See, there's just no winning. If we move (back) to cardboard, the argument becomes about trees. If we move to that biodegradable quasi-plastic that some drinking straws are made out of, then the argument is that the change disproportionately affects the poor, since that stuff is somewhere around triple the cost of plastic. If we move to glass, then the transport of the containers becomes far more prone to pollution because of the significantly higher weight of everything. If we eliminate one-time packing entirely, then we deal with health concerns and chemicals to combat those health concerns.

As much as the plastic industry loves to lobby, let's not pretend that it's the only barrier.

Yes, because we all love walking half a mile a day in the rain...carrying groceries in paper bags...or in the cold...or in the heat...or transporting 20-kilo items...or making multiple trips...or are we just ordering everything from Buy-N-Large and no longer in-person shopping?

To the topic at hand, PHEVs are fantastic INTERIM solutions. The charging infrastructure isn't as pervasive as gasoline and diesel, so a solution that both encourages the use of charging stations while enabling the use of existing gas stations is a helpful way to handle the transition. As we get to the point where EVs can get 1,000 off a charge and/or 200 miles of range out of a 5-minute charge, and as the number of charging stations continues to increase, and the grid adjusts to compensate, PHEVs will be less desirable as their reduced EV range will start to become a liability as gas stations decrease in number.

Maybe you don't like the fact that intermediate solutions are compromises by definition, but you won't get a whole lot of folks on board with the expectation that the solution to a global problem for everyone to relocate to walkable cities.

As someone who considers Mass Effect their favorite game, all the way to actually-liking Andromeda (I read the novel that replaced the Quarian Ark DLC)...ME4 is something I'm keeping an eye on, but have zero hope about.

We're coming up on four years since the release of the teaser poster, and three years since the trailer...and by all accounts, the game is still in pre-production. *PRE* production, for longer than it took to make ME3, and a year less than the time it took to make ME:A.

This leads me to believe one of a few things: first, that the original push was likely similar to that of Veilguard, namely that EA wanted to make it a casino game, er, "live service"...then, pretty far into the production process, the MBAs were somehow convinced that turning Dragon Age into a live service was going to fail as spectacularly as Anthem, causing a massive pivot back into the single-player narrative game the audience wanted all along. It would shock me more to know that the ME4 story didn't follow a similar chain of events.

Second, I would completely believe that there's a whole lot of internal bickering within the team about how to progress on...basically everything. Amongst the stories about why ME:A was such a disaster was because the team was forced to use Frostbite, which was made for FPSes but not RPGs, leaving the team to waste time building systems for Frostbite that already existed in Unreal...well, it was announced years ago that ME5 would use the Unreal engine again, so 'building the infrastructure' doesn't factor in this go-round. Art assets certainly need to be created, but the use of Unreal means that a good number of assets from the remaster can be utilized, so it's not that sort of baseline stuff.

Let's talk about ME:A for a quick minute...what made it such a letdown had nothing to do with the crappy animations or the fact that there was some transgender NPC in the game...the story itself was the problem. First off, the game's runtime was massively padded with fetch quests - lots of driving around and...retrieving these rocks, scanning this structure, getting this plant...if the missions were limited to unlocking the vaults and fighting Architects, the game would be ten hours long. There *were* pieces that were interesting, but they were few and far between. In terms of the actual narrative...there were two alien factions, the oppressor and the oppressed, and we sided with the oppressed fighting the oppressor...no sign of the nuance or complexity that made one stop and think that the Salarian Dalatross might *possibly* have a point, that curing the genophage might not *actually* be a good idea...just an enemy who wants to destroy everything and a Fern Gully/Na'vi, everyone-gets-along-with-everyone underdog race...that's it. Oh, and dialog choices that never *actually* matter. Either ME4 is spending so much time in pre-production to overcorrect for these issues (I concede that it takes a LOT of time to do either branching outcomes or multiroute missions like the garage pass in Noveria), or it's a bunch of people going to work and arguing all day about how to do things, and the game will be built on a stack of compromises that will please no one.

