Yeah YouTube is unwatchable without an ad blocker. Absolutely full of ads

Really? Windows, Linux and MacOS are in such a hurry to upgrade that they don't care about breaking things that work. This is not to start a flame war but I have yet to see another OS with such a stable upgrade cycle. My oldest upgraded system is from 2003 now running FreeBSD 14.2. The system migrated from bare metal, to VM, to jail and back to bare metal. Several images were made to test major upgrades or paths to upgrades.

Windows chokes on itself with updates. You never know what will break. Just when you are comfortable you spend a day reinstalling print drivers. Moving from old hardware to new hardware is a PITA.

MacOS just changes things just for the look. Who cares about functionality or interoperability. At least they have a simple transition to new hardware you may just lose some functionality.

Just when you think that Linux got it right an upgrade fails and all the forums tell you you are doing it wrong by assuming that the upgrade button will give you a running system.

Like I said this is not meant to start a flame war but I have yet to find an OS that has FreeBSD's stability and maintainability. Certainly not Linux with systemD which forced me to reinstall just this year the OS.

When you're the size of Google, of course you can have it both ways. What's the entire point of effectively legalized regulatory capture if not the privilege of having it both (or 5 or 10 or N) ways?

Not in this case. Cloud Innovation is basically a global spam operation that hijacked a good portion of AfriNic IP space to operate from.

There are more people employed today as a percentage of the population than ever. The world population continues to grow. Not sure how you came to that conclusion.

Uh, debit cards do all those things. Only you don't have to engage in all the "make work" that middlemen loyalty programs incur. You spend money, it comes out of the money you have, it's a card. The merchant doesn't have to pay anybody to run a loyalty program, and then pass the costs on to you. The end.

Due to a disability, I can only type with my right hand. It definitely slows my typing. But, I have learned to work around this. For example, I use "sticky keys" which lets me type Shift, Ctrl, Alt, and release those keys. so, Ctrl+C is typed by pressing Ctrl then releasing it, then pressing C then releasing it. The regular way also works while "sticky keys" is enabled.

So what do you get from using a credit card if you always pay it off? Are you magically always one month behind being able to afford anything?

I'm guessing it's not that. Do you get points? Services? Goodies? I wonder how credit card companies pay for those? Oh yeah, you pay for them - and that's even if you use the stuff that comes "with" credit cards. Truly the ultimate middleman/redistribution scheme.

Yes, I'm sure Nintendo's lawyers have not considered the legality of their business practices in their largest market. *rolls eyes*

Have you taken apart everything in your home to ensure there are no recording devices embedded inside them? Get a grip, bro.

The *real* problem is with people who aren't skilled enough at operating a motor vehicle while manipulating a device or controls. Long before cellphones existed, we had people accidentally rear-ending other cars because they were trying to change their radio station or volume. Yet, we didn't pass laws banning car stereos. (We collectively acknowledged the benefits of a car stereo while driving and decided people just needed to learn how to work the radio controls in a safe manner while driving -- which most people figured out how to do.)

People used to manage to unfold paper maps and refer to them while driving, back in the 1970's and earlier, without wrecking into people, too.

I'm amazed at how lax the drivers' ed testing has become in recent years. My daughter went to get her license last year and the entirety of the practical part of her exam was having her drive around the block, out of the shopping center the motor vehicle dept. was located in, and back into the lot to park in a parking space next to it. They didn't so much as get her out on the highway! I have a hard time rationalizing that as ok, while worrying about good/experienced drivers who multitask glancing at smartphone screens.

Definitely! Similar vibes to (but pre-dating) Trader Joe's "Fearless Flyer", right down to the cheap paper and retro graphics.

Visiting their original storefront in Chicago was one of my favorite excursions when I was young and in need of science fair inspiration or just "stuff" for one of my personal projects.

Pretty much all the B&M and online surplus electronics stores I used to buy from have faded away or moved to a purely eBay existence.

As long as he's referring to his own field (creation of animations/art for film or video), I think he's essentially correct. AI will become a required tool you need to be familiar with as part of your career. It won't take people's jobs, except for people who refuse to learn how to utilize AI as part of it.

I'm FAR from convinced AI usage will play out the same way in all industries. For example? If you work in law, it makes sense AI could replace your lower-paid paralegals who essentially just open Word templates and fill out fields with appropriate info for each client. However, AI isn't at all likely to take jobs of many attorneys out there because that line of work involves showing up in courts in person, and presenting things to other people in a persuasive way.

If you're paid to publish ad copy, then AI is likely to reduce the number of employees needed, but again? The ones retained will need to know how to utilize AI tools well (and how to supplement or revise what they churn out).

AI isn't going to do anything meaningful in most "blue collar" fields like construction, IMO. It might help an architect out with the design stages of a project, but people getting paid to build things won't get anything done by some software code running in the cloud.