That was doctors and neuroscientists, not activists.

Lots of conditions have a wide spectrum when it comes to severity and symptoms. They are grouped together due to things like common cause or common mechanism. Sometimes they grouping is historic, but we tend to undo that when it turns out to be inappropriate.

I've become super sensitive to ads now, thanks to always blocking them online. Any service that doesn't let me block the ads (and I don't mind paying for that if it's worth it) just doesn't get used.

Note that the report on the scheme which lead to this decision states that they believe there was a net positive economic benefit, i.e. the extra economic activity generated by it was worth more than the cost of the scheme.

If you read the actual report it says that society benefited from a decent financial return on the investment. Not directly of course, but as best they could determine the economic boost from having artists be more free to work on their art was more than the cost of the scheme.

Art is an example of something that is important but also so diffuse that few people are willing to pay for it individually. Like clean air or largely theoretical scientific research that eventually leads to marketable new technologies and medical treatments.

It makes sense for societies to fund it for the benefit of everyone. Like with R&D, most art isn't that profound and may end up having little value by itself, but that's the nature of the thing - you have to fund all of it to get the rare but significant benefits.

Can you just turn down the brightness on the LED backlight? Seems easier than replacing the resistor, and has the same effect of running them at a lower current.

I suppose the cheaper ones might be doing PWM dimming which means that the peak current is still going to be high.

AI slop on YouTube is several years old at this point. It started before the AI boom with algorithm created videos. They were usually some poorly animated CG Disney characters in bizarre nonsense scenarios, randomly edited together, targeting small children for whom narrative was unimportant.

After that came videos that were an AI voiceover and a script ripped from a web page or book, with an auto generated montage of images from a web search.

What could they actually lock away though? It's all open source at the moment, so even the fairly crappy IDE could be forked. The rest is just code implementing the Arudino APIs, all of which is open source, and for most of the boards wasn't even written by Arduino.

Arduino the company has been kinda irrelevant for years now. They produce a crappy IDE, but beyond that all the interesting devices and add-on boards are from third parties and based on the original Arduino model (pinout and dimensions).

The open source community will keep providing libraries, and the various Chinese brands will keep providing boards and accessories. Qualcomm couldn't kill it if they wanted to.

The ones that come with devices are often crap anyway. For example the USB cables supplied with Pixel phones, at least up to a few years ago when I last bought one, are USB 2.0 data rate only. If you plug a USB 3 cable in you get much faster transfers, like 10x faster.

I have a load of crap cables and a few good ones I use. Not all the good ones are super fast, some are just very flexible or the right length.

The EU is doing stuff about it. Requirements to make products repairable, batteries swappable, minimum support periods, clear warnings that paid services are requires, refunds where functionality is significantly changed.

Props to Doctorow though. Coining such a compelling and accurate word has really helped with consumer understanding of the issue. Even in places like the US where the corporations make the rules, consumers are starting to understand and demand better.

I've thought about this kind of thing, but realized that in many cases the time and energy needed to build and maintain such a system outweighs the cost of replacing a commercial solution when it enshittifies every 5-10 years.

Similar thing with data. I could spend time sorting through all my photos and music, my old projects, freeing up space... But it's cheaper to just buy more storage, assuming I value my free time as low as minimum wage.

There are times when it is worth it. An OpenWRT router is a good example. Home Assistant seems to be worthwhile too, and crucially is actually stable and reliable.

Is if they confirmed your age by a behavioral maturity test. AI could monitor posts, and if it figures out that someone with an emotional age of 15 or older wouldn't have posted such a thing, you're cut off.

Art and cultural activity is a major sector of the US economy. It adds a staggering 1.17 *trillion* dollars to the US GDP. However that's hard to see because for the most part it's not artists who receive this money.

The actual creative talent this massive edifice is built upon earns about 1.4% of the revenue generated. The rest goes to companies whose role in the system is managing capital and distributing. Of that 1.4% that goes to actual creators, the lion's share goes to a handful of superstars -- movie stars and music stars and the like. This is not as unfair as it sounds, as it reflects the superstar's ability to earn money for the companies they distribute through, but the long tail of struggling individual artists play a crucial role in artistic innovation and creativity. Behind every Elvis there's a Big Mama Thornton, and armies of gospel singers who may have made a record or two but never made a living.

We can't run this giant economic juggernaut off a handful of superstars with AI slop filling in the gaps in demand. But maybe we'll give that a try.