The fact that they're five years into production - longer than any other game in the series' development cycle - and they still aren't into the actual-production phase - leads me to believe that the game is going to absolutely wreak of compromise at every stage. If the game is in development hell at this stage, I fully expect the release to be about as smooth as Cyberpunk 2077's...and I *don't* expect the sort of stability patches that made ME:A playable in the months to follow.

Really, my pipe dream is that EA will sell the franchises to other developers and stick to a publishing exclusivity deal...they could probably make some decent money doing that with some of their older franchises if their plans involve sticking to FIFA and Battlefield...but I have no hope that Saudi leadership is going to do any better with ME or DA or SimCity than the former owners did.

16GB of RAM, I'll grant is fine for standard use...but Apple really needs to come up with some sort of solution for storage expansion beyond "bag of USB accessories" or "2TB of iCloud storage"; most Mac owners end up with both.

Sure, 512GB is fine for Apple Chromebooks, but video editors easily end up with either an external storage array or having to do "the project shuffle" of data management that is an absolute chore. There are more than a handful of PC laptops that offer multiple NVMe slots, so 8TB of internal storage is an option on less expensive laptops, that isn't possible on a Macbook, at all, for any price.

Sure, it's not everyone...but soldered-RAM and soldered-storage means that a nontrivial amount of the Mac market (which is disproportionately musicians, photographers, and videographers) is stuck buying the other half of their computer in pieces, including a port replicator to plug them all in simultaneously. This isn't an argument that Apple needs to design some Clevo monstrosity with interchangeable GPUs, only an acknowledgment that there is a sizeable market demographic that is artificially hamstrung.

I swear, the FSF has no concept of onramps, incremental victories, or provisional compromises.

Graphene, iode, and /e/OS exist, in addition to LineageOS. Are they "free enough" for the FSF? No, but to argue that the reason these things don't have mass acceptance is because users can't modify their modem firmware is patently absurd. I can appreciate the desire for purity, and a truly Free/Libre software stack from the low-level firmware to the apps, but this is absolutely the wrong starting point.

For starters, they could throw some funding toward F-Droid. Fund app development contests to improve availabilty of FOSS/FLOSS mobile apps. Users won't move off a proprietary OS if they *also* have to say goodbye to their massive app stack. If apps are available that will allow users to migrate their data to FOSS alternatives that are *also* available on a FOSS/FLOSS mobile OS, the migration path off Google Android becomes much easier to walk.

To double-down on this, the FSF could fund Creative Commons alternatives to Spotify and Netflix and maybe Tiktok or Instagram, and provide music and video streaming platforms for artists to post their music and movies (maybe with a self-hosted/federation option). Sure, it'll be a bit amateur at the beginning, but so was Youtube, and now entire careers exist because of it. If the FSF got behind these kinds of platforms, to the point of releasing iterations of streaming clients in the Google Play and Apple App Stores, it would chip away at the reasons *why* a FOSS/FLOSS operating system has such an uphill climb. Imperfectly, sure...but my wager is that more users would be willing to abandon iOS and Android if they already move over to independent streaming apps, than if the FSF's sales pitch is "you can modify your own firmware".

From there, again, onramps. Make a list of phones that pass certain criteria of freedom - 'copper' for phones with user-unlockable bootloaders and a commitment to release device trees within the first year, 'bronze' for phones that ship with unlockable bootloaders and release device trees on day-one for Lineage-and-friends to modify, 'silver' for phones that ship with unlocked bootloaders and officially supported mostly-Free Android builds with user instructions to load it, 'gold' for phones that ship with a mostly-free Android build out of the box, 'platinum' for phones that are FOSS everywhere except the modem (which has a documented API), and 'diamond' for 'no proprietary code anywhere, at all'. Hell, the FSF could probably make a few extra bucks reselling such phones at all the different levels, and let users decide the level of freedom they're looking for.

