Meta has a knack for building/buying the replacement for the "thing" that becomes cool after their original service starts to die.

Facebook started becoming uncool, so they bought and expanded Instagram.

Then TikTok became cooler than Instagram, so they added Instagram Reels for a similar bite sized mindless video experience.

People got mad at Twitter after Musk turned it into X, so then they built Threads and started migrating Instagram users to it.

Then Open AI released Sora, so they created Meta AI "Vibes" to compete in the AI generated slop video space.

If someone else comes up with a new social media platform, I'm sure that they'll either buy them as well or compete a competing product and crush them with advertising and cross promotion.

Isn't Texas one of those states that requires ID verification to watch adult content? If so, you might actually have a valid case here. Watching someone else's porn without consent AND with no ID verification is probably a double whammy in Texas law.

Does anyone remember the Firefox phone OS debacle? I'll bet that one cost them tens of millions.

As least as of today, the AI slop in Firefox is restricted to a slide out menu on left hand side that brings up a console for your LLM of choice. If you don't like it, just close the side menu and be done with it.

It's not nearly as obnoxious as Chrome or Edge, where they have a Gemini or Copilot agent reading everything on screen, eagerly waiting to offer "suggestions". I'm not sure what's done with the data they're scraping, but I can't imagine that they are just tossing it out without feeding at least some of it to an ad targeting mechanism.

I think that the original plan under the Biden admin was to make EPA fuel mileage and emission guidelines so strict that by 2031 only plug-in hybrid and EV pickups could meet them. That way, you don't have to "worry" about EV pickups being more expensive than their gas counterparts when the gas versions can no longer be built or sold new. I guess that you could still get a used one, but those older trucks aren't going to last forever.

Hey... maybe that one prolific pro-nuclear poster on Slashdot will finally get their wish, and we'll be drowning in cheap power by 2029.

I doubt it, but dare to dream?

It sounds like Ford is trying to keep their new battery plants busy until we get a new administration in 2029 that's going to try to force everyone to start buying EV trucks.Which is probably a smart move.

Considering that the major backers are Meta, Oracle, XAi, and Palantir, they'll probably spend the first year of their two year stint arguing over which AI framework and hosting providers to use.

I have to wonder if the Trump admin has a shortage of tech workers thanks to all of the people that they laid off due to DOGE. I'd imagine that many more top performers just got sick of dealing with Elon's incoherent ramblings in early 2025 and went elsewhere.

That said, they're probably still saving money by hiring new tech workers right out of college for the lowest wages possible. They can probably offer pennies on the dollar now, considering that most big tech companies are trying to avoid hiring junior workers and use AI and outsourced labor where ever possible.

For me, that "Dark Web" scan was giving me a ton of false positives. People were signing up for random shit using my e-mail address, and THOSE accounts were the ones being flagged as being breached.

Sorry, but I don't care if some random Romanian dating or eastern European crypto site has a weak password. I never signed up for it to begin with.

I had a fairly early generation Roomba (500 series, I believe), and it was pretty brain dead. It had a bad habit of trying to eat cat toys and getting stuck on stair ledges. Which was annoying, because they were supposed to be smart enough to avoid those things at that point.

I tried to avoid the 1st generation bugs, and still got screwed on my purchase.

Don't forget that last year they picked Trump as the 2024 person of the year. It's not an award for the "best" person, just the person (or people) who got the most news headlines.

Yeah, that would be my guess as well. I'd imagine that the editors started their Friday evening drinking a bit early, but I'm hoping that it was supposed to be something slightly more intelligent sounding than that?

Most of those shows that you mentioned were popular in the 1990's. You forgot to mention The Computer Chronicles, which probably helped me get interested in technology back then.

I'd imagine that conservatives probably think that PBS lost it's way in the 2010-2020's and became the "social justice network" instead. It really seemed to put a lot of it's focus on systemic racism around that time, and made some powerful enemies in the process.

At the tail end of the summary:

"Trump denied taking a big should on television viewers."

What in the What now?