As EU citizen, it amazes me that USA still - in the 21st century - doesn't provide basic consumer rights such as 3 year warranty in addition to manufacturers voluntary warranty, or even basic rights such as right to be reimbursed.

You do realize the 3 year warranty is because you say yes to "do you want the extended warranty"?

The US gives consumers the option of paying extra for it. The EU, the prices have that option already built in. It's why something that's $500 USD is €500 (or around $585 USD) - that extra cost gets built into the amount extra you pay.

Renenberm TINSTAAFL. Even Apple's prices were found to include AppleCare by default (which they even had the audacity to try to sell it to you again).

One way it's different is that it's a 2 year commitment. IIUC, there's no plan proposed to extend the employment.

Also, considering the companies I heard named in conjunction with the play, I hope it's a total failure.

Abandon hope, all ye who press enter here.

As much as I hate seeing a brute-force approach burn huge amounts of electricity to enable morally dubious applications based on inputs that are often corrupt or illegal, I think the AI bubble is as likely to pop as the Bitcoin bubble.

The bicoin bubble popped nearly a decade ago. You might remember that time when an iced tea beverage company changed their name to blockchain and shot up in value.

Just because bitcoin's still around doesn't mean it hasn't popped - does the existence of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, eBay, and dozens of other companies today mean the dot-com bubble never happened?

The AI bubble popping will bring these companies back down where we aren't going to see the giant circlejerk of Oracle buying Nvidia who invests in OpenAI who then places orders for more Oracle compute.

(And it might be cracking - given Oracle was recently rejected for billions of dollars in loans as their existing debt might not be repaid).

Doesn't mean we won't have ChatGPT at the end of the day, but we probably will see a slowdown - we went from GPT-3 to GPT-4 to GPT-5 in a few years, when it took far long for GPT-2 to come out and be "scary".

Some bubbles just pop and disappear, like NFTs. Other bubbles pop and the market goes saner but we still have the benefits, like the dot-com, blockchain and likely AI. Chances are we will see AI used strategically rather than it being the solution to everything. And several things have come out of it - including awareness of deepfakes

It is legal to take photographs and videos in public spaces without a requirement for consent of those photographed. It is also legal to keep records of what you observe. It is even legal to combine your records with other people's records to make a giant database.

But there are limits as well, because while it's legal to take photos of your house from the street, you might disagree. I mean, if the neighbour across the street installs a doorbell camera that happens to overlook your front porch, they'll have nice recordings of everything going on at your house. In some jurisdictions that's considered illegal surveillance despite it happening from perfectly legal spots - either someone on the street taking photos, or your neighbour from their property.

And there have been plenty of opportunities where Flock cameras have been set up in such a way they contain a perfect view of someone's house, so not only was it capturing the license plates of passing cars, it also caught the comings and goings of the people living in the house.

Interestingly, a few counties in Washington state turned off their cameras after trying to fight a FOIA request for those photos. The courts said as long as they are state records, he's entitled to the data that was collected as well. They turned the cameras off because it meant they had to provide the data to anyone and everyone who asked, including people who should not have it (e.g., stalkers)

Meanwhile, the police would probably ask for CCTV footage from area businesses to which they could've found the suspect as well.

Alarm clocks are everywhere. Best Buy still sells them. You can get them from Walmart. You can even find them at the dollar store.

Since this is a technical forum, you can even write one up yourself in your language of choice - even the most inefficient code will still fulfill the basic function of an alarm clock, ignoring the dozens that already are installable and working for your OS of choice. Ubuntu probably ships with a dozen different apps that work as an alarm clock.

Of course, the best alarm clock I had was my dog, who for nearly a decade woke up at precisely the same time every day, save for one day where he accidentally slept in. He was more effective at waking us up than any alarm clock. If we fell back asleep, he made sure to wake you again and would not stop until you fed him.

Now, yes, there are predictions that you could get a supermassive black hole launched into space, especially during a galaxy merger if the velocity of the smaller black hole exceeds the escape velocity of the combined galaxy.