Ultimately, starting at the lowest level of the hardware stack might have its place, but it is of no virtue if the LibrePhone has no users (or worse, whose primary users are troublemakers who get IMEI runs blocklisted). Firmware is the least of the problems the FSF is facing, and while a staunch adherence to principles is laudable, it is of no virtue to have an OSS cellular modem that can't make phone calls or text messages because no telco will allow it. It is of no virtue to have a FLOSS laptop who spends its day storing data in Google Drive, acquired from Salesforce, and copied into Quickbooks Online, then going home and listening to Spotify and watching Disney+...and the phone landscape is exactly the same. Without a counterbalance of enabling users to meaningfully interact with their data without being beholden to proprietary systems, the FSF will be the poster child for winning the battle and losing the war.

I think there were three elements of this mindset that were assumed knowledge on the part of the person who said it:

1. "Move fast and break things...in a development environment where possible".
2. "Move fast and break things...in a way that is easily reversible." (see #1)
3. "Move fast and break things...and assume they will break, so assume you'll be fixing what broke" (see #2 and #1).

I can appreciate that Facebook can have this mindset, and in the case of a social network, there *is* an element of wisdom in not treating it like the IBM-of-old that overengineered EVERYTHING, making it super-reliable, but also making development very slow and very expensive. Facebook's focus on agility makes perfect sense for the nature of the work.

This doesn't work in every field, though. From finance to medicine to engineering, the costs are much, much greater than the loss of cat videos. Just because something makes sense in one field, doesn't mean it makes sense in EVERY field...and unfortunately, there are very, very few MBAs who understand the one thing that is more valuable than money: wisdom. Wisdom can earn money, but money can't buy wisdom.

A friend of mine is extremely fortunate to have a bit more of an 'old school' environment. They have a TV, but she doesn't let her kids use her phone. She's able to be a stay-at-home-mom, supplementing the household income with baked goods and Etsy projects and eggs from her chickens. She pays attention to her kids, not as a helicopter parent, but as a genuinely involved parent - going on walks, taking them to the library, teaching them how to interact safely with the chickens, having them cook with her, teaching them arithmetic and reading, playing with them, giving them simple chores...really making it a point to focus on early childhood education. This in turn is evident in her kids' longer attention spans, and ability to have discussions at levels in excess of their peers.

Something tells me that they will do far better than their peers on standardized tests...not because they had less screen time and spent their formative years staring at the wall instead, but because she's been an active parent and made it a point to make the most of the pre-kindergarten years.

She's an exception, sure...but the point generally stands - parents who just hand their kid an iPad and leave them alone are going to end up with kids focused on entertainment rather than exploring their world and gaining understanding, which will likely be reflected on standardized test scores to some extent.

I would also submit that one of the contributors to this problem is how basically every video game has devolved into a skinner box and dopamine dispenser. Puzzle games exist, but it's an incredibly exhaustive process to load an iPad exclusively with games that are pay-once, no-IAPs. It would be interesting to see if such a thing *could* be used as part of an experimental group, where kids who only played games that had traditional progression mechanics were compared to kids who had games that were colorful slot machines.

...the only people using Meta's AI, and even *they* don't want to use it.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

89 years have passed, management remains the same.

"Increase Production".

I'd be absolutely shocked if they did.

DRM has been a problem for TiVo pretty much since digital cable became a thing. TiVo managed to squeak out a longer shelf life as a DVR because they kissed the ring, but they had to go through all kinds of hoops to do it. Amongst the reasons the GPLv3 exists is because of what Stallman called the "TiVo-ization" effect, where the GPL components were released, but the useful extensions weren't, and they couldn't because they were the components that allowed the TiVo to work despite the DRM.

