How does Microsoft get by with Windows 11 in Europe? The entire OS is infested with data aggregation by default, and even if you try to escape the defaults, it will continually nag you to allow them to gather your data and sells it as a "security feature." I'd think some regulators would be getting mighty pissy about that nonsense if they understood what it was actually doing.

The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

The better strategy, IMO, is to keep your money safe and wait for the bubble to burst, then pile in for the recovery. Where to keep money safe is a good question, though. Just holding cash might be risky if inflation comes back, and the current administration seems anxious to pump up inflation.

There's a pair of seriously bad assumptions underlying your analysis:

(1) What AI does right now is all it's going to do. Given the way capabilites have grown recently, this is a ludicrous assumption. Keep in mind that ChatGPT was launched November 30, 2022... it's less than three years old! And the reasoning models are barely a year old. There is no reason whatsoever to assume that this technology has peaked.

(2) We already know how to take full advantage of AI. Every time a new technology comes along it takes decades for us to fully understand how to effectively use it, and to deploy it everywhere it is useful. I'd say we still haven't fully incorporated the Internet into our society, and we've been working on that for over 30 years now. We're barely beginning to understand how to use what AI we've already got, and it'll take years, if not decades, for the full economic benefits to be achieved -- and in the meantime AI is probably going to continue improving.

The AI thing absolutely is a bubble, but it's not "sand-castle based or vapor based". It's very real. The problem is that the massive wave of investment is going to have to start generating returns within the next 3-4 years or else the financial deals that underpin it all will collapse. That doesn't mean the technology will disappear, it just means that the current investors will lose their shirts, other people will scoop up their assets at firesale prices, and those people will figure out how to deploy it effectively, and create trillions in economic value.

Well, assuming AI doesn't just kill us all.

How long before they remove the option to disable it?

Microsoft logic: Not enough people are using this feature we want used. Remove the ability to disable it.

It's like the railroads. Enormous fortunes were made and then lost as the railroad boom played out and then the bubble burst. When people were driving hard to push rails across the continental US, the business case for doing so wasn't there. Yes, linking the east and west coasts had some value, but not much, since there really wasn't that much on the west coast. And there was a whole lot of nothing in between. But it was obvious to everyone that when the railroads connected the coasts and opened access to the interior, there would be enormous value. What exactly, no one knew, in the sense that no one knew where all of the railroad-enabled interior cities would be constructed or what kinds of things they would do. But it was clear that there was value in access to all of that land and that someone would do something with it.

On the other hand, realizing that value didn't happen right away. It took decades for all of the land granted to the railroads to become really valuable, because it wasn't valuable until people came and built farms, dug mines, established ranches and generally built lives and industry. The return on that massive investment was there... but it came far too late for most of the people that invested it. Lots of bankruptcies resulted, and others swooped in and snapped up the resources for bargain-basement prices, and they're the ones who became incredibly wealthy (well, they and the ones who supplied the steel, e.g. Carnegie).

It's been the same with pretty much every technology-driven bubble. Remember telecom/dot-com bubble in the 90s, with all of the "dark fiber" that was laid everywhere? Bankruptcies and consolidations resulted, and all of that fiber got lit up and used. That bubble built the Internet, and huge fortunes were made as a result -- the top half-dozen most valuable companies on the planet are all a direct result.

OpenAI and Anthropic are betting that this time will be different, that the payoff will come fast enough to pay back the investment. Google is betting this somewhat, too, but Google has scale, diversity and resources to weather the bust -- and might be well-positioned to snap up the depreciated investments made by others. If history is any guide, OpenAI and Anthropic are wrong. But, then again, AI is fundamentally different from every other technology we've created.

Like most racists, your critical thinking skills (assuming you have them) are shoved aside by overwhelming confirmation bias. Otherwise, you'd have noticed that the US was also a lot whiter before the Pendleton Act, and that the post-Pendleton boom continued and even accelerated after the Civil Rights acts and a large influx of non-white immigrants. We became the world's sole superpower and continued increasing our economic, political and cultural dominance as a diverse, melting-pot society. The rise of China as an economic power (oh, wait... how is that, they're not white, how can they possibly do well?) has flummoxed us somewhat, but even with Trump beginning to throw away the apolitical civil service, our international partnerships and, well, the rule of law as a whole, we're still on top. But the decline is beginning, and it's not the brown-skinned immigrants who are taking us down, it's the white nationalist administration.

If you could discard your biases and examine the situation objectively and critically, you would notice that the timeline you're referring to completely and utterly refutes the conclusion that you're trying to draw.

The "achievement" is creating IPO bait. Pretty sure that's all this announcement is about.

Somebody took a LOOOOOOOOOOOONG toke on the bong before writing that up.

Holy shit, man. Pick a dystopia. Don't go mixing them up. The last thing we need is Skynet watching the Hunger Games to get ideas on how to handle us.

The end goal may not be to gain human listeners. It's more likely that they want to flood the zone so that other AI / LLM systems are parsing their podcasts and summarizing them as reality for end-users. It'll be bots feeding bots. And pretty soon, we'll need another layer of bots hovering over the current level of bots to parse out the gobbledygook nonsense being created by and summarized by the underbots. We're going to turn the entire internet into a giant cauldron of LLM spew, LLM summaries feeding other LLMs who continue to spew, and still more LLMs summarizing that spew into more spew. And the expectation of the big tech companies is that they can provide us with an "agentic" OS that can filter all that spew into simple to understand human relatable . . . uhm, something something whatever.

The promise of the future is turning out just as shit as everything else we do. We really are the worst.

It's just an acceleration of what we were already doing to ourselves. Propaganda used to take effort. Now it can be automated and spewed out at such a prodigious rate that it'll be impossible to find anything of value in between all the chaff. And apparently we're too stupid as a species to stop and ask the valid questions now, so expect, if we're still around, in twenty years or so someone will go, "duh, uh, maybe we shouldn't a ought notta let dem machine dingies do all da tinkin' fer us?"

The real solution is for parents to actually parent. I understand the lure of the digital babysitter, but handing children an unlocked device with no web filter *AND* spending zero time helping them navigate what they may find is just plain shit parenting. I'm sorry if that hurts someone's feelings, but it's true. I totally understand that life moves fast, and it's hard when both parents work real jobs and still need to take care of the home to actually be a parent, but when you have children, you have to find ways to be a parent anyway. Stop eroding everyone's rights just because you refuse to spend time being a parent.

Google, at least in my state, is asking for "verification" that I'm allowed to use the internet as an adult. It asks that I upload a state issued picture ID, a selfie to verify it's me, and a credit card to further verify. We're seriously one step removed from "give us you DOB, social security number, and all valid financial information to proceed."

Thus far I've refused to do it. On the bright side, I see a lot less political bullshit in my youtube feed now.

Many, many PC games can be played with a controller connected to the PC's USB port. Support for HID protocol and XInput protocol is widespread.

Gaming exclusively on modern consoles on grounds that games for Linux or Windows are presumed malware means you'll probably get indie games years late or never. This is because it takes time for an indie developer to build enough of a reputation in the industry to become eligible to buy a devkit for a modern console.

Unless by consoles, you mean things like the NES and Genesis, which are still getting brand-new indie games decades after Nintendo and Sega stopped supporting them.