It'd have to support full-text search by default. Mastodon, last I checked, was still in practice stuck with tags-only search that fails unless both the poster and searcher manage to correctly #GuessTheHashtag. I've read that Mastodon added in version 4.2.0, but I've never got it to work because it's not the default: the posting user has to deliberately seek out how to opt into full-text search before sending posts, and the administrator of the searcher's instance has to spend a lot more money for a much larger VPS with the RAM for Elasticsearch or OpenSearch.

For Aldi, which uses Instacart, I assumed it was because there is no 'fee' for pickup, but they have to pay someone to shop for you. I consider the difference a convenience fee.

That said, by not shopping in store, I end up getting only what is on my list and end up paying FAR LESS than I would if I was wandering around.

Agreed that AI (in general) is not a dead end, but any particular implementation of AI might be. OpenAI et al are betting billions that their approach will turn out to be the best one, but it really is a bet; there's not guarantee that tomorrow the next DeepSeek won't come out with a better algorithm that obsoletes all their investments.

Apple can always buy out whichever company they decide has what they want. It'll be pricey, but Apple has plenty of cash on hand.

Why will it be "winner takes most"? AI isn't like the Internet where there are network-effects that make first-mover status a huge advantage -- e.g. if I could write a better Facebook than Facebook today, it still wouldn't get used by anyone, since Facebook's advantage comes from its huge user base and my new platform wouldn't have one.

With AI, OTOH, anything the first-movers do, Apple can (eventually) copy and improve upon, a strategy they have used successfully many times in the past. Stepping back and letting others figure out what the works and doesn't work, on their own dime, seems like a good approach. Why burn money on what might be a dead-end, when others are happy to burn their own money for you?

Apple isn't doing nothing -- it's continuing to do the things that it has always done, like selling iPhones and computers and streaming services. Those things have always been profit centers for Apple, and they continue to be.

The other thing that it's doing correctly at this point is not losing its head and betting the farm on AI. Other companies would be wise to follow Apple's example.

I get the impression that a company like ADP requires that an employer employ at least some minimum number of employees in an area. Otherwise, ADP appears to fall back to printing paper checks for the employer to mail. I don't know the specifics; I just know that I got ADP paper at one job after a bunch of layoffs, and I got ADP paper when I was the only remote worker in a particular state.

In my experience at my last three jobs (in the midwestern USA), small businesses that don't have enough employees in an area have to print and mail paper payroll checks instead of paying their employees through direct deposit.

It seems Warner can't catch a break. Time Warner's financials were in dire straits in 2004 as well with a load of debt from the AOL merger. That time, they paid their debt by selling Dire Straits and the rest of Warner Music Group to Edgar Bronfman Jr.

... except instead of shoes becoming the only profitable product to manufacture, it's chatbots. Nobody knows why, but when it's all over, the only survivors will be those who evolved into computer-illiterate deaf-mutes.

Agreed; but it is possible to make a Metro-sized car that is safe by modern standards and still gets 40+mpg. The Smart ForTwo and the Scion IQ are two examples.

Yes, but only because most Americans are unwilling to drive a Metro-sized car anymore. They've been conditioned to think small/lightweight cars are unsafe or unmanly or etc.

The invisible hand of the free market solves a lot of things, but it's never quite figured out how to avoid the tragedy of the commons. Everybody wants to live on a livable planet, but nobody wants to pay for the technology required to keep that way.

Being inexpensive to purchase and operate is one advantage scooters have over automobiles; the other is that they are small enough to maneuver quickly through heavy traffic and easier to find a parking spot for in congested areas.

Among widely available fonts under OFL, GNU GPL for Fonts, or other free licenses, not many of them cover the 2,100-odd Jouyou (regularly used) kanji and 1,000 name kanji that BadDreamer mentioned. It's a lot easier to make a font that covers 100-200 characters from two alphabets, such as Chilanka that covers the Latin and Malayalam scripts in a distinctive and dyslexia-friendly handwritten style, than one that covers 3,000 different kanji made of 600 radicals (as iggymanz mentioned) with manually-tuned slight variations to their shapes to make them fit next to each other in a character.

Exclusive use of kana (Japanese phonetic characters) was common in games for MSX, Famicom, and other 8-bit platforms. The one problem with that is the sheer number of homophones in both Chinese and Japanese, words spoken the same and written differently. Kana normally don't even distinguish which syllable a word is accented on, which would be like writing Chinese without its tones. Yet somehow Korean avoided this and switched from Chinese characters (Hanja) to a suitable phonetic alphabet (Hangul).