If there was competition in the market then no it wouldn't have done that but the same handful of people own all the grocery stores. Remember we put everything on the stock market and only a handful of people own enough stock that they actually have any kind of a controlling interest. Your 401k does not mean you have a controlling interest..

What does this means in practice is that there is zero competition in grocery shopping. The only limit on prices is the point where people actually start to notice that and stop voting Republican.

So they can fire a whole shitload of people and yeah it's slower for you to sit in the line ringing and bagging your own groceries and it's slower for everyone involved but you need food and they've got it so you have to put up with it.

There are a handful of alternatives but none of them at scale. You can drive an hour or two to a farmer's market I guess. There are expensive boutique grocery stores. Stuff like that. But realistically you're not going to be able to keep yourself fed with those. Not unless you have special circumstances. The majority of the population are stuck with the large grocery chains and they know it.

You could of course try opening your own grocery store chain to compete... Except they will run you out of business with low prices just long enough to bankrupt you and we don't enforce antitrust law.

We spent the last 50 years dismantling our Democratic institutions so that we could indulge in Petty moral panics. We are only just now starting to see the consequences of that. The real fun comes when the stock market finally collapses after the Epstein class is done looting our 401ks. If you're a baby boomer good luck dying before that happens because God knows you can't stop it.

It's just outsourcing, H1-Bs and age discrimination fueled layoffs. AI is a great cover for that.

Also Trump is wrecking the economy and nobody wants to acknowledge that because he's a vindictive psycho that nobody will stand up to.

We all know what they're doing.

They tried to build one and it caught fire IIRC.

Oh I'm still bad at it it takes me an inordinate amount of time to make something that is barely presentable.

The fact that I can make something barely presentable in entirely too much time doesn't make me good at it.

I still just don't understand what Torvalds is saying here. It doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement of AI. It sounds like he tried to use it and it didn't work. Maybe he just thinks it's a cool new thing and he doesn't fear it taking his job or his water and electricity since he's pretty high up on the totem pole...

But also the tariffs. Don't lift them though, that way there is more cheap CXMT DRAM for Europe. Thanks for your attention to this matter.

Consumer computers might go away if we are not careful. It will all be cloud based because that is more profitable. Everything on subscription. Your computer is the minimum viable terminal for those services.

The firmware probably isn't designed to be secure, they likely instead have a box that does all the comms with the fridges, and connects to their VPN for remote control. The box only ever talks to the VPN so the only bit that needs securing is their corporate network.

That is how most of these devices work, such as connected cars. VPN to a fixed server, with a certificate to validate that it's the real one, and don't talk to anything else.

Because it saves them vastly more money than this hack has cost them.

They could use a one-way link for simple monitoring, but by having a two way link they can adjust the set point temperature based on real-time electricity prices. Unlike residential customers, large businesses usually pay a variable rate based on 15 minute demand pricing. The pricing is announced 24 hours in advance based on predictions for demand. They drop the set temperature a degree or two when it is cheap, and raise it a degree or two when it is expensive.

Fukushima was an inconvenience? Half a trillion Euros to clean up, and rising, and at least 200 billion Euros of consequential economic damage. Multiple full meltdowns, at least 51 deaths, and 164,000 residence displaced.

Modern reactors absolutely can melt down. I don't know where you got that idea from. The new SMR designs can too.

To be fair Google has supported Fitbit products for a long time and has been steadily upgrading Google Health. It does seem that they are in it for the long haul, although some people aren't happy with the new app and prefer the old Google Fit one.

I've had a Versa 4 for a few years and it's good. Battery life is decent, it seems accurate and proper scientific tests confirm that it is. The sleep tracking is the best you can get without spending at least 4x as much, and is accurate enough to be useful.

The latest Pixel Watch is screwed together, not glued. I imagine this Fitbit will be the same. As long as you properly replace the rubber seals (don't re-use them) it should be fine.

"XL" isn't a good name for it really.

JPEG-XL offers numerous improvements over JPEG, including the ability to do a lossless transcoding of a JPEG file for a ~20% space saving. That alone is very valuable for the web where there is a vast amount of JPEG data that can be reduced now.

It also has proper HDR support, although it remains to be see how well that will work in practice. The issue is going to be the conversion for SDR screens. Also browsers need to be careful with HDR images, or retina burning trolling is going to become a think.

For general use it offers smaller file sizes and better image quality than JPEG. It usually equals or beats most other lossy formats, but not always. It also offers true lossless, and visually lossless modes. The former is competitive with PNG.

The main downside is that performance is much, much worse than JPEG. For decoding, what matters to 99.9% of people, it is both slower and uses more energy (i.e. battery run-time) than JPEG. It may be a net benefit due to smaller downloads, but I'm not convinced.

The other issue is that the reference decoder is written in Rust, so if you want to use it you need to integrate that into your app. There is a C implementation but it's old and seemingly abandoned.

People who are just making little apps and scripts to improve productivity could benefit from AI. I've used it to do a few little PowerShell and Python scripts. I'm not very familiar with either language and don't have time to learn, so some little automation scripts that I otherwise wouldn't have had the inclination to make myself are valuable time savers.

For example I have a PowerShell script that takes unstapled magazines that have been scanned in a sheet feed scanner and splits them into correctly numbered individual pages. It has massively sped up the process of preserving old magazines. Gemini took a few attempts to get it right, but it got there eventually. I'd have probably ended up wasting a fair bit more time writing a little C# app if AI couldn't do it for me.

On the other hand, I'd never let it write embedded code for work. If I can't write it myself, I can't debug it either.