Yes eventually we will be like the great hymenopterans with a single ruling creature and millions of mindless drones to feed it.

It's not about making them better, it's about making them cheaper. I don't think they can make money on a mass-market device with everyone and their grandma asking this thing dumb questions constantly. Think Alexa but every API call costs $1.50 in compute to run. It needs to be cheaper to get that kind of market segment cornered.

So what exactly makes these unhealthy? I consistently get voted down whenever I question this, but just because it's "ultraprocessed" doesn't make it unhealthy. If one person eats a homemade cupcake every day, and the other eats a Hostess Refined Palm Oil Dessert, is the Hostess one more unhealthy because it's "ultraprocessed"? If you control for calories and portion sizes, I doubt it.

No, the real problem lies in people eating shitty food that is convenient and tastes good. Perfectly rational thing to do in the short-term, which makes it a difficult behavior to change. So instead we have regressed to this "harm reduction" mode: Can't fix the problem, so let's invent another made-up bugaboo to fuel our two minutes hate and distract us from looking in the mirror. In this case, we blame the food--it must be poisoned by big corporations!--instead of blaming the person making bad lifestyle choices.

I'm not sure what the goal is here* but what result do they expect? Do they want Bimbo Bakeries to stop putting so much sugar in the bread? Or maybe McDonald's will stop salting their fries? Or maybe just put warning labels on everything with too much salt or saturated fat or sugar like they did in Canada. I'm sure none of those will help. We live in unprecedented times where we can eat like this, might as well enjoy it. Pass the Ozempic.

*I lied--I know the goal is for the lawyers involved to make boatloads of money at the taxpayers' expense.

Hey, howbout let's reclassify that Waymo robot as a food processor and handle two stupid things at the same time.

Sure, I get that, but iPad? Laptop? PC?

Is your phone the thing you're going to be doing it on? And if it is, I guess it's nice that they're making $2500 morning news devices, but it still seems a bit crazy for the price.

He also questioned the accuracy of First Street's data, saying he didn't think that areas which haven't flooded in the last 40 to 50 years were likely to flood in the next five.

What he really means is "there are a lot of doomed properties we can make one more commission on."

If I'm being uncharitable, he can of course make me a fool by insuring buyers' flood risks for 5 years.

Nice one, it really helps when the characters are tedious and uninteresting too.

I like a nice big screen as much as anyone, but after years and years of owning an iPad I'm using it less and less. And I honestly can't figure out why you'd want to tote around something that big all the time. Flights, I guess? A lot of traveling? I don't begrudge anyone buying one if they want it or they actually do have a day to day use for it, but I want my phone to get SMALLER.

The only folding phone I'll consider is the flip style, to reduce the carrying size. That would be handy to me, even if the folded dimensions are much thicker than my current phone. It'll still fit in a lot more pockets than the current form factor.

So... what is the purpose of the beeping alerts, then, if there is no danger to which you need to alert humans?

Just remove the beepers entirely.

No surprise that a nation that outsources gaslighting itself and cares more about making sure people don't think about its compromised phone system than fixing it isn't going to give a shit about who gets to share its surveillance product when the targets are just the little people.

Eventually someone will use Flock to assist with a high-profile heist of some sort, at which point it will become a problem.

I am really enjoying this story.

Waiting for the young one to pop an ollie off one of the pews.

But how else does your TV get firmware updates that change things in subtle ways to the annoyance of its users?

Maybe they can start broadcasting their content with a red tint and make you use those special decoder glasses to watch it.

Good idea, but you'd also need a pretty robust safety verification mechanism, showing that the vehicles are indeed in an area where they can turn safety features off, with no humans accidentally in the area.

Yes, the enshittification continues as they remove more features from lower tier plans.

If they're talking about the Google Cast protocol, it's just a remote control for your TV, not even screen mirroring... so the only reason to remove such a trivial feature is to force you to pay for it at a higher tier plan.

What else is new.