Absolutely not. The YouTube customers are the people buying ads on the platform.

YouTube is fleecing them by raising the number of ads they can bill them for, even though they're force-showing them to visitors who have very clearly expressed that they don't want ads and are more likely to hold the ads against the customers who paid for them than see them as an incentive to buy or as a positive brand-image thing.

And that's exactly what YouTube is doing.

YT is dying. Slowly, and it'll be around for years, but it's dying. The algorithm is starting to fail in very obvious ways, like recommending you the same videos constantly, despite you've scrolled past them a hundred times before. The content has become thinly veiled advertisement in addition to the actual advertisement they shove down your throat in increasingly aggressive manner. Most of the large content creators don't make much money anymore on YouTube and would probably jump ship the moment a competitor with a comparative audience size appears.

They're desperately trying to keep the cash cow alive somehow. And when you run out of ideas to innovate and make a good product, you start to ask yourself how you can fleece your customers for more.

It's true that there is the assumption that technology and innovation will reduce interstellar travel times drastically, the way they have reduce travel across an ocean from many weeks to a few hours.

I do agree that most people probably are off by at least two orders of magnitude in estimating realistic interstellar travel times. With technology we can predict as probably going to happen, we're still on the order of hundreds of years to even nearby star systems.

Unless some magical technology breaks the light-speed barrier, space will not be "another ocean".

However, star-faring civilisations are still possible. They wouldn't be any kind of space kingdom, but independent star systems that just happen to have a common ancestry. They would certainly communicate, and the technology for that basically exists already, at least in the nearby area ( And if we can only travel to a few of the nearest stars, would we want to? Is there anything there we want?

Humans do a lot of things simply because we can. And what is vast resources today isn't so much tomorrow. Just 200 years ago, all the gold in the world wouldn't have enabled you to fly to another country for a quick visit to relatives. King, pope, peasant, no difference, simply wasn't possible. Today, anyone with an average income can do it.

So in another 200 years, who's to say that a space ship to a nearby solar system is not well within the budget of a wealthy nation?

Cinemas essentially killed themselves in the early 2000s, at least over here in Europe. There used to be local cinemas everywhere, with one or at most 2 main halls and 2-4 small ones. The main hall or halls showed the Hollywood blockbuster of the month and the smaller ones the other movies, the ones that didn't fill the main hall.

Then all of those local cinemas started disappearing and were replaced with the massive cinemas we have today, with 10+ main halls and no small ones (or "small" ones the size that the main hall of local cinemas used to be). I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've been there where these massive halls were filled to even somewhat near capacity. Most of the time you can pick wherever because there's 2-4 people per row. Make it 10% full if you want to be generous.

Of course that's not viable. They thought economy of scale. They thought they can have more efficiency than the local places by having fewer cashiers and popcorn sellers per customer. They thought on paper and not in the real world.

And to have even a chance to fill those halls, the only movies that they could show were blockbusters.

spot on

I can recommend to everyone to have at least one non-geek good friend. I'll reset your understanding of how "easy" tech actually is.

Or a photo from 30 years ago that looks nothing like them today, but if asked they can truthfully say that yes, it's a photo of them.

I think Apple doesn't understand what it had with the big iMac.

I still have my 2017 one around. When it came out, it was revolutionary. A full 5K display with a reasonable CPU and GPU at a very reasonable price. Built-in webcam and speakers. The only necessary cable was power (if you went bluetooth keyboard and mouse). A wonderfully uncluttered desktop with a mean machine that also looks nice.

Why would I make many steps back from that?

I've done the math last year. I also thought Mac mini + Studio Display (it's not that much more expensive than a good 4K display) would do it, but it turns out that once you upgrade the Mac mini to something actually useable for desktop work, you're not that far from a Studio price-wise.

I really, really, really wish someone took a big fence post and hammered some sense into the idiots at Apple.

They have. I've seen such in several different offices.

So finally a new 27" or even 30" iMac with an M4 chip?

Come on Apple, wake up. People want an affordable desktop machine, not $4k+ for a Studio+Display combo.

Reducing something to just over 1 % of its original planned size isn't "scaling down". That's an euphemism for "giving up, just finishing the stuff we've already largely built".

Converted to your typical house, it means instead of building the whole house you're building the tiny guest toilet and nothing else.

Wow! It seems to me that you feel very strongly about your thorough lack of understanding of this topic. Not only don't you understand it, but you also wish to force your beliefs on others.

Let's start by ignoring GM owned companies. They have never made any product worthy of purchase. They should be simply shut down.

Now, you make a great point. Now that NPCs are employing AI, they are rapidly improving. So much so that game makers will have to intentionally cripple them or human players will never be able to beat them. AI has tremendous advantages over humans that we can never hope to compare with.

The most important reason AI is superior to humans is collective learning. If there were a million fully self driving vehicles on the road, all data collected by every vehicle is used to train all vehicles. And it is forever, I of course had to start from scratch as a child, it took 49 years for me to know as little as I know. When I die, I may leave behind some legacy, but for the most part, what I've learned will die with me. AIs will never have that problem.

We're raising AIs from infancy now. We have different models for different purposes. Eventually, we'll have fewer models which should outperform humans in every area. And they will perpetually improve.

Self driving cars already drive better than I do. And I'm guessing from the high opinion of yourself that you've displayed thus far that you're like most people who seem to think they are good drivers and the AIs are either already better than you or soon will be.

And yes, there will be accidents. The cars will either encounter scenarios they weren't prepared for or no-win situations. And yes, we'll blame the cars. And yes we'll sue the companies. And yes, the entire fleet of FSD cars will learn from each others mistakes and experiences. And yes FSD cars will quickly become superior to human drivers in every way... and stay that way.

I have been a dick towards you in this post. You rubbed me the wrong way. I hope to ponder upon this experience and hope to learn from it. Maybe I'll ask myself whether there was value in my behavior or maybe I will teach myself to behave differently so next time either I won't let myself be rubbed that way or I'll behave better when I am. And all of that will be lost when I die. But AIs will simply continue to learn.

You read it wrong. Google is not announcing THE first custom Arm-based CPU. It's announcing ITS first custom Arm-based CPU.

The pressures of capitalism can also work to force good quality for the money spent on education. Not everything in capitalism is about the lowest price. I know that cheap-cheap-cheap has become a kind of mantra, but that's not god-given.

Not quite. The real acid test is whether, once you get to your destination, you can do a full workday without waiting six hours to recharge.

Conversely, my Mac's ~14-hour battery life means I've never left the house with the (bulky) power adapter unless I'm traveling overnight.

I dunno, macOS has a pretty extensive Accessibility control panel. Have you checked it out? There's a Text Size slider in there, among many other things.

There's also the Text Size slider under the Accessibility control panel.