In practice, I will concede that HDCP has been mostly-seamless, most of the time, for most users...but I don't think TiVo is going to play games with the HDCP licensing and enforcement to then allow timeshifting. I submit that there are issues on both sides with doing so. On one hand, what you're suggesting is the ability to timeshift content that is inherently on-demand. TiVo's popularity was entirely due to making it possible to timeshift linear broadcasts in a way that was far more functional than VHS. Having a TiVo that would accept an HDMI signal from a Fire Stick would be mostly-pointless...unless the user is intending to archive a video due to concerns about takedown...and it's not like TiVo would roll the dice on a device that would be a lightning rod for litigation, if not actually-legal ones, if TiVo's HDCP license got revoked, they would either neuter everyone's hardware, or they'd be signing up for a court case they have no chance of winning.

The alternative exists; HDMI capture cards are plentiful, and there is plenty of software that can record from it. Screen recording software is also super plentiful, and examples of these things which also manage to play fast-and-loose with DRM are readily available on the market.

So, TiVo would be caught in the middle, and the liability is well below whatever they would make in revenue...it's certainly not worth it to them.

At its peak, TiVo was a household name...and in hindsight, it probably would have been possible to keep it going with relatively small amounts of effort.

For starters, they weren't all that great to their base - the folks with the lifetime subscriptions. They were the early-adopters and the enthusiasts, but they ran into issues once the lifetime subscriptions were tied to the analog boxes and the cable companies stopped offering that service...in such cases, the customers had to choose, and at the very least, some of them were unlikely to choose to continue with TiVo. It probably didn't help that some of those boxes required dial-up connections to get guide data, and they weren't exactly upgradeable to wi-fi.

From there, cable companies competed with first-party DVR boxes...which everyone hated because their UI sucked and was slow, but it came bundled with cable service and the cable companies actively supported and marketed them, so lots of people used them instead. Had TiVo offered an onboarding service, where TiVo would get a CableCARD on the users' behalf and send it to them preconfigured, that may have helped justify the purchase.

TiVo was already at least some living rooms; they could have gone toe-to-toe with Roku and Amazon Fire Sticks...and I believe the later models *did* allow Netflix streaming and such, but it was too little, too late, and TiVo didn't have retail space in the same way Roku did. For sure, Roku would have won on price, but it likely would have been possible for them to have leveraged their brand recognition.

Finally, the nail in the coffin for TiVo was that they didn't lobby to retain the legal mandate for CableCARDs. I had a SiliconDust HD Homerun Prime, and I loved it for the time I could use it, but my cable company wouldn't give me a CableCARD when I changed my service, because they didn't have to.

It's completely unsurprising that the pioneer in the space lost their spot, but they absolutely could have owned the market with a bit better marketing and availability.

That may be true to a certain extent, but I submit two counterbalances to this:

1. VPS workloads aren't usually helped by GPU acceleration; even if DigitalOcean or Hetzner got these datacenters in a fire sale, they'd still be sitting on a pile of GPUs they would either have to leverage or sell.

2. While VPS companies will undoubtedly continue to have their workload quantities increase over time, if the AI tech bubble bursts, they are likely to end up being on the working end of that at some level, too. I'm sure they aren't going anywhere, but even if revenue is down 10%, it's going to be a tough sell to get leadership to think about making an investment of that size when it's unclear whether next year will *also* have a 10% loss of revenue.

I can only assume that for the past decade, James has been ignored, or terrible at his job. Every Adobe product has gotten progressively worse to use, forums are filled with bug reports that get ignored release after release, and the increase in system requirements do not reflect improvements in functionality.

Whether because Adobe didn't like what he had to say, or they decided not to listen to him, it's completely unsurprising that he lost his job.

The folks offering $500K/year for AI experts aren't going to take anyone who makes the claim on a resume, they're almost guaranteed to be looking to poach someone at OpenAI or Google. Practically speaking, they're looking to benefit from the experience that those companies paid for...and James doesn't have it.