But I'd be wary of assuming that it's a launched black hole, unless we can find the merger it comes from. There may be ways for such a black hole to form that cause the stars to be launched away rather than the black hole being flung, and if a galaxy isn't rotating fast enough to be stable, one could imagine that a sufficiently small galaxy was simply consumed by its central black hole. Both of these would seem to produce exactly the same outcome, if all we have is the black hole itself and a velocity.

I'm not going to say either of these is likely in this case, or that astronomers haven't examine them (they almost certainly have), but rather that we should be cautious until we've a clearer idea of what the astronomers have actually been able to determine or rule out.

Seems to me like game developers are going at this the wrong way. You don't force invasive anti-cheat methods on the players... You offer them as a higher tier of service. Sure, the hoi polloi servers are full of cheaters. You don't want that, do you? Well, if your system can pass our 100% Certified Cheat-Free(tm) environment test, run our 100% Certified Cheat-Free(tm) drivers, and pay for premium access to our 100% Certified Cheat-Free(tm) servers, you can compete directly with the other elite gamers! You are an elite gamer, aren't you?

The gamer bros with the 'leet gaming rigs will eat it up and will jump at the chance to prove their 'leetness. Oh, they may complain, but none of them are going to go back to the normal servers. That would be an admission that the only way they won before was by cheating. Meanwhile, people like me who run an 8 year old laptop and only ever go online because even the single-player mode demands it for some reason are perfectly happy playing in the cheap seats, without the intrusive spyware.

* Certified Cheat-Free(tm) is a registered trademark and is not meant as a literal description of the end-user experience.

All HDR content is that instead of going from say, 0 to 255 for brightness, we can go from 0 to 1023. Your SDR content stays mapped to 0-255 as it always was, but now your HDR content can now use 256-1023 as brightness values which goes much brighter.

And that's how you notice HDR video - they can appear normal, but then it walks out into sunlight and it's a lot brighter than it can be.

The problem is that most HDR displays are crap - some even claim HDR when they can't do it (DisplayHDR 400, for example is used on many laptops). This just means it can do up to 400 nits.

The problem is until recently, it was hard to do HDR. HDR10, for example, was designed in an era where 1000 nits was bright, and 4000 nits was theoretical, so it supports either 1000 nits or 4000 nits (but not both, and it's static). HDR10+ and Dolby Vision (competing HDR formats, and no one has both) I believe can dynamically support up to 10,000 nits.

The problem is, of course, if your display can only do 400 nits, but needs to display 1000 nit images, and those are usually tone-mapped which can give artifacts.

Not that it really matters since most content doesn't even come close to 1000 nits HDR10. HDR analysis of a lot of recent movies show most generally keep to well under 1000 nits, with some like Avatar Way of Water only achieving 300 nits. (This is sort of limited because movie screens are brightness limited - most projectors simply cannot do 500 nits, and this applies to home projectors too, which is why very few support more than basic HDR10 - Dolby Vision is practically non-existent).

"Oh, okay. You don't want to be known for your body. Very well then. Just act, and we'll put an AI body that we own, over your body, which (for now) does the acting."

For much of the world, avoiding starvation is the principle goal, so for these areas, higher crop yields are beneficial despite lower nutrient density.

We do not have a food issue. We make more than enough food to feed everyone in the world right now.

We only have a distribution issue - if humanity were to regain some humanity and not feed the greed, it would be easy to end world hunger and ensure no one goes hungry again.

You still think that you have to have a monopoly, absolute or otherwise, to violate antitrust law?

What monopoly does Apple have? Developers don't have a right to developer for Apple's OS running on Apple's hardware. And if they do have that intrinsic right, then we need to talk about Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony for the same reason.

You have to remember it's an Apple ecosystem - Apple software on Apple hardware, and to imply otherwise would mean I should be able to demand a Tesla with a big-block Chevy V8 in it from Tesla.

It's what makes Apple's situation different from Google's situation. Google supplies an operating system to 3rd parties who make hardware to run it. It's just like Windows and macOS - Windows runs on the Intel (and ARM) platforms made by 3rd party hardware vendors. macOS only runs on Apple platforms (with slight exceptions to the Macintosh clones of the mid-90s and Hackintosh movement of the 2010s).

