Frankly it would be best if the government stays out and doesn't do the things it does (not all in one country, collected from around the world), namely charging/for:

- TV and Radio tax even if you don't have a radio or TV, even if you don't have ANYTHING that can stream, no phone, PC, internet connection, anything. Germany, I'm looking at you, although UK is also funny with their TV license that's based on the TV, and it's charged at a reduced rate for blind people (but they still pay for TV) and they pay more if it's color and less if it black and white!
- of course "copyright tax" for blanc media, but sometimes also USB sticks, CF/SD cards (which traditionally one would use in a camera not for copyright infringement)
- all kinds of players and recorders, including sometimes simple PCs/smartphones/tablets/e-readers
- copy and fax machines. Yes, some people voted with a straight face to collect fees from all sold fax machines and distribute them (FSM knows how) to the supposed poor copyright owners victimised by people buying fax machines
- in one case even the regular A4 paper is taxed, per sheet!

What's more, Kindle is the worst example as even the 4GB one would store thousands of books (and most Kindles nowadays are a few times that). For most people this is their whole library, so what's the FOMO, that you can't buy new books?

You can do that on the very first Raspberry Pi, or literally on any smartphone that accepts some storage. Or (the natural place mosly anyone could have and it's on 24/7) on some openWRT capable router.

The other thing I don't get is using apps for everything.

I mean, I get it from the manufacturer's point of view. It means they can update things as they please retrospectively and possibly add new charges for functionality or services and/or implement spyware after the sale.

But from a user's point of view, why would I ever want my new home solar power and battery installation that has an expected working life of at least 20-30 years to be dependent on some random phone app to configure it? How many people had smartphones 20-30 years ago? How many people will still have them in 20-30 years? Exactly.

Nothing wrong with providing an app as well for the convenience of those who want it. But anything that is a permanent appliance or fixture in my home and doesn't fundamentally require external connectivity to do its job still needs to have 100% of its functionality available locally as well, without relying on external connectivity or any separate hardware or software platform for the UI.

When there is functionality that really does need remote connectivity, like say a power system that integrates with my electricity provider that offers flexible, demand-based pricing, there should be open standards for how these remote interactions work and it should still be possible to see and do everything else locally.

The world would be a much better place if governments and regulators promoted this kind of future-proof approach but sadly the public sector tends to lag so far behind in its awareness and understand of tech issues that it's not very effective at dealing with them.

Despite what the unbelievably pushy marketing campaign from Qualcomm last year would mislead you to believe in Windows world ARM is still an unbelievably tiny niche. It's a tiny minority where they even offer devices at all, that is for relatively expensive light laptops (and a handful of Windows tablets, which are mostly used with a keyboard too, and very often called "laptops" too). Even there they're barely fit for purpose, with basic, consumer software dragging its fit to deliver something usable, like a Google Drive client took 5 years to appear. And for the rest they just don't exist, even if people somehow would fancy some idea of buying some.

So as long as there is Windows we're talking about regular x86-64 CPUs. Now that Microsoft is doing all their best to bury Windows, starting with a nearly impossible OOBE, is pushing ads even in the Enterprise editions and so on, that's another story. But most likely Windows is another from the "too big to fail" things.

I agree. Questions like this often seem to come from people who don’t *want* to use AI, or perhaps are afraid of it for whatever reason, and they’re looking for reasons that they shouldn’t use it.

I guess the logical next step is to capture the heat output as hot water, concentrate the heat somehow (or heat the water a bit more) and use steam to drive a turbine producing electricity. Ye cannae break the laws of physics, but it should be possible for a datacentre to recoup at least part of its electricity costs this way? Essentially a steam-driven power station where the heating element is a bank of GPUs with water running over them.

If it's a model that's kind of popular for the region I don't see this problem in practice. Once it's a few years old there are tons of third party making parts for things that break with any frequency, including quite specialized parts. And of course lots of parts that are still good coming from totaled cars (which is a very low bar nowadays too, sadly). There MIGHT be some kind of "part locking" Apple-style but I haven't seen it, and mechanics are still just "black box" troubleshooting for everything that seems too complex, just replacing some subsystem and seeing if the problem moves with it or not.

The whole situation is certainly influenced by a HUGE inertia. It's absolutely unreal, I looked at the motor compartment for a small (full) electric Skoda - it was the same as for the regular ICE car! There was no big engine but all the (non-existent ICE) engine (and other unnecessary) mounts were there, plus other design choices that only someone doing some "at-home" hobby ICE-electric conversion would do, not someone mass assembling a small electric car where every "cut corner" (in a good sense, if it isn't necessary) would help! It even has in the same place and of the same size the freaking' LEAD ACID BATTERY! Of course it wasn't a starter battery but more like a backup battery - I HOPE, I hope it isn't just because they were so daft to design whatever system controlling the "serious" batteries to give them in some situations blackouts. Now we need to change from this or that mode and need to reboot for 20s and you get only backup power for that time :-) .

... at least if it's any kind of public video. What was the question?

Companies like Amazon seem to be betting on the AI taking over theory. It's probably the only explanation that makes sense now, because their reputation among skilled technical people will be permanently damaged by moves like this. It won't suddenly repair itself whenever the pendulum swings back to being an employee's market, if the great AI revolution turns out to be just another hype cycle after all.

Working at a FAANG used to be attractive to a lot of highly skilled technical people and having employment history inside that bubble used to be a positive thing on your resume. I'm not sure how true either of those things is any more. Maybe those who are still there and making premium TC in a big US city are still getting a decent deal out of it. For others, most of those big brands seem to be increasingly unattractive, and having history there seems to be increasingly regarded as neutral or even negative when employers outside that bubble are hiring.

FWIW, I'm a little more optimistic. In the UK, we don't have the kind of pork barrel politics that is endemic to some other western democracies. The ICO are, like many government regulators, under-resourced, but they are basically trying to do a decent job and I think moves like the one we're discussing here today are going in the right direction.

Which is exactly why it's vital for governments and their regulatory bodies to step in and protect the ordinary citizen who isn't an expert on these things from the abuse that the big companies who are will otherwise commit in the name of profit, just as they already do with financial services, caterers, healthcare providers, and so on.

Fantastic. Then we can go back to having dumb devices that just do their jobs and don't have all the other junk attached competing for the market instead. That worked for a few generations before all the 1984 stuff. I'm betting it will work just fine for generations after it too.

And please spare us the rhetoric about how nothing could possibly be affordable if it doesn't violate our privacy to help pay for itself. The difference in pricing in a competitive market is likely to be pretty small. The only reason they can get away with intruding as much as they do right now is that market competition has failed because everyone is lapping up the free money. I, for one, am glad the ICO has other ideas about how things should be .

Yes, I have to confess I let YouTube autoplay me in whatever echo chamber it wanted from clicking on two related videos. I eagerly watched the documentary as someone recommended it and couldn't find anything, ANYTHING new. I'm sure they might have this or that snippet or old picture or interview that was never presented before but nothing I could pinpoint, certainly nothing groundbreaking.

It's all about theta waves. Those who have become "clear" and can harmonize the frequency of their theta are known as operating thetans.