The UK just agreed a "deal" with the US where the cost of medication will rise by at least 25%. The cost of living crisis is not going away, it's getting worse.

Their model seems to be people who don't use a car enough to warrant owning one, but want the convenience of having access to one and are willing to pay a premium for it.

My latest pet peeve is when Siri violates basic privacy standards by compelling data collection that isn't necessary.

A couple of days ago, I asked it for a list of restaurants near a particular town where I would be in a couple of hours. Siri immediately told me I had to enable location services for that query. What? Why? My query didn't ask for a list of restaurants near me. I asked for a list of restaurants near a different town, and more to the point, I gave both the name of the town and the state.

I attempted probably half a dozen different variations of that query, including things like avoiding the word "near", and Siri failed in the same way every single time, so this isn't just a one-off glitch specific to how I worded the query. It's a general problem with the way Siri handles queries that involve location.

This violates the first rule of location services, which is do not ask for the user's location unless you actually need the user's location. If the user is asking for restaurants in Panama City, Florida, Siri does NOT need to know that the user is currently in Charleston, South Carolina. It's none of Siri's d**n business. And more to the point, if Siri actually tried to do literally anything with that location data, it would be pretty much guaranteed to reduce the quality of the results rather than increase it, so having the data is just an invitation for any AI that might be involved to do something utterly stupid.

You're not helping your case by quoting a quack like him. He's a pop sci author that specializes in junk science. Exactly the kind of guy that I would expect to do a lazy study pointing to cell phones bad.

Like I mentioned on other comments I'm still not at all convinced and correlation is not causation.

I keep coming back to the fact that these same studies have been done with every new form of media and they always find a correlation.

The problem isn't the New Media the problem is we don't support parents and kids enough so the parents plop their kids down with Penny dreadfuls or radio or TV or Internet and now cell phones and screens.

In another hundred years these same dumb studies will be done for cyberdecks.

So I'm aware that the abstract says that they controlled for socioeconomic factors I'm just dubious of that.

It's far more likely that kids spending a bunch of time on screens is a symptom of other problems.

That said on the off chance that the phones are a problem they are a miniscule problem compared to everything else kids are up against in 2025.

Taking your kid's phone away isn't going to magically make them get better grades or take up sports.

Even so I think it's far more likely that you're seeing the same basic problem across different economic groups. And because of that you could replace the phone with basically any form of media. Which is why you get the same little panic every time a new form of media comes out and the same group of social scientists running the same experiments blaming the New Media for causing the problems.

I'm not a huge fan of folk music but having listened to a little bit of it just because I'm a lefty and Lefty's tend to blare the stuff I can tell you that the same problems that we had a hundred years ago or more we're getting sung about in folk music back then and are getting sung about it and folk music today. We haven't solved any of the problems. And it's the same damn problems. The only thing new is obesity and that's just because we have reasonably reliable access to food for most people... Most people. There are still several million kids having sleep for dinner every night...

Right, what the free market wants to do is levelize our standard of living with our low-cost competitors, or import all the chips from them (with the security and supply risks that entails).

Simply shaming Intel for seeking government handouts does not solve our problem - how to maintain a domestic industry including internal competition rather than government choosing the winners and subsidizing incompetence.

It's entirely possible even likely that what we are seeing here is just that latchkey kids are more likely to have smartphones at an early age.

The problem isn't the phone itself it's overworked parents with low pay and no social support.

The abstract at least says that the account for socioeconomic factors but I'm not able to read the actual study past the abstract.

Also I guarantee that these exact same studies can be found for television, the internet and if you go back far enough you can find the 18th century equivalent of these studies for Penny dreadfuls.

Every time a new form of mass media or a new device for mass media shows up you can bet somebody is going to find a correlation between everything bad and if. Meanwhile we never actually do anything about things like child hunger or forcing kids to get up early to go to school when we have plenty of studies indicating the teenagers need more sleep and it needs to be later in the morning...

You know whether people should or not they do. I've more than once come across somebody using Excel like a database application. It's exactly as bad of an idea as it sounds but people do it and for the most part despite time spent debugging problems it does work.

I guess what I am saying is the answer to, there isn't a tool that can do what the customer wants to do, should not be, tell the customer to knock it the fuck off.

Antitrust is mostly how Microsoft stays in power but they do one thing. It's called the 80/20 rule and the idea is that 80% of your features are used by 20% of your customers but it's a different feature for every single customer. So you can't just take features out because you will rapidly start losing customers even though on paper very few customers are using those features. Basically when you have a sufficiently complex application it has a ton of features only used by a small group of people but you keep adding those groups up and suddenly you've got market dominance.

