I am employed in a full-on MS shop, where our laptop environments are pretty locked down. So I am subject to all of the Microsoft nonsense. Like effing paint.exe is also begging you to activate Co-pilot. Like every-single-time-I-open-the-application. And as others have noted, the very reason that the bare-bones applications are useful is because they only have limited options. No need to navigate through multiple menu options, etc.

I use Paint for notations on quick screen grabs that I am using to tell someone something. Like a big red arrow pointing to the wrong code/database, whatever. For the people recommending other tools for text like Notepad++, most of us users of Notepad do have and use other editors. Those are useful and powerful for many things...like I'm not opening up a 100MB text file in Notepad. All the extra stuff they plop on these basic applications is not making them more useful, quite the opposite

Same thing with the major search engines pushing hard...like desperately hard...their AI-enhanced answers. If you search on "How to change a lightbulb" now you have to scroll through the AI slop, the Videos that are increasingly AI slop, now the Sponsored ads, now the Shopping options, and then eventually if you are lucky and still on page 1 maybe a website that tells you what you want to know.

These firms have been sold on the idea that all applications....all of them, will be replaced by one AI. It's like the grand unified theory of end-user computing. I dunno at this stage its totally crap though.

1. Reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses going into the evironment today.
2. Encourage reductions in birthrates. aka globably free Nexalplon and financial incentives to have fewer children
âoe1980â(TM)s population with 21st century technologyâ
That would be a very pleasant world to inhabit.

3. As described above, implement schemes using cleaner energy aka solar, wind, geo, nuclear if they can make it happen. The environmentalists need to get on board as there are tradeoffs â¦cover big swaths of land in panels changes local area, but we stiil
need it

In NVDA....

From the 2022 Slashdot article

"NVIDIA is proud of its role in the first commercially available smart tractor (which began rolling off the production line Thursday). Monarch Tractor's MK-V "combines electrification, automation, and data analysis to help farmers reduce their carbon footprint, improve field safety, streamline farming operations, and increase their bottom lines," according to NVIDIA's blog.

NVIDIA's been touting the ability to accelerate machine learning applications with its low-power Jetson boards (each with a system on a chip integrating an ARM-architecture CPU) , and they write that the new tractor "cuts energy costs and diesel emissions, while also helping reduce harmful herbicides, which are expensive and deplete the soil." "

Watching Ken Burn's The American Revolution series. Typically high quality documentary...his format never gets old for me.

One of the themes that struck home was around how the 'Founding Fathers' recognized a particular requirement as they began inventing this bottom-up government, where the mass of citizens wielded the power versus a king, military, or other un-elected ruler.

[paraphrasing] " A Republican democracy underscores the need for a populace that is educated and engaged to uphold the principles of self-governance and rule of law. "

Being educated as a virtue, as an aspiration, even a patriotic duty seems quaint in 2025. And being meaningfully politically engaged has been replaced by social media "engagement".

What if I take Tylenol after my vaccine to soothe the pain? Is that ok?

Also maybe we should start working in earnest on learning the science behind dementia. Seems like there is a cluster in the Washington DC area.

Thereâ(TM)s already precedentâ¦for a small investment of several
million dollars you get a billion or more

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

Generally I am aligned with EFF but what I wish they or similar orgs would have done is not relied on the 'abstinence' model of digital surveillance,

  "Sure digital cameras are going to be cheap and ubiquitous. Storage the same. Wireless networking also, and probably image/pattern recognition. But don't use that stuff. " "Local governments, I know your constituents are screaming to decrease crime...but don't use that stuff, just good ol' walking the beat policing."

Rather it could have been the safe-sex model of "I know you are going to sue this stuff, here is a template for how to do it safely. Encrypted storage, access via official and transparent means. Auto destruction of data after fixed period, etc Emphasis on data quality and validation (fewer false positives)

If guidelines that that were socialized in advance with local govs, manufacturers, service providers, civil libertarians etc maybe we'd have more than hollow lawsuits. Maybe.

From the Same BoA Global Fund Manager Survey

"Average cash level dropped to 3.7% of holdings. Cash levels of 3.7% or lower has occurred 20 times since 2002 and on very occasion stocks fell and Treasuries out-performed for the following 1-3 months" Past performance, not a guarantee, etc etc

My takeaway is that it seems like everyone is saying the same thing. AI bubble. The CEO's of the firms involved, press, government, retail investors, now global fund investors. Yet investment managers still have to be deeply invested in this bubble to compete with the returns of the other managers...to get your fat Xmas bonus, etc.

