People are only annoyed because this is Apple.

If a clothing brand like Ann Taylor made an ugly $250 phone purse nobody here would bat an eye.

This particular thing has only been pushed recently, but various different visions of "interactive TV" has been a Thing for a very long time.

People were talking about it back in the 50s, probably earlier. But the earliest deployment in the US of something plausibly called interactive TV was Qube in 1977.

There's a parallel universe in which the US ended up with a cable-TV-based version of Minitel.

There are multiple reasons, but I think the biggest is that a different interactive screen ate TV's lunch.

The phone is superior in most ways, from the perspective of the pushers - usually maps to a single person, always with them, location trackable, etc. About the only advantage of the TV is being a big screen, but that doesn't seem to matter for much.

Another big one is there's no central player to lay the rails and the big players have competing interests. But I really think the deciding factor is just that the money folks don't see a need for a QVC "buy now" button.

It is always DNS.

Mainly because I started doing this in 1997 and managing /etc/aliases myself works just fine.

Because what use do you have for cash at home?

Drug delivery is the most obvious. I remember a couple of times I was preparing to head to the airport, needed cash, and might well have used something like this.

And even if you are going out, how often do you actually need cash?

I regularly use cash. "Need" doesn't have anything to do with it, I just prefer the simplicity.

I self-host email, and after spending weeks dealing with a very persistent asshole trying to break in to my systems, was looking at options a while back. (I still self host email.)

Proton was the first one I looked at, but they charge per-email address, including aliases, which is a blocker for me. (I use unique email addresses for each service I use, and more for other things.)

But this is even worse. I would never use a service that would start sending my email to someone else if I stop paying, that's insane.

There is no way Proton is anywhere close to namespace saturation. The big mail hosters have orders of magnitude more addresses behind single domains.

How is it different than other convenience-for-money transactions?

Paying people to bring you toilet paper or soft drinks is pretty uncontroversial. What makes money different?

I'd also note that $2.99 is less than the ATM fee at the closest ATM to my house. I don't use Robinhood, but it would be $.51cheaper for me to have them bring me money than to go to the nearest ATM.

Sounds to me like he is trying to get ahead of some news with a compliant journalist.

I simply refuse to use an OS that leans so hard on trying to modify my behavior. It would be like living in a house that constantly tried to control what toilet paper I used or if my fridge started "awarding" me "points" based on what I eat.

Fuck every last bit of that.

This lines up with school disruptions.

I'm sure that's not the only contributing factor, but I'm also pretty sure you don't upend kids' lives (don't forget the impact on parents - lots of people lost jobs, which also disrupts kids schooling) across multiple years without disrupting their math training.

Oh, also, the shitbag trolls here are funny. Now that they can't pretend the white kids aren't pig-ignorant, this is suddenly all about testing.

This is a very specific form of writing. It is kind of, but not quite journalism, not quite fictionalization, and not just an attempt to influence other market participants.

The author is trying to tell the story within the form - A Titan of Finance is making a Bold Bet with big implications for the little peoples' 401Ks!

Various folks with input to the story all have their own angle and want to steer it to their advantage. Everyone outside the story who is paying attention can see the bubble, but have the same problem Burry has - the old cliche about the market staying irrational longer than you can stay solvent still applies.

So little investors have skin in the game but very little range of motion other than getting out of the market. Big players are betting against bubble blowers, which means they need their story to "win" on a timeline that doesn't lose them a ton of money. Meanwhile OAI, NVidia and similar grifters are sucking Tubby's stump in hopes of a bailout.

It is all high drama, with lots of players trying to influence the story. Think of it as multiparty participatory propaganda trying to steer things, with the eventual outcome determining how many Grandmas have to switch to dog food for dinner.

That's just fair use, right? Then the robots puke video back out on demand, fantasy sportball people can make their teams win, or folks can have their team fuck or steal from target or whatever people do with LLMs when they aren't building scams and throwaway code. And nobody will have to care about Google or Disney's goofy little money war.

There, I fixed it.

Yeah, that happened too, and also helped push me away from new music. But I think I was on a declining-interest path already.

Bandcamp is also still good for buying MP3s. Of the small amount of music I've purchased over the last decade, most of it has been from there.

A designer lock-in-a-sock.