On the upswing, odds are pretty good that James will have a job in short order, helping to deal with the fallout of 'vibe coders' who don't know how to do real-world testing. He's probably going to run into some combination of age discrimination and salary discrimination (no way he's working for $60K if he has 25 years at Adobe), but once the messes start being too big to ignore, I'm pretty sure he'll be able to become a project manager that helps direct fixes for deployed code that didn't get actual-QA. The need is most definitely there, it'll just take a bit more time to prove to the brass that he's more valuable to the company than the MBAs that are looking at their now-spherical product for more corners to cut.

Well, I think we did 'simple math' when we thought that, rather than 'real-world-math'. If my cable bill is $150/month for 100 channels, that's $1.50/channel. Since I only watch maybe 20 of them at most, 20*1.5 = $30/month for the 20 channels I watch. Who wouldn't want that?

The problem is that channel costs don't divide evenly. ESPN is very expensive ($8 or more of one's cable bill goes for just this channel), while Home Shopping Network and QVC have historically paid the cable companies for inclusion in the lineup. Public Access stations are both legal requirements in many jurisdictions, and the content is paid for by whoever submits it for broadcast...and again, roughly nobody would include it in their custom lineup.

Finally, there *is* a baseline amount of cost for the last-mile distribution. Whether it's got 1 channel or 1,000 channels, the infrastructure needs to exist. I'm not making any excuses for Comcast here, but someone needs to pay the right-of-way to the townships for the wire runs, the backend equipment costs money, the staff to service it, and the staff to answer the phone for CSR requests all cost something. Streaming services generally get away with chat-only support and don't have any wires to run.

So...while I'm not calling cable a good deal by any stretch, I *am* at least acknowledging that a-la-carte math would be something closer to $30 infrastructure + $10/month ESPN + probably-something-closer-to-$3/channel for the ones with actual-content, making that beautiful $30/month bill something closer to $80/month in practice.

Personally, I think that there *does* need to be some sort of court case that uses United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1948) as precedent to decouple distribution from production, which would probably do more to solve the cost issues than anything else.

So, please forgive the pedantry - actually, it might actually be more to your point - but the math ain't mathing here.

General Availability for Windows Vista was in January of 2007, which was 18 years ago. Its EOL date was in April 2017, 9 years ago.

If the car is really eight years old, even if it was a model-year and was the very first one of its model year, it STILL would be newer than Vista's EOL date. Eight years ago, Windows 10 was already out for two years.

Half of me wants to believe the story that the car did, in fact, roll off the assembly line with a splash screen reflecting an already-EOL operating system. The other half is wondering if perhaps the car is older than eight years old.

Way to completely miss the point...

It's not that this never happened, or even that it was some extremely exceptional case in the millennial/GenX/boomer eras...but it was extremely different.

For starters, I think that there are two sides that have both valid points and problematic extremes. In the days of yore, companies generally saw employees as an investment. It wasn't uncommon for people to work at the same company for 25 years or more. Certainly not every company, but the majority of them accepted the tradeoff that new employees would require a good amount of training before the company broke even on their paycheck, and in return, the employee who stayed would earn the company a tidy profit over time, receiving enough money to support a family in return. Today, it seems that everyone wants to 'skip to the end' - companies want to hire savants with 20 years experience in Debian Trixie, make them always-on-call, and in return want to pay them less than half of a living wage, and keep a fear of layoffs at the front of everyone's mind.

The counterbalance is that Gen-Z knows this is the case, and treats employers with the same sense of expendability. If a company sees an employee as someone not worth investing in, with little ability to get promoted, and both promotions and layoffs being abstracted from job performance or dedication, it's not unreasonable to adopt the mindset of "if they're doing what's best for them, then I'll do what's best for me"...and it's only a few more steps from there to "I'll work when I feel like it", which is demonstrated in the willingness to no-call/no-show, doomscrolling at work, or having to be 'helicopter managed'.

This leads us to the downward spiral - with both sides leaving themselves vulnerable to exploitation if loyalty and dedication are expressed, it is only natural to reduce that vulnerability moving forward. The result, however, is both sides getting worse...it's a Prisoner's Dilemma, and neither side has incentive to break the cycle.