A regular bank can't magic up $1M out of thin air, much less $1T.
They can. There are laws that prevent how much they can make based on the percentage of "something-something-whatever" they put into a central banking, so there's a ceiling of sorts. But other than that, it's all magicked up, yes: Fractional-reserve banking.
Most of the urban noise comes from cars! I had a nice place in a dead end street in a major East coast city and it was very quiet at night. If we had more residential streets closed to through traffic or so-called "superblocks" it would be very peaceful in our cities most of the time.
Naming things after people is never so much a celebration as it is about notability.
If it were just about historical notability, then little towns would have a streets named after Lenin, Mao, Genghis Kahn, Hitler, Tang Taizong, Galileo, Gandhi, Sitting Bull, etc. with the same frequency that they have "Washington St."
It's about honoring historical figures that our culture reveres. Maybe every once in a while we should be re-evaluating who is worthy of such reverence.
Here we have "acceleration of enshittification".
Interestingly, that makes extreme sense. Capitalism in general, and Shareholder Capitalism more intensely, requires exponential growth. A company that makes (I'll throw random number for simplicity) $1 billion/quarter to grow 3%, means increasing revenue by $30 million in that period, whereas a company that makes $1 trillion/quarter needs to increase revenue by $30 billion to meet the same 3% growth. Needing to make $30 million allows for a much larger window of "good enough quality" before enshitification quicks in compared to needing to make $30 billion, so the later is way more prone to enshitify their products as soon as possible, if not before, otherwise they miss that target.
If this is how it works, then enshitification also follows the same exponential curve, and we'll definitely see more, and more, and MORE, AND MORE of it, in the next years, until the entire thing collapses as big corps all around start failing to meet their shareholder's expectations over and over again.
I own, but do not operate, a few IT companies that manage corporations in the $600MM-$1B receivables range.
Based on our own help desk ticket software, our clients have opened 40% fewer tickets since ChatGPT was rolled out to every desk and phone. 40%. I expect another 40% drop (total 80%) by next year as end users just manage things themselves.
I won't downsize as the tickets aren't really generating revenue as much as headaches. One of my engineers had a broken PDF file that took her 6 hours to fix, and the end user spent 6 days trying to fix it themselves with Ai.
But -- the basic stuff? Reboot your computer stuff? Email rejected because you mistyped a domain name stuff?
You don't need a human, and we would probably have outsource that stuff to India anyway next year if not for ChatGPT etc.
Although then every single tax jurisdiction - city, county, state, and federal - must have a different ad.
All they have to do is have some copy up front that says "As low as 19.99!*"
And then have some fine print at the bottom: "* Final price may vary depending on local tariffs" or whatever legalize the lawyers come up with. The ISP version of "prices and participation may vary".
I spend quite a bit on Discord server services, but I'm out.
GFY, Discord and governments, for mandating this bullshit nonsense.
Yes, but most people don't have the technical wherewithal to set it up.
IoT doesn't necessarily mean cloud. Plenty of IoT devices work without them.
I would say most IoT devices are cloud connected. You can't have an Internet of things if the thing is not on the internet.
Not all smart devices are IoT devices though. You have protocols like Z-Wave, Zigbee, and Matter that allow completely local control, but those devices aren't necessarily internet addressable without jumping through some hoops.
Here you go. Each button fires an event. How flexible it is depends on your hub. In HA you can make it run an arbitrary script that does whatever you want.
They make similar for Zigbee and Matter/Thread as well.
There's no reason this device needed the maker to continuously run a server for it.
That was a choice they made, for the sake of control.
That's the kind of design choice that was always bad and ought to go away.
I agree, but the reality is that most people don't want to go through the rigmarole of setting up some kind smart hub, figuring out if the potential device is compatible with their hub: Zigbee? Z-Wave? Matter (and what flavor? Thread or WIFI)? Pairing the device: Can I scan a QR code? Do I have to figure out an archaic set of button presses to put it in pairing mode? Is there a security code I have to put into the hub? Then you might have to debug a flaky connection: Do I need to buy a new Z-Wave, Thread repeater or WIFI access point, or should I just re-pair the device in long range rather than mesh mode?
I don't find that too daunting, but that is an impossible hill to climb for your average non-technical person. Compare that to installing your device and then just popping open the company's proprietary app to get it connected to the cloud.
When I moved into my new house, I bought a bunch of fairly bare-bones Honeywell switches that supported Z-Wave. All the smarts are on a server I control. Short of a physical defect I never have to worry about them going out of support.
It's really not too tough to run it in a VM. VMs get full plugin support. I went from knowing nothing about running VMs under Linux to standing up a KVM instance of HA in a couple hours of research. I used the virt-manager tool.
I've had very good experience with it, with the caveat that I only used Z-Wave and Matter. I don't bother trying to integrate most of the other stuff it discovers.
Here the command I used. The only thing that would differ between instances would be the --hostdev flag which was used to map the USB Z-Wave dongle from the host onto the VM.
virt-install --name haos --description "Home Assistant OS" --os-variant=generic \
--ram=4096 --vcpus=2 --disk
--controller type=scsi,model=virtio-scsi --import --graphics none --boot uefi \
--hostdev 001.004
Autism as used in the modern sense, is a relatively new diagnosis, coming into prominence only in the last 35 years or so. Previously a lot of people we now call mildly autistic would just be labeled as "weird" and singled out for extra discipline, bullied by their peers, and flagged for remedial education. Many of the "profoundly autistic"/low functioning kids would have been labeled "mentally retarded" and stuck in special education programs (that classroom near the boiler room with the window blacked out where you could always hear the teacher yelling or kids screaming) if not outright institutionalized.
In short, "everyone is autistic now" for the same reason "everyone is gay now". When you stop mislabeling, killing, and locking a group of people up, they become more visible.
You're not thinking creatively enough. The way things are going, the argument will be that uncontrolled installation of unregulated Linux distributions empowers pedophiles to distribute CSAM, so government will start demanding new motherboards to only allow the installation of properly vetted operating systems that implement extensive, impossible to disable, system monitoring to make sure no CSAM can be distributed with it.
Only big corporations with a proven need for maximum performance (and governments, evidently) will be able to buy special, unrestricted motherboards, and they'll need special authorization and a proven internal governance system, subject to periodic government audits, to show they aren't allowing CSAM on their systems.
Evidently, politicians and CEOs will be free from such obligations, because they're Very Important People acting in the National Interest.
And once this is in place, the tightening will continue at a slow but steady pace.
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (8) I'm on the committee and I *still* don't know what the hell #pragma is for.
