It is never OK to use the AI output directly without checking it thoroughly. There are factual errors far too often.

I asked for a paragraph about my home village. The AI told me very enthusiastically about my parish church, St Andrews.

In truth, that church has been there for 800 years and has NEVER been named St Andrews.

Writing it myself is quicker and more likely to be what I want.

We Europeans have been telling you for decades that your banks are 30 years behind the times.

And you did your usual thing ...NOTHING.

...before something big and knobbly falls on the northern hemisphere, without us seeing it in advance....

[Yes, I know we won't be able to do anything useful in such an event ... but I really would like time to kiss my ass goodbye...]

Adafruit already has a good customer base in Europe, and a good reputation. And y'all would be welcome to the sane part of the world.

Microsoft have been trying to move their revenue stream to a subscription model for decades. I myself have witnessed at least three previous attempts over the last 30 years.

That's some impressive customer resistance there.

And some equally impressive "bashing their heads against a brick wall" from Microsoft.

Sorry. You are too late.

The USA has given up on punishing lies, liars, perjurers, tax cheats, bribers, bribe recipients, and foreign agents.

Jellyfin gives you a highly configurable system that is free and open source.

Plex offers compatibility with more equipment out of the box as well as flexibility in what you can use as a server - a nvidia shield TV works well as a plex server and client apps are available on many smart tvs without having to sideload.

There is also plex TV, which is a free streaming service along the same lines as pluto.tv.

I terms of performance and capability for playing your own media I'd say there isn't a lot in it. I think that some things like downloading media you own onto your device via client apps, (something you might do if you don't expect to be able to access the Internet for a while), works more reliably in Jellyfin.

Ultimately it comes down to the question of use case and willingness to faff about getting the Jellyfin client to run on things it usually doesn't. What equipment you already have vs how much your time is worth?

Yup, 100% correct. The term to describe this phenomenon is credentialism.

At least here in the UK a lot of it was sparked by Tony Blair demanding that 50% of the population should have university degrees. If that figure seems utterly arbitrary, that's because it is - when asked by journalists at the time he had no answer for how he came up with the figure.

I've heard that in the US, a lot of this is being led by HR departments, but don't know how correct that is.

Seems to me that both you and the parent have points. There is plenty of examples to show that spending habits are skewed, however much of what you say is true also.

I would tack onto this the scourge that is credentialism that effectively forces kids to go into lifelong debt for jobs that demand levels of education far beyond what is actually necessary. That is an insane burden.

I'm in my forties and got to watch as politicians in the 90s offshored basically everything that wasn't nailed down and in so doing saw my future evaporate before me.

Add to this the floodgates were opened on mass immigration far beyond our capacity to build housing to cover it (this is in the UK) and housing inflation meant I was never in a position to buy a home on the wages the remaining job types could offer. As all of these factors have continued unabated, my kids are now in the position that they would struggle to be able to afford rent.

I don't see this improving without a major course correction and there is no political will to do it. I've my doubts as to whether large swathes of the public would either.

I don't want to run OS/2 just for fun (shudder, I remember what it was like trying to use it).

So why are user applications not mentioned anywhere in TFA nor in this discussion?

More: I went via the Wiki to the Store, where there are only three "Office & Productivity" apps, none of which anyone has ever heard of before.

And you want me to pay for this?

What Lloyd's are doing is functionally equivalent to ....

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) got rid of 1500 experienced people, and replaced with 750 hired guns from the subcontinent... who turned out to be not as gifted as those who were shown to RBS before the contract was signed (surprise surprise).

These guys fucked up an update to the batch scheduler software, and fucked up restarting the batch schedule, which left RBS without any functioning banking apps nor any valid databases.

Over the weeks of disruption, the FCA said customers could not:
- Use online banking facilities to access their accounts
- Obtain accurate account balances from ATMs
- Make timely mortgage payments
- Access cash in foreign countries
In addition, the banks applied incorrect credit and debit interest to customers' accounts, and produced inaccurate bank statements.

It took more than four months to completely restore all the function for all customers.

AI is not just regurgitating garbage, it is creating new garbage.

Microsoft Copilot just told me with total confidence all about the wonderful parish church St Andrews in my village. But ...

That parish church has been here for 800 years and has NEVER been dedicated to St Andrew. We have no idea where this notion came from.

There is a special place in Hell for the people who trained Copilot.

We can easily replace ChromeOS with Mint, and let the updates continue...

I mentor at a Code Club. All our machines are donated, including 5 or 6 Chromebooks. We have installed Mint on all the machines to save ourselves the grief of the machines not being identical. Mint works fine on the Chromebooks.

Footnote: I am fairly certain that all our Chromebooks are older than 2021

Manufacturers will be motivated to not weasel out on battery guarantees. There's money in the battery. Because lithium batteries are 95% recyclable. And recycled lithium is cheaper than mined lithium.

[The 5% is plastic parts, such as spacers].