Before the industry consolidated that was part of what put Microsoft on top. Of course nowadays they just don't let anyone compete

Headline is they refuse to give up Instagram reality is that they refused to gag order.

I just got a article in my feed that the lead actress for the Asoka series at Disney refused to do another season because she wasn't paid enough.

The actual facts are that season 2 filming is already done and one of the other less important characters didn't come back because they didn't offer her enough money to afford to live in London where the shooting was.

I'm so sick of clickbait. Lately it's being written by shitty AI so it's gotten even worse.

But your AI can hide all your bigotry behind a cloud! Then you can have it imagine excuses as to why a certain group is picked on by the system. Don't even need to make up lies for it anymore. Even if you are guilty from some bug leaking out proof, just donate to Trump. problem solved.

And you've done nothing to explain what the use case is. As far as I can tell, the use case is "Someone who wants to use their phone to control the TV instead of the TV remote," which is a tremendous amount of technological overhead for such a negligible benefit.

It's way easier to point your camera at the screen and do an instant sign-in on the TV than it is to get your phone connected to the right Wi-Fi network and cast to the right TV, so the use case would have to be pretty compelling to make up for what a pain in the a** it is when it works, much less when it doesn't.

Major correction here: about something that I have tried to use on many, many occasions, but never used successfully. There's a difference.

You won't read or engage further because you don't actually know any compelling reason to use it. If you did, you would have said what that reason was by now.

Not really, no. If I wanted to use the TV to do all of the networking and playback, I would have just used the TV's app to do it. The number of hotels I've seen where the TV supported Chromecast or AirPlay streaming but did not have a built-in Netflix app are literally zero.

From my perspective, casting is a complete disaster by its very nature. It relies on the display device having full Internet access, which isn't a given. Literally every time I've wanted to do casting, it has been because the TV set's Netflix app wasn't working because of a network problem, and it couldn't get access to the Internet, so I was trying to use the phone's network connection. By shifting the network connectivity back to the TV set, it makes the entire system completely worthless, because the exact situations where it could be useful are the exact situations where it isn't.

I think their initial idea to use human brains to run aspects of AI was far smarter and more realistic than their quick jump to human batteries!
Sometimes the audience doesn't need to all understand the whole story; we try too hard to appease the lowest common denominator. It was such a stupid brushed over explanation, that I just assumed it was metaphorical rather than be too annoyed they didn't try harder and just confuse half the viewers instead of BS something that was actually confusing to most everybody outside of metaphors or the usual unimportant filler that really could just be skipped.
You don't need to know WHY Luke and Leia were siblings, WHY the politics created the conflict, WHY some people had magical powers, etc. Those details were unnecessary and their later detailing was not interesting so a lot of entertainment had to be invented around a dull cameo like appearance which hitched the new money maker to the old success. Now they seem to make even less effort to hitch it together; which is fine because cosplay is enough for most people. I frankly would like a good well made story and don't care what theming is used as long as it doesn't detract from either one... which often it does hack away from the source those hack "artists" depend upon. This is why I see AI as a threat to their livelihood.

I'm not a US lawyer, but I'd interpret that as they need to block commercial VPN services advertised for circumventing blocks.

And then having people check it. The result is every single update can randomly break shit that doesn't get caught.

Having people check the AI code at slop doesn't really work because the entire point of AI coding is to do it fast and cheap so there's going to be enormous pressure to do as little checking as possible.

Not that it matters. Microsoft has a monopoly. Any viable competitor will simply get taken out by well-known and well understood anti-competitive tactics. And because we refuse to enforce those laws because we refuse to vote for politicians who will enforce those laws Microsoft can basically do whatever they want. With the occasional bribe to some of the larger governments that might try to regulate them.

I think Europe is actually trying to quit the habit but I don't think they will be able to. I can tell you right now that there is no alternative for Microsoft Excel when you're doing large complex spreadsheets. Open offices nice but it just doesn't cut it. Some of that's because of shitty little patents Microsoft has but the system is designed to let them keep generating new patents that make it difficult to compete. And some of it is just that it's rough going writing office software so it's tough to compete with someone who can pay people to do that kind of boring dreary work.

And of course you have the aforementioned anti-competitive tactics that work like a charm.

I'm not even going to say we need to decide what's more important, software freedom or whatever bullshit that makes us vote for pro corporate anti-capitalist political candidates (and mark my words pro corporate is just as anti-capitalist as any socialist or communist just in a different direction)

It doesn't matter what the reasons are the end result is we don't enforce laws.