I get that global warming is an issue. I get that it should be addressed, but these alarmist things where global warming is basically the root of all evil don't really help the cause. I swear we're not far from "Yo - global warming gonna make yo dick fall off.".

A lot of older hardware that people may still be watching on doesn't support AV1 decoding. Only very recent gen video cards support AV1 encoding.

Also realistically its just not THAT much better IMHO. H265 is a significant step above H264. AV1 vs H265 though just isn't as extreme (quick google searching says that H265 offers a 50% reduction in filesize versus an equivalent quality H264, whilst AV1 typically only results in a 12% reduction in size vs H265).

Personally for my Jellyfin library where I archive my media, I encode everything to H265. My video card on that machine does support AV1 encoding but the slower encoding just isn't worth the minimal size reduction.

I have to agree with you there. So long as they're expecting the human to take control "if needed", these systems will be impractical. I can accept that they might not be 100% accurate all the time and accidents, even fatal ones, are inevitable. The incidence of them just needs to be less than that of a human drivers to be acceptable. If they can't drive autonomously without human input though then to me its pointless.

I'll buy one when they get to a point where they don't even have manual controls anymore.

Based on your use of "queue" I'm guessing you're British, so the experience may be a bit different over there, but here in the US virtually everyone does pay at the pump for gas. You just pull up, swipe your card, pump, then drive off.

People generally don't want to see ANYTHING in the theater - if the problem was lack of quality streaming services would be dying too. They're not. Most people just wait to stream the movies at home rather than to go to a theater.

Home screens have consistently gotten bigger and bigger. Almost everybody has at least a 65" screen at home now and if you really want it you can get 85" TV's for less than $1k and 98" TV's for about $1.5k. That's not cheap but its also well within the "I like movies as a hobby" bugdet.

Home surround sound systems have also gotten better. In general many people just prefer the experience of watching at home. Not everyone mind you, but its gotten to the tipping point (or will very soon) where the people who prefer the theater just aren't enough to make it profitable. Mind you its not MOVIES that aren't profitable - its just the theatrical release component of them.

Sort of. Availability certainly needs to be there, but charging speed is the major hold up. I know improvements have been made but you're still looking at 30 minutes or so to get a useable charge on an EV. A gas vehicle can go from empty to full in about 3 minutes.

That's not only a matter of convenience for the consumer, but also each pump has a faster turnover time before its ready to serve another customer (eg in 30 minutes an electrical charger can serve 1 customer whereas a gas pump can serve about 10).

They really need to get those recharge times down to around 8 to 10 minutes.

You are aware that's what businesses are for right?

I swear I'm shocked that not only was Napster still around, but somehow was still worth $200+ million. They haven't been relevant for like 20 years.

No lie. To repost a comment I saw on this when I saw it a few days ago:

"China openly announces a technology that every world power (including themselves) has had for years now but wasn't stupid enough to admit to having."

The Battlemage is a pretty impressive and promising card, but most benchmark sites are putting it about on par with the 6600. More VRAM on the Battlemage which is nice but speed wise about the same.

I've got a 6600 XT and will either do a 700 series Battlemage if they come out or a 9070 XT, but I'm in now big hurry to upgrade.

Maybe there's some of them that are still installs but I haven't used a tax prep software in 15+ years that wasn't web based.

Turbo Tax, Tax Act, Tax Slayer, etc are all web based now.

I'm not some Linux on the desktop evangelist, but realistically if the hardware is artificially being locked out of running Windows 11 and their purpose is to recycle PC's then switching to Linux is obvious.

And honestly in today's world if you're not gaming its not really a big deal. Most stuff that the average user does is web based anyways. Chromebooks have proven that many people just need a working web browser.

That's what I've found AI code to be good for. Established API for a project? Give me a function that does XYZ. Or something simple like "Give me a PHP function that connects to an FTP site, uploads a file (with the name given as a parameter to the function), retries 5 times in case of failure, then returns a boolean if transfer was sucessful".

I kind of view it like using a calculator for math problems. I COULD do it by hand, but its just faster to use a tool. At the end of the day though that tool doesn't to much more than simple code snippets.

I can't exactly say "Give me a program that analyzes Virginia Tax law and then provides a bootstrap web UI to manage, calculate, and print all tax bills within a municipality.". That problem is complex enough that just describing it in enough descriptive language would end up with a prompt longer than a novel, which would still produce code that was likely HEAVILY buggy and would require more verification than its worth.

Their job is to make money to hopefully prevent their demise, not cushion the blow to the customers if they do go out of business.

Releasing new products is a way to hopefully make that money.

I'm in SC. It very rarely snows here so there is no salt on the roads so car bodies rarely rust out. For annual testing - there is none. We did away with our annual inspections 30 years ago.

These days as long as it run and you have a title you're good to go.