I have to agree with you and I'm sure it's unpopular in this overall discussion. Our entire educational system is built upon learning from sample code, sample writing, sample art. To suggest that a pattern learning/mimicking LLM is somehow more offensive than a pattern learning/mimicking human being seems ridiculous to me. I'm not trying to debate the moral implications of LLMs that were trained on stolen code, but I also don't understand how banning LLM contributed code somehow leads to less work for devs or better quality code. I'm a pretty hack programmer and if I wanted to contribute to an open source project ... how would you determine that my contribution didn't violate copyright? How would you know where my inspiration came from?

So the question becomes, where is the new trade-in industry hungry to rip the chips out of all of my older unused devices to pay me top dollar?

It's more prevalent than you think, singling out BMW is missing the bigger point.

Just picked up a used Hyundai that also has a subscription based service that's required if you want to remote start the car. My BMW includes that for free.

If you’re self-employed, here’s the deal:

SEP IRA: Contributions are capped at about 20% of net earnings. So if you make $100K, you can put in roughly $20K. To contribute $70K, you’d need around $350K in earnings.

Solo 401(k): You get two components:

Employee deferral: Up to $24,500 (or $32,500 if you’re 50+).
Employer (profit-sharing): About 20% of net earnings, same as SEP.
Combined, on $100K earnings, you could contribute $44,500 (or ~$51k if 50+).
The overall IRS limit is $72,000 (plus catch-up), but you’d need higher income to hit that.

Bottom line: Solo 401(k) offers way more flexibility at lower income levels. SEP is simple, but to max it out, you need big earnings. Keep in mind that a SEP is also effectively free to operate while a solo 401(k) will probably cost you ~$500-1000 to administer per year.

The irony is that "collectibles" have their own tax rate and it's considerably higher than capital gains. Most people would pay a 15 or 20% long-term capital gains rate on securities they sell but collectibles are taxed at a 28% rate.

I finally had to give up on gmail for the same reason. Everyone seemed to think it was theirs and for every unsubscribe I went through, 3 more got added. I still get people's mortgage statements, rental agreements for storage units, food order receipts, etc. The most annoying part is someone used it to sign up for a Playstation account and Sony refused to do anything about it. Their system required two-factor so I couldn't just force a password reset and delete the account, and they wouldn't delete it because I wasn't the person who created it. It basically permanently banned me from creating an account with my own email address.

Because they aren't segregated. From their user agreement (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.coinbase.com%2Flegal%2Fuser_agreement%2Funited_states%23hosted-wallet-and-custodial-services)

2.6.3. Digital Assets Not Segregated. In order to more securely custody assets, Coinbase may use shared blockchain addresses, controlled by Coinbase, to hold Supported Digital Assets held on behalf of customers and/or held on behalf of Coinbase. Although we maintain separate ledgers for User accounts and Coinbase accounts held by Coinbase for its own benefit, Coinbase shall have no obligation to segregate by blockchain address Supported Digital Assets owned by you from Supported Digital Assets owned by other customers or by Coinbase.

Not safer, just more transparent.

I think your post is very on point. What we've seen play out in the past 10 years but accelerated recently in the video streaming space was just a precursor to the gaming world that, frankly, we should have all seen coming. Companies value subscription revenue, it's more valuable to their investors for one. You can't garner a critical mass of subscribers to support the platform costs unless you have an arsenal of content to go along with it. That's why Netflix, HBOMax, Disney+, etc. are spending obscene amounts of money to produce content to lure people to their platforms.

Gaming will be no different. Microsoft is clearly heading in the direction where Game Pass is their consumer subscription service that rounds out their commercial subscriptions in Windows/Office. They have the platform and a decent amount of content but this will push them over the top and make for a very compelling offer for what $15/mo gets you. As a long time Xbox owner, I don't personally care whether Sony/Nintendo get these games or not (though I'm sure they do). What actually excites me is Microsoft's stance about including these in Game Pass and generally assuring me that I can play them on PC AND Xbox, hopefully they can bring some more cross-play support between those two platforms as well since third parties have been so inconsistent with it. I expect other studios will continue to be snatched up but I also think others have made good comments in here that none of this precludes great content from arising from other Indie developers. After all, almost every game we celebrate today from the "big players" started off as a small entity that grew. The large studios, to my recollection, haven't been great about starting new content (just look at companies like Amazon that can throw endless money at a project and how many failures they've had).

Exactly. Don't even see how this is news. If you're an investor with any diversification at all, you own APPL, either directly or in any number of mutual funds or ETFs. It's almost unavoidable unless you're trying really hard.

Agreed, part of that issue is also that it's so disjointed. There are too many projects run by too few developers because everyone wants to fork and put their own spin on something. Why do we need a dozen window managers, multiple x servers, a dozen filesystems, 20 web browsers, 30 PDF readers, etc.? Someone will answer that it's because X program didn't have Y feature, but it leads to a plethora of mediocre programs, developed using different toolkits, and most of them are incomplete, incoherent, and poorly documented. Granted I didn't pay anything for them and couldn't do better myself, but it's not going to win over the average household's computer when you don't have one coherent experience.

Well while we're making up statistics (all of my XBox's are hardwired), 95% of users aren't going to go out and buy a new Wi-Fi 6 router anytime in the near future nor do they have broadband connections that would exceed what Wi-Fi 5 can deliver.

1. Quarantining 50,000 people qualifies as a "major impact?" There's a bit of hyperbole in that article and in your argument. Everyone is extrapolating to a "what could be" scenario and the truth is we have no idea how much worse it can/will get. It could spread and become a true pandemic or we could be seeing the worst of it right now and deaths will be limited to no more than 5,000, only time will tell. But for markets to price in a truly disruptive scenario with global recession implications is definitely betting on the extreme. To say the US is doing nothing is also a lie as we've restricted travel, are actively investing in treatment options, and are working hard to track down cases and isolate the spread.

2. I said the mortality rate was lower than other diseases we've battled in the past decade. SARS was 11%, Ebola 83-90%, MERS 45% (your source: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...), and COVID-19 at 2-4%. Most deaths have been in humans with compromised immune systems or preexisting conditions that made increased their likelihood of death from just about any infection.

Please provide your reference for US deaths in the millions if this disease actually spreads here? China appears to be plateauing, has more than 4 times our population, and has a total of 2,788 deaths as of this writing (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fvac-lshtm.shinyapps.io%2Fncov_tracker%2F).