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Comment Let the roads die... (Score 1) 27

...Nothing on them but cranky bastards contributing to climate change while moving between ticky-tacky, 40+ hours of indentured servitude, and temples to Mammon.

I largely agree with most of Klee's points, but there's a serious bias issue with his conclusion: "The internet" is just the road we use to get somewhere. Where we go is up to us most of the time. And in this case, the "old internet" is still mostly there - Case in point, I still have a crappy static personal website up that hasn't been updated since the 1990s.

Problem is, nobody wants to read my ramblings from 30 years ago any more than they did 30 years ago. People want FAANGs, even while they may openly resent those same platforms. Sure, Amazon is evil... But the alternative is leaving the house and going to a store, eew! NetFlix kills everything good after two seasons, but two seasons on-demand beats a 30-second stick-figure animation that takes six weeks per "episode" and depends on the unpaid hobbyist creator not getting bored with the project. TikTok is measurably destroying the attention spans of our youth, but we can't risk missing the next big "hold my beer and watch this" moment.

The problem isn't "the internet". The problem is us as a collective whole. When there's demand for trash, sanitation engineers flip to supply side.

Comment Re:How abysmally stupid do you have to be ... (Score 1) 39

I mean people have probably sued lawnmower companies because they were not warned to not to lift the mower with their hands when it was running. For every warning sign you see that you think it is stupidly obvious, there was probably someone who did exactly what was warned.

Comment Take that, stupid golden goose! (Score 2) 55

The primary reason companies advertise with Google is to drive search results to their site.

If AI summaries become good enough that nobody needs to click the links anymore - What are advertisers paying for? "Brand recognition" only takes things so far, at some point they need real customers to drop in and throw money at them or they won't have anything to advertise.

Comment Re:Evidence (Score 1) 66

My company ships data dumps like this to multiple vendors on a monthly (sometimes weekly) basis.

My side of that equation takes security very seriously. The recipients... Well... When someone offers to send you credentials out-of-channel, the right response is never "Just email it, this isn't a shared account" followed by getting cranky at being told that ain't happening.

Comment Re:delegate an agent (Score 1) 39

Things like that will appear eventually. It's too early to expect them. And eventually it will be the user that has the read-only access...and it will never be used. But eventually may be a couple of decades from now (and it may also be a couple of years from now...there's a large variance in that prediction, but I'd be really surprised if it were less than a year from now or longer than a couple of decades).

Comment Re:Does anyone like touch screens on a notebook? (Score 1) 70

Does anyone actually have a use case for a touch screen, that can't be better served with a device that prevents it?

Yes, but not for you and me. Graphics designers have been using stylus-displays for years and years, because it's great to draw on the thing you are making instead of drawing on a different surface like a Wacom.

But I'm like you, I don't have a use case for a touchscreen and if you touch my notebook screen I'll be angry because I prefer it without fingerprints, thanks. So my first question is: Do they offer this thing with OLED but without touch? I guess not. Pity.

Comment reason to buy (Score 1) 171

I've been slowly moving towards my dream setup: Solar panels, battery, EV car, island mode capability. This is one thing that'd be a factor in my buying decision. Using your car as a battery or secondary battery is a big plus, and if they built the necessary equipment to run independent of the power grid, it'd come in a neat package.

While power failures are rare where I live, I expect them to become more common with the move to renewable energies. I support that, but it's more fragile than constantly running power stations. So being able to run your home at least for a few hours on your own energy is something that I consider a good idea.

Comment How do they go about solving a problem... (Score 1) 100

The thing to look for is how they go about solving a problem. That's the key. Coding is easy. Figuring out what the problem is and how to go about solving it, that's the hard part. Especially given that the problem the user says they need solved is often not the problem they actually have.

Comment Re:Pluto is a planet (Score 0) 67

Don't be hypnotized by the names. What is most significant (after the orbit) is the mass. And that's a pretty smooth gradation (at least on a logarithmic scale).

If you want "planet" to mean "stuff in orbit around the sun", you end up with most planets weighing micrograms...or possibly less.

N.B.: By the strict definition of "planet" used by the IAU, even Jupiter wouldn't really qualify, because it hasn't cleared it's orbit. There's a lot of small stuff and, of course, the trojans.

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