So are these boosted minimum requirements the previous boosted minimum requirements, or did they just now pull a new set of minimum requirements out of their asses again? I lose track since they started changing shit mid-version. Might as well just buy a new computer and throw it directly in the trash these days.

So what exactly CPU features is it that this glorious AI shit needs? ... Right, there isn't any actual CPU feature.

And what does this AI shit give me anyway? ... Right nothing anyone wants or needs.

Wait I, "can't use" this AI shit without a CPU that supports it? Well, stock up on those then.

Somewhat ironically, they just finished killing the last bits of Gmail classic, which was more or less their original user interface. Basic HTML and light weight enough it could be used over dial-up as well as with less capable web browsers.

I was still accessing Gmail classic via an old Firefox until a couple of weeks ago it finally started forcing a redirect.

Or, smartphones are really just annoying business tools, and the market has only been kept alive by the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field (TM). Break that spell and everyone will go back to proper landlines.

Yea, so this is what modern communications have devolved in to. Communications by grunting via cell phone text messages. It is just too much to ask for people these days to elaborate on something or spell it out in enough detail to eliminate ambiguity or possible misunderstandings.

Of course, you know how they will "fix" the problem... add yet another Unicode character/emoji/unintelligible hieroglyph specifically for accepting a contract!

Because those pesky old letters A-Z are just too damn hard to combine in to ideas!

Imagine sitting at your desk staring at your screen and your annoying cow-orker comes up and stands behind your desk so you get a nice view of his crotch through your screen.

How about text contrast against a potentially moving background?

I already makes me want to reach through the screen and punch a web developer in the face every time I come across a web site that has a dizzying full motion video background that makes the entire site impossible for me to even look at.

I've long since gotten tired of translucent user interface elements back in Windows Vista/7 - Take a look at someones screen shots, and you get bits of the picture of their baby in the background or some dumb crap.

Of course, what will happen is Apple will start selling transparent screens, and then all of a sudden everyone is expected to have one, even if it kills them.

Smart phones are designed to be a distraction. All the way from the ultra-bright screens to the hypnotic scrolling, to the constant stream of mindless alerts, to the social stigma against taking more than a minute to respond to "texts".

You are expected to constantly look at your smartphone and view every advertisement that comes your way. You are supposed to love your smart phone more than anything else in the world because that is what the commercials say.

It also doesn't help that they act as a source of (mis)information.

When I was growing up, there was no internet, no smart phones, and no social media. All I had access to was a set of encyclopedias, a tiny public library, and parents with rocks for brains. So when I wanted to know something, I had to figure it out for my damn self.

What disappoints me is that it has taken this long for the media to finally start pointing out the negative aspects of smart phones. When the Apple iPhone and similar first appears on the market, the manufacturers were pumping so much money in to advertising, no media organization dared to say anything against them, and instead took every opportunity to glorify the smart phones of their advertising overloads.

Oh, look, sparkly pink dresses are on sale at Walmart!

And so it begins.

Soon, you can expect all tech support numbers to be replaced with an "AI"... but on the upside there will be NO DAMN EXCUSE for those grating Indian accents any more. Heck, give it a pleasant British accent.

Wait, who snuck in the deep Austrian accent? What do you mean my support call is terminated?!

I didn't know Wendy's sold cake. Hmm, there is a lot of unsaturated polyester resin and sediment in this cake.

Yea, I don't own a smartphone. Does that make me a non-person? They don't want my business?

Is it law that one has to own a smart phone? I know the cell phone manufacturers would love to make that law.

Even for smellphone lovers, is your precious phone ALWAYS working? Forgot to charge it? Got hacked again? Camera gunked? Internet access not working at that moment?

Why add those dependencies to the simple task of ordering from a menu?

Right, they probably make more money mining your personal data.

Oh, for fucks sake, DST is not stupid.

Take it away and either you have to sleep though an hour of sunlight in the morning during summer, or slog through an hour of darkness in the morning during the winter.

Obligatory: Think of the children waiting in the dark at bus stops!

All but the smallest hippie internet businesses are going to keep a standard schedule with each other and start at 8:00am no matter what. Having DST as law is the only realistic way to fix that.

The main problem is they screwed it up a way while back when they tried to expand DST, making people have to get up earlier starting in March rather than April. Ow!

And why? Well, more daylight hours in the evening means more people buying things at stores! Or even online. Who do you think pays for most of the lawmaker's bribes? Yea, big businesses.

Now they want it all! No individual wants to get rid of DST (just change the spring switch date back to April!!!) But big businesses want you to wake up an hour earlier in the winter so you can buy more shit!

Ad blockers keep your computer safe from malware.

Ad blockers can save bandwith and computer resources.

Ad blockers keep your eyes safe from objectionable content, and content that can even cause some people physical harm.

YouTube's use of ads is unacceptable. A little while back an office place I was at told everyone to watch a training video on youtube. Over the next hour as people randomly starting the video, youtube forced everyone to listen to a very sick political advertisement over and over and over. Long story short, this caused some serious problems. But apparently nobody cares. Oh, and apparently nobody knows how to use "mute audio" on a computer any more.

Youtube does not deserve the privilege of advertising. They don't deserve your ears, eyeballs, or attention. It needs to DIE.

You joke, but it should make one wonder how exactly they were generating so-called custom smoothies and what exactly the benefit to the customer is. I can certainly imagine a huge company feeding in data like customer purchasing history across multiple business back to the beginning of time, any recent data they can buy from privacy invading cell phone apps, current data like the customers demeanor, manor of dress, time of day, current weather, and a billion other obscure details, all to generate the optimal customer experience....

That will then taste like ape food, or sediment shaped sediment, or some hallucinatory drug. Or most likely is just based on a pseudo random number between zero and 255.

From the summary, it sounds like the only thing they were using AI for was generating hype. Glossy photo shoot faces, occasional three fingers, gibberish text. That's what I expect every time I read a damn article hyping "AI".

There are probably MBAs out there scratching their head wondering why this business wasn't successful. But I think everyone else here understands that AI is BS.

Walgreens only exists as trap to get people to buy things as they navigate all the way back through the store to get to the pharmacy.

You are "free" to buy things without their store tracking card, but only if you pay twice the regular price.

I can think of no good reason to shop at a Walgreen's, and abusing people by stuffing seizure inducing ads in their faces while hiding products is not going to help.

Stores have no respect for customers any more. The local Walmart started putting some products behind little access doors that loudly exclaim "Thank your for shopping at Walmart!" whenever you touch them. Ostensibly as some kind of shoplifting deterrent. But I won't touch those products now, and I want nothing more than to smash those damn machines every time I hear that.

Is this the first time someone used a GPS to find their car? Oh, is it the first time someone used a privacy violating "app" to find their car?

Oh, look GPS tracking saved a baby! GPS tracking is good! Give up all your privacy to save more babies, or you are a bad person! And buy more cell phones!

Sorry, a creepy insurance company tracking everything you do just to save a few buck is not a good thing. So it helped this guy find is car. Good for him. Let's not expect everyone else to be the same.

It's been well known for a long time now that it is possible to get a little more compression out of PNG if you throw more horsepower at the compression and/or re-arrange things in the file (not always technically lossless, but what you see is identical). Just look at PNGOUT by Ken "Nice Job" Silverman.

So how does performance compare? Or is this magical "AI" just running in teh cloud off of unicorn magic? Do you want to have to rev up a nuclear power plant every time you save a graphic file?

But, but, but glorious AI!

What the blazes ever happened to color preferences? And applications that actually respected them? Oh, I guess that was too boring and predictable.