So, something like $3,490.99 to $3491.00?

I see that Apple's favourite fanboi got some mod points.

Yeah, that was basically it for me - that it was just about 2 guys and some underground "fight club" they formed - of course the title doesn't actually describe the story line, or do it justice.

When something is over-hyped commercially (as in the overabundance of ads for it), it's an immediate turn off for me - and this is no different.

I remember when Fight Club came out, it was so over-hyped I didn't even want to see if for years, because I thought it was only hyped because it was crap. Yes I was proven wrong, and think it's a great movie, but that didn't take away from the fact it was over-hyped.

Contrast that to, say, 6th Sense (same timeframe), for which word-of-mouth was somewhat insane, but justified, and I watched it as soon as it came out on video.

Indeed - people even paid the extra Apple tax/premium for it - of course they expected it to be for no ads, instead of ads being an extra perk. Silly comsumers!

I, personally (no knock against anyone else for feeling differently), don't respect him anymore than I did before, but I do acknowledge when politicians that I don't hold in high regard (for lack of less family-friendly terms to use) actually do the right thing, because I do respect that in someone, even if I don't respect anything else they've done or represent otherwise.

For example, I still don't think Mike Pence is a particularly good person in general (he jumped onto the Trump train, and was a willing participant to the GOP train wreck), but respectfully acknowledge and he did the right thing in not following through with Trump's plan to nullify the election results.

Hmm, yes, let's all believe the dying industry's own spin on things.

Correct.

Some would probably say it should be "enshittification", but I would argue that "enshittification" is the process of embarking into the process of making your service/experience crap for your users, and we're well past that part in the movie going 'experience', so "shitification" is correct here.

"brag" != "whine"

WTF here said that in this discussion. Provide citations.

Comparing apples to oranges.

Multi-billion$ AI companies scrape content, then repeatedly sell access to services that use that content at scale without compensation to the creators, without whose content those companies would have nothing to offer in the first place.

Quite different than some individual "stealing" a song for their own use (sure there's some level of deprivation of funding to the creator, but they're not making money off of it, and certainly not at scale).

No doubt Meta[stasize], Google, OpenAI and all other major AI shops will whine about having to pay for anything and conjure up some reasoning why this system is illegal because reasons and sue Cloudflare to tie them up in litigation - so my question is: when is that happening?

Back in the 90s when I worked tech support for a technology distributor, often had to call in to companies to get find info about their products. So I was also on hold a lot.

One cool thing Symantec had back then was the "on-hold DJ" (not sure what they officially called it), but basically think of a radio DJ putting on some tunes, and then talking in-between songs about stuff like "How to reach us", "current hold times are....", "Hey did you hear about our new product...", but was all live with a real person (no AI then!), and quite frankly was pretty entertaining (to the point where you didn't mind being on hold that much).

At first I misread that as "We also had to ask the customer for permission to use the bathroom"

I was like "WTF company requires its agents to ask the customers calling in for permission to use the bathroom???"

End result is the same - bunch of SPAM slop being regurgitated back at you.

"Companies want their products and brands to appear in chatbot results,". And "Since Reddit forms a key part of the training material for Google's AI, then one effective way to make that happen is to spam Reddit."

So soon every prompt will give you back useless results due to bias from everyone doing the equivalent of SEO spam, just like how any search results from Google today are basically completely useless.

for advocates of cryptocurrencies who want crypto to be treated the same way as other assets

And yet those same "advocates" don't want crypto to be regulated the same way as other assets are.