Two cars racing to a finish live, but with a cliff soon after the line. Neither is slowing, indeed peddle to the metal, assuming the other guy will chicken out first and that they will be able to hit the brakes just in the nick of time to avoid going over the cliff.

Pretty sure both are going over

+1 here too. Frequent travelers, incl myself, won't even pretend to bother with 3rd party sites even if it it appears cheaper. For one, it's likely not cheaper with all the weird surcharges, etc. And two, as others have noted, once you've been screwed over by a missing or incorrect reservation for hotel, car, flight, that slight bargain is erased time 10

I would also add that the same applies when I am booking flights for relatives/friend who are infrequent travelers. I'm not going to risk Aunt Stacy's sanity on having to get a flight rebooked or whatever via a 3rd party intermediary while stranded in Atlanta Hartsfield. 100% not worth it,

I will say that back in the golden age of these travel apps, you could score some decent vacation packages flight, car, hotel for like 3-4 day extended weekend type things, but those type of actual deals disappeared long ago. : (

You are not alone. For giggles I went to Doordash to see what a Big Mac Value Meal would be delivered. There's a McDonalds less than 5 miles from my location.

"$18.92 total before taxes" and having not used Doordash I'm guessing there is an expectation on top of that. So maybe $24 for a Big Mac meal delivered...that's batsh-t crazy. But no doubt people do this, and those people are likely the ones who aren't in a great position to afford it. I dunno, it's hard to see stuff like this...like paying to having some deliver cash to your house for a fee and not think that there is something off with certain generations.

Also who will sign up to be the cash delivery person? Almost every delivery van, FedEx, Amazon, UPS, USPS has a "No cash on board" so as not to get robbed. Cash delivery trucks are armored, have two guys with guns, etc. I would think some delivery dude rolling up in a used Prius will definitely be robbed. I doubt even this guy would take on that job: https://youtu.be/oGZLYx8StWk

Possibly a matter of catch-up. Telsa has the lead given that thusfar only Tesla has killed humans at highway speed.

The worst part is that this was a just a fake robot with a Russian guy inside.

In the US gas isn't $2.99 / gallon it is actually $2.99 and 9/10s of a cent per gallon.

Can we get rid of this 100 year old artifact too?
          (and I'm not just talking about the president bazinga! )

Also worth mentioning that the target audience is also likely interested in enriching themselves for their efforts (as do most of us). The problem with China in this regard is that such people will be rightly suspicious that their intellectual property will be stolen or simply taken. Likewise any wealth you do get can be taken for any reason, yourself deported or imprisoned, etc etc.

You have a firm like NVDIA that currently has a market cap of $4.5 trillion. If it were a country and we compared GDP (this is an apples to dragonfruit comparison, I know ) NVDIA would be 4th on the list after USA, China, and Germany and ahead of Japan

  United States 29.1T
  China 18.7T
  Germany 4.6T
  Japan 4.0 T

Why can't...why shouldn't a firm like NVDIA, MSFT, ORCL, FB, AAPL etc build out their own capacity? For this one project they could by 5000+ solar panels, some acreage in gods country, all the battery packs they need, and tweak the software to run during the optimal times. Do it all in-house for relatively cheap.

Here's what I think pisses people off....they don't do this, rather these firms make false promises about nuclear but then squeeze their way into existing generation and transmission, raising prices for residential customers. In essence arbitraging. "Hey, we can spend XX billion on our own generating capacity, or we can take from existing capacity + transmission, raising rates for everyone and ourselves, but it will be a few billion cheaper than building out our own generating capacity." They have trillions but are still sticking it to society so the SVP of blah blah blah can make his quarterly numbers

It also speaks to how truly invested in this AI race they are. Which is to say not as much as they advertise since they are only putting a fraction of their sizable cash towards renting AI 'stuff'

About the only good thing that may come of this is that the extra capacity and transmission will be available for EV's and residential electrification (away from nat gas) when the AI bubble deflates. Not sure what to do with all the GPU's, maybe artificial coral reefs? Grind into silicon dust and make more solar panels?