For some things you don't even need ChatGPT. If you're having the flu, it would be really nice if you just call the doctor to get the prescription instead of having to pay a visit where the doctors says "Yeah here is the prescription, bye and come back if it doesn't get better". Sometimes you really don't need a long diagnosis.

What meds for the flu?

I mean, there is Tamiflu (sp?)...but that's really only effective if you catch it at the beginning.....but the best diagnosis is generally, treat the symptoms, plenty of fluids, rest and let it run its course...

Flu is viral....so NO ANTI-BIOTICS....no matter how much the patient bitches and asks for them....

Steve Lehto has a good video about this.

In Michigan the Lemon Law applies to problems that 'reduce the value to the consumer'.

Some people are attempting to return their cars over these popup ads. IIRC it was GM that was much more aggressive but I might have that detail wrong.

This pattern keeps re-emerging.

Online payment systems want your bank login details.

Facebook was infamous for scraping your IMAP account for contact information.

etc.

The implications for security are so severe I wouldn't mind if this were illegal, but certainly it should be legal for banks or cell providers to terminate online accounts of people who share their credentials, no matter if - or especially if - they are with other large corporations. How many times has T-Mobile been hacked in the past two years?

If an account holder wanted to download a data export and upload that to another provider I don't really care so much. It's the near mandatory sharing of credentials that is just such a terrible habit to normalize.

And yes, greybeards, we know you've never heard of apartment rental agencies only accepting Venmo for rent.

> So you can drive it but you cannot look at it?

Is there a difference between riding on a rocket and giving Russia the technical knowledge to build a thousand of them?

Personally I think Russia could figure it out if they wanted to but that's not why the rules are in place.

> Was he just being a rocket geek?

90% likely but the 10% difference is why there are rules that cannot be broken.

He signed up for obeying the rules, so it was a dumb move.

> "conserve energy! Ditch your tungsten! Go LED!" ... or the Planet will die in Hellfire!

( "you may be in a psyop when..." )

FWIW I replaced the warm white LED's in one quarter of my rooms with incandescents last week. Turns out current LED's contribute to diabetes.

It's been 20 years since I switched to CFL's and LED's and I was genuinely surprised how different (and really good) it feels to sit under a 200W incandescent.

The crazy thing is 20 years ago my lighting usage was over 2KW for my house whereas my entire house is now 1.4KW, typically, but the electricity bill has quadrupled while the usage fell in half so really it's an 8x.

Hence my investment in solar infrastructure. The society is collapsing in slow-mo; the AI datacenters are just exacerbating the problem of not being able to scale. They framed Nixon for impeachment over Project Independence, so this isn't an accident.

If this were a factory that needed huge amounts of water but there wasn't enough water for the factory the permit would simply be denied.

Notice how AI, datacenters, and electricity gets a special exception to the societal norms.

Partially it's the transhumanists who have a religious fervor in bringing about their AGI God, but part of it is just dumb bureaucrats who can't understand how anything, including Econ 101, works. Or they're just bribed, which happens to be a highly profitable technique.

In the USA car companies are bribing politicians to keep fuel economy standards low because they do not want to spend money on R&D. Meanwhile the Chinese car makers are designing dark factories that crank out electric cars that are better and less expensive than anything made in the USA. Ten years from now there are going to be Chinese factories in the USA cranking out amazing cars. And it is going to be a bloodbath for the companies that want to keep living in the past.

Those cheap Chinese EVs aren't going to do a damned bit of good for the at least 1/3+ of US citizens that have no way to charge at home.

Unless you live on one of the extremes coasts, there just is not sufficient public charging infrastructure......hence, there's not likely to be much more EV demand in the US than there is now for the most part.

People largely don't want them....the ones that do, have them already.

Sure, low cost will win a lot of people over, BUT that hits a brick wall when you can't charge the damned things at home and they don't fit within your lifestyle .....

As I said https://slashdot.org/comments....
AFAIC ruzzia can and needs to go to hell. I hire people, I won't hire a ruzzian, the world needs to get its act together and start using space without them.

They are a scourge, always were, always will be. The American scientists, that passed information to the USSR about nuclear weapon design and manufacturing were not just traitors, they made a gigantic mistake, they truly made the world a much worse place to live. Preferably the soviets and by extension the Chinese and then the Iraqies, Iranians, North Koreans and who knows who else should not have nukes, at least not immediately after the Americans designed and built them.

Americans are exceptionally good at delivering innovation, but they are also exceptionally naive about the rest of the world. All Americans, their scientists incorrectly believe in basic good human nature, their politicians incorrectly believe that others are just like them and want to do business. Ha! Business is the last thing on the minds of foreign despots. The first thing is to make sure their population are controllable so that nothing can dethrone them, this means the status quo must be maintained, business does not help to maintain status quo, on the contrary, it may provide extra resources to the population. Once the population has more resources than the absolute minimum and once the population does not depend on the State to provide this bare minimum, once the population can provide for itself it starts demanding change and this is unaaceptable. The change is a political demand, population must be dependent and ready to die for a few scraps off the table of the rulers, business interferes with this. Americans think putin or whatever other dictator wants to do business, what a stupid notion.

American people believe they can just keep to themselves, nothing concerns them about the rest of the world, they do not need to try and control the outcomes. They are the naive wealthy mark, walking carelessly through a foreign open market, there are enough eyes on their pockets and there is a guy with a knife in a dark alley waiting for them specifically. This is a metaphore. Americans need to build alliances with the Europeans, not break them, they need to understand that ruzzians are not friends or business partners. They also need to understand that global caliphate is a real thing, it is the goal and if Americans care about their way of life even a little, Israel and Ukraine are their lines of defence right now and must be supported as if the war was already in the USA, bevause it is.

Nah. Only a few Slashdotters and Redditors will notice or care.

Yeah, and when that bubble pops in a few months customers will look at them side-eyed.

We can't have those because they wanted to sell chicken meat to Germany after WWII.

No, really, Fat Electrician has a good video on it.

(our government is just a loony bin now)

Stability is relative. Compared to reinstalling Win9X so often I only recently forgot my most-used 98SE product key, Win2K was a breath of fresh air, especially for dual CPU rigs formerly afflicted with NT 4.0.

There may be a silver lining.

Desperation will ensure sales to the only customers (PC building enthusiasts) who will still care about traditional removable RAM.

Normals never install an OS, never open their computers, and never install internal hardware upgrades. People who do are "techno-divergent".

Apple demonstrates soldered RAM and storage are no barriers to consumer sales with zero need for a hobbyist market.

Ancient Slashdotters remember COAST (Cache On A STick) and why it went away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Today we have ROAST (RAM On A STick) which only exists for customers who cannot afford to max out RAM on computer purchase, there being no (conventional user to whom computers are magic) downside to max RAM.

Being able to buy a PC with a cheap spinning rust hard drive and the least offered amount of RAM then binning those and maxing out with aftermarket parts (mostly Crucial RAM in my and many others case) was great while it lasted but the vast majority of PCs go from womb to tomb without upgrades and will in future.