Yeah... Microsoft just made their laptops so expensive that the Apple Macbook Air suddenly looks like a VALUE option in comparison?

Does AWS or any of the big AI companies really want to build a data center in Maine? It's not exactly near any major Internet backbones or major tech hubs. The electricity there is expensive as well, plus you have to worry about blizzards disrupting your diesel deliveries during a power outage.

It seems like someone is trying to score easy political points "protesting" something that probably wasn't going to be built anyway.

Why would someone want to do this? Are they some sort of deranged Sora fan, raging against Sam for shutting down their favorite free AI slop video generation service?

Yeah, I thought that it was odd to use a logo from a defunct hardware company that ceased to exist around 1998 for this story as well.

The only thing that I "trust" a car salesman to do is attempt to get me to sign up for useless add-ons like VIN etching and extended warranties that are basically pure profit for the dealership.

You can't even trust them to give you the best interest rate on your car loan if you need one, they farm that out to the banks that give them the best kickbacks.

I'd imagine that they'll just discontinue the $599 model and put new A18 Pro chips with a GPU core disabled in the $699 model until it's time to upgrade to a new $699 model with the A19 Pro and 12 GB of RAM.

Sure, it would be nice if they didn't needlessly disable that 6th core, but Apple is probably already losing M5 Macbook Air sales from this thing as it is.

And the really annoying thing about this is that when the AI bubble inevitably crashes, it's going to be difficult to repurpose all of these specialized AI processors into something useful..

This won't be like the 2018-2023 crypto bubble, where we end up with a ton of cheap used GPU's and power supplies available for resale. This stuff with mostly end up in the landfill and scavenged for their raw materials.

It seems like every large or midsize business uses Teams for interoffice communication and meetings now.

I don't think that most of them LIKE it because it's flaky software, but it comes bundled with your Office 365 subscription so you're kinda stuck with it.

I think that the real issue is that the idea of "upper middle class" hasn't been properly adjusted for inflation.

$133,000 a year would have been a decent income 5 years ago, but now it's the minimum for meeting your living expenses in some higher cost of living states.

If you ask Claude about any of these features, it will deny that they exist.

It makes you wonder. Were they removed from the models that are currently running, or was Claude taught to not disclose their existence?

The "why" is pretty easy to understand:

1) It makes them look like responsible citizens to government officials, who will now be more willing to turn a blind eye to their privacy raping default "privacy" settings. Who knows, it might even help with the permitting process to plop a new data center somewhere.

2) It adds a barrier of entry for startups and open source projects who can't afford an army of lawyers to ensure that they're meeting the specific age regulations for every US state and country.

3) It allows Open AI/Meta to stop wasting time and effort trying to upsell users who don't have a credit card or bank account.

Yeah, those headsets do not hold a charge. If you try to power it up after letting it sit for 3 months, it will be stone cold dead.

Slashdot has had a long running hatred of Microsoft products in general. I'd imagine that anything that helps loosen their grip on the sub $1,000 laptop OS monopoly would be cheered around here.

I don't think that Honda ever wanted to build those EV's in the US, but was probably required to by the prior administration to at least attempt to meet the EPA's alternative fuel and fleet fuel mileage requirements. Now that those regulations are gone for at least the next 2 1/2 years or so, there really isn't any pressure to build these vehicles.

I don't think that Google really had any real interest in becoming a major ISP. It just wanted to shame the telcos and cable companies who were offering 20Mbps "broadband" service at the time with a gigabit service option in order to force them to upgrade their offerings to meet international standards.