Xi: "Hey! I broke in first, Zork, now beat it!"

iPads, and tablets more broadly, have always been a solution in search of a problem.

About the only thing I think they really do well, and better than either a phone or a tablet, is consuming video media. That's all they've ever been used for in my house, at any rate - by everyone in the house.

Almost everything else they can do, phones and laptops do better, and have always done better. They had a niche for a while due to battery life when paired with a bluetooth keyboard, but not so much anymore.

If they'd duplicate the Fujitsu Toughbook reversible laptop hinge from years ago, or one like it, so a Macbook could also be a tablet, I can't think of a single reason why you'd ever want to use a tablet.

But I guess Apple would lose out on a high profit margin gadget sale.

is there any hard data that it actually improves anything?

Yes, ChatGPT clearly states that it's cheaper and better than humans.

ChatTP

I swear I just got through a session with Esty chat support that sounds just like that: canned empathy. Real people did answer questions, but were aided by something making such fluffy statements in-between.

It's like the AI version of that phone-wait message that says, "Your call is very important to us" while you queue for half an hour.

I want deeds, NOT words!

And it would be more entertaining to have a sarcastic Bender-style bot, as long as I can call it nasty names back. Chewing out a LoutBot makes the wait feel shorter, and is cathartic.

Pronounce it "Pesky"

Regardless, this is gonna turbo-charge foil hats. I've been trying to find ways to make money off conspiracy nuts. It's a win-win: I'd get richer, and they'd get a much-needed wallet-spanking lesson in reality. Don't think of it as manipulation, but as Professor Reality getting paid for giving lessons.

Harvard claims it's part of academic freedom, and to let the scientific process correct bad ideas, not university administration. True or not, it seems an honest stance. But it may become a practical problem if too many attention-seeking nuts sink the U's reputation.

"How would you ever get rid of a poor leader? I mean, what if ants lived *thousands* of days? We'd be stuck with a bad queen seemingly forever!"

Stick them in a Truman Show tank, giving them plenty of distractions and fake admiration to keep them out of our hair.

But in wealthy countries, the birth rate is trending toward a shrinking population. Extending (quality) life may help reverse the trend.

Ironically, restricting calories has proven to help lab animals live roughly 10% longer. Thus, there is some truth to your joke.

Thank You David Sinclair for being humanity's guinea pig! Even if it doesn't turn out to work right, I applaud you for testing. Failure is scientific data also. Someday some brave soul like yours may actually stumble on the right formula.

I personally suspect it won't work until nano-bots can trek around our body and fix age-related cell DNA mutations. I'd guestimate that's at least 20 years away for the wealthy (done overseas to avoid regs), and longer for us plebes.

The balls on this guy...

Are we going to just pretend that systemd didn't just nearly introduce a FTW-level security event across every major linux distribution due to its careless ability to do entirely too much for something which should simply be starting and stopping services?

And we should listen to him, why?

His ideas are fine, but the implementation... good god. There was nothing wrong with what we had before, and now everything is markedly more complex with little to no benefit.

My grandfather had a CoCo. Whenever I visited (which was fairly often as my grandparents were less than an hour away at the time), I worked through the tutorials in Getting Started with Color BASIC . Eventually, I got a TI-99/4A at home, and then an Apple IIe. All of those put me on the path to where I am today, 40+ years later.

I'm a Kaiser member, and there is way too much JavaScript and unnecessary layers in their crazy site. Many simple browser and HTML widget actions simply don't work because an intermediate JS layer re-translates keyboard and mouse actions to something internal, it appears. They are reinventing a browser in a browser.

And it's slow to render, with stuff bouncing around as various panels incrementally load and change the layout and flow. Thus, you often click on the wrong thing if you don't wait at least about 5 seconds.

Kaiser's IT team needs to go to KISS Bootcamp. Or stop renting outsourcers who throw layers at a problem instead of do it right.

Maybe there's a limit to data back-up systems we haven't hit yet.