So, how'd you feel if other businesses took the same approach? Let's clutter up the sidewalk with plumbers, electricians and other tradesman riding around in little vehicles that can't go in the road. It wouldn't be long before someone says exactly the same thing I just said for the food delivery companies: if you want to run a business, there's inescapable overhead costs, with one of them being the purchase of vehicles that can legally operate on the roadways.

That's an entirely separate issue. I'm not getting into the socioeconomic can of worms that is job loss due to automation. I simply said the robots shouldn't be on the sidewalks in the first place, which would amazingly also solve the problem of their path being blocked by "protestors".

Nope. When it was Sam Altman doing the whole "You're probably not going to have a job thanks to the tech my company is developing, so here's a pittance as a way of saying oops, my bad." thing, I felt the same way.

Hey kid, I flooded your bedroom but here's a free inflatable pool float you can sit in. We're good now, right?

I have a modest proposal: Let's build factories to manufacture glass panes in less prosperous states and then go around smashing windows to create demand for their products. What could possibly go wrong?

What you're actually buying is a license those do come with limitations. Heck, even when you buy a piece of piece of hardware it's not something you'll be able to realistically use for the rest of your life. With old cars for example, eventually the replacement parts become unobtainium and even if you really want to keep the car on the road indefinitely, there's a limit to how long such a goal will be practical.

Really, it is just an issue of making sure buyers are aware that they're only paying to play the game while it is supported by the developer. That's really the norm for most of the tech industry anyway *glances over at my obsolete Apple Watch*.

This was clearly the wrong decision. The cost of entry to deliver food via robot should be by means of an autonomous car that operates on the road with the rest of the motorized vehicles. We're not talking about some college kid who needs to ride a motorized micromobility device on the sidewalk because an e-scooter is all he can afford and the road is full of multi-ton SUVs going 60 MPH. The companies behind this crap can belly up to the bar and pay what it costs to build machines that can operate in the road, or they can GTFO.

If you're not saddled with the costs of employing humans to do the work, you can certainly afford to come up with something that can operate in the damn road. The sidewalks absolutely should not become a commons to be plundered for every tech bro's get-rich-quick-scheme.

You're not getting a mid-tier anything for $120 in the RAMpocalypse era. That price point comes with a lot of compromises, the OP's implication that it's even close to "90%" of a $2k phone is laughable.

On the Android side, for true flagship performance we're talking something like $900 for a Pixel 11. Once you start getting into the real bargain territory (like the Samsung A17 5G), yeah, it's $270, but it starts at 128GB of storage and 4GB of RAM. Then if for some ungodly reason you absolutely can't spend the extra $70 for the Samsung, there's the Motorola Moto G Play 2026, which compromises on the storage (there's only 64GB) and has a truly awful 720P display.

Ironically, through a quirk of carrier subsidies one of the better bang-for-your-buck values at the moment actually is an iPhone. Metro has the 16e for a total of $160 if you port over a number from a competitor (which can be a burner number) and prepay for the first month of service. Let it sit in a drawer for a year and it will still automatically unlock (Metro's unlock policy is weird like that). Chances are, even after a year of waiting for it to unlock, it will still perform better than anything else you could buy for $160.

My sister-in-law bought one of the recent-ish Motorola RAZR phones. It lasted a little bit past the warranty before the screen failed. She's now using an old iPhone 13. I'd say a folding phone is probably not for people who like to keep their phones for the long haul.

Actually, $2k ain't what it used to be. I regularly see people riding the train with e-scooters that cost about that much. Granted, a $2k e-scooter is a nice e-scooter, but nobody is looking at it and thinking that person won at capitalism. It will be exactly the same with this folding iPhone.

In my expert opinion as a card-carrying member of the LGBTQ+ community, I have some bad news for you if your chicks are using the he/him pronouns.

There is a point of diminishing returns for smartphones, but it's still quite a bit north of one-hundred-twenty bucks. Of all the things to cheap out on, it's baffled me that it's such a common refrain among techie folks that so many are fine with a phone that's a bit of a clunker.

For most people, a smartphone is one of their most often used possessions. It only makes sense to buy something you'll enjoy using and that doesn't waste your time with laggy performance while you're out and about. Every moment that you spend waiting for your phone to do something is time in your life that you'll never get back. Granted, I get that some people have a low-end phone because they specifically prefer using their phones as little as possible and in that case it really wouldn't make a huge quality of life improvement by buying something better, but that's more of a difference of usage preferences rather than specifically about being frugal.

GTA 5 PC added anti-cheat at some point and those usually do end up breaking Linux compatibility. I don't see GTA 6 launching on PC without anti-cheat also, because the public lobbies in GTA 5 were an absolute mess of people doing crazy things like turning your character into a toilet. I doubt Rockstar would want a repeat of that.

Also, the other thing they hate even more than cheaters is people using hacks to get free shit. The new game will probably be even more heavily monetized than GTA 5, and those Shark Cards ain't gonna just sell themselves.
 

For a game where a big part of the appeal is the driving simulator aspect (screwy cartoon video game physics aside), 30 FPS feels like a slideshow. There are certainly genres of games where it doesn't matter as much, but high-speed action is kind of the whole point of GTA.

Or just take the phone you already have out of your pocket and use that instead? The main advantage of using smart hub/speaker devices is that you can program them to know what room they're in, so you can say things like "lights on" and just have it activate the lights within that room. But at three hundred doll hairs per room to do that with Apple hardware, that'd be a nope from me, dawg.

I'm honestly still pretty happy with the Echo Dots that I got from some Black Friday sale an eternity ago. They were cheap enough to put one everywhere I wanted smart lighting control and besides setting kitchen timers, is really the only practical use I've ever found for such devices. For anything else, it really is just less hassle to use my phone.

I'm assuming you forgot about the time their cars were wearing out their flash storage modules.

Presently, nope. Apple is yet again insisting that one of their new devices does not actually need 3rd party developer support to succeed. If your smart devices are from an unsupported ecosystem, you'll have to do the usual sort of workarounds to get them to play nice with this thing.

Probably via activating the defrost elements on equipment that is stupidly designed without hardware failsafes in place. Yeah, in the old days you'd expect there to be one of those bimetallic limit switches that physically cuts power to the defrost element, but now you've got software monitoring a sensor instead. Add a little malicious code to ignore the output of the sensor and suddenly Oh lord Jesus, it's a fire!