Apple has a monopoly the same way Tesla has a monopoly. Or Sony has a monopoly. Or Nintendo. Or Microsoft.

Monopolies aren't bad - because it gets completely silly otherwise if you could demand they sell you a PC from competing companies - you want a desktop PC, but it has a Alpha AXP processor, 640K of RAM from your IBM 5150 computer, the 8" floppy drives from your Kaypro, or you'll call the anti-trust for them not being a monopoly.

Anti-trust is where they use one monopoly to force another. Apple had one - iPods and digital music sales. The fact iPods dominated the market, and they only worked with Apple's music store was anti-trust because Apple refused to let their music work on other devices other than computers. Meanwhile, no other music store could sell music on iPods. Unfortunately for anti-trust, the music industry blinked first and had Amazon sell DRM-free music which worked on iPods creating competition in the space.

For Microsoft, it was Windows being used to dominate the browser space - we all knew how the "Designed for Internet Explorer" era was.

That's why Apple can get away with it because technically it's still Apple's platform to control. Otherwise you're also going to have to demand that stores be forced to allow other products in - perhaps the law can be modified to Trader Joe's must be forced to sell Hershey chocolate bars, for example. (Trader Joe's is a supermarket where everything they have is basically private label)

Nevermind registrars used to provide domain parkers with heads up notices that an expired domain will be coming up so they can grab them first instead of letting them expire and someone else grabbing them. This includes domains by other domain parkers, so you end up a domain changing hands as each gives it a try to "win the jackpot".

I've seen some sites that were parked because they expired, and they wanted like $1250 for it. Not sure how they came up with that figure, as it was a relatively obscure domain when it was in use.

Of course, I always browse it with adblockers and such so it's just costing them traffic. Of course, I wonder if my periodic accesses of it are just generating enough traffic that someone is hanging onto them wondering if the person will pay them because they keep hitting the "buy now" page.

You do realise what they said applies to basically every category of site? Google want to feed you their own rehashed version of other people's works so you will stay with google, seeing google's ads and google gets to keep everything.

No one is going to produce anything to anonymously feed google's bottom line. If they keep this up it will destroy the best of the internet.

Except recipe sites are some of the worst. They show a nice picture of the food, OK, great. Then you get the author's life story as to how this recipe changed their life and how they serve it at every family gathering. Then they introduce it to their kids when they get old enough to cook and they go on and on and on about the life story. Meanwhile, you're on page 15 of 45 for this dish and have seen maybe 150 ads.

Then the next 10 pages are dedicated to the story of how the ingredients were chosen, and why you should use this recipe over others, again, inundated with ads.

The next 15 pages are dedicated to each ingredient, why it was chosen, its history and where you should buy it because you aren't going to get the kind you need at the supermarket, but if you click this convenient affiliate link, you can buy an overpriced version of that ingredient that's recommended. Again, ads ads ads, and paragraphs of fluff over one ingredient.

The final 10 pages are then the step by step instructions of the recipe, 1 instruction per page, wrapped with ads everywhere. If you're lucky, you'll get pages like "1) Preheat oven to 350F. Next-->". If not. it'll have a dissertation on the oven and its history and an affiliate link to buy a new one if yours is going out.

Even news sites aren't that bad, and their cooking pages are often quite minimal.

The problem is recipes are not copyrightable so they're layered in tons of fluff that is. Some of the worst sites hide the stuff behind a paywall or a login and you only find out after 5 steps that the last 5 steps are for members only.

You're right that a lot of sites do it, but generally not as bad as recipe sites. I remember seeing them in my feed like "Easy no-bake cookies only 3 ingredients". After endless amounts of scrolling past huge amounts of ads (the kind that other sites put at the end of the article) because I couldn't tell if the article continued after the ads or if that was it.

The YouTube equivalent are those 30 minute long videos on some stupidly easy thing but buried among tons of sponsor ads so the actual content is really 2 minutes long.

It's just a SPAC - Trump Media was created to acquire the company that runs the social network - it helps bypass a whole bunch of regulations regarding public companies. Now it's just acquiring more companies to take them public.