I guess it's my turn to do remedial science for the resident conservatives.
The carbon in the CO2 that you or I breathe out comes from the food we eat. That carbon is balanced by the CO2 that was removed from the atmosphere when this food was grown or raised, probably within the last year or so. When plants grow, where do you think the carbon comes from? It's not the soil - it's from CO2 drawn out of the atmosphere. Now, when we burn fossil fuels like coal or oil, that carbon had been buried for hundreds of millions of years. Or, if you're a conservative, maybe 6,000 years when God put it there. Either way, that means that when you burn it, it's not offset by CO2 that was removed from the atmosphere any time recently. So, CO2 levels rise.
Sorry if I have to talk to you like you're babies, but maybe if you'd get your heads out of the butts of Fox News and the like I wouldn't have to.

Is there a place in our solar system that's more hospitable to human life than Earth, now or in a thousand years? There's your problem right there.

I'll field this one. You could (a) sell it and get something you can do what you want with, or (b) forget about the hacking and learn to be happy with whatever Apple lets you do with what you've got.

The aesthetics and annoyances of ads are only part of the issue, and not even the most important. Ads are also vectors for information gathering and tracking across the web, which is why it is perfectly justifiable to cut them off at the ankles, right in your hosts file.

A PhD means you've been trained to do academic research, and mapping that skill set to non-academic environments can be problematical at best (especially in CS). While you might assume that someone who has earned a PhD is more able to do things like "reasonable design and architecture", many employers will assume the opposite: that you live in a world of abstract algorithmics, and the mundane skills involved in producing real software are beneath you. Both assumptions are equally bogus.

Of course I read this entire diatribe in Matt Damon's voice from Good Will Hunting...

This hits the nail right on the head. Unfortunately, it's the corporate marketers that dictate what's cool, and home-built high-performance machines with clean installs of non-proprietary operating systems and zero crapware/malware ain't it.

I wonder how much of these improvements in accuracy are due to fundamental advances, vs. the capacity of available hardware to implement larger models and (especially?) the availability of vastly larger and better training sets...

Aaaaaaaand... we've come full-circle. Look how much more productive you can be with this amazing new thing!

I didn't know that Apple made pacemakers...

My thought exactly. You're looking at the official suspect list when our digital armageddon finally comes...

There will always be plenty of this whenever an open source threat emerges to somebody's billion-dollar monopoly, and most people will buy into it without questioning where the memes are coming from.

I've also had a couple of biking accidents where my helmet didn't play a role, but if you get thrown from your bike it's not hard to see that your head is extremely vulnerable. My GF works with traumatic brain injury patients at a local hospital, and words can hardly describe how devastating these injuries can be, or how instantly your life can change forever. So other people can do what they want, but I'm not going out biking without the helmet. It takes all of 5 seconds.

This is the USA. You might surprised how many people who share you opinion end up suing just because it's the only way to pay for the medical care and rehabilitation that they need. I've also seen many cases of insurance companies screwing over TBI (traumatic brain injury) patients, just because they think they can get away with it.

Then honor the DNT flag for those that choose to use it. Unless we're using some double-speak definition of "impose" here, that is...