Sugar is not harmful in sensible quantities, i would rather drink a small quantity of full sugar coca-cola than any quantity of coke zero.

I'm an insulin dependent (LADA) diabetic, thanks to Agent Orange. Unless I need to recover from hypoglycemia before I pass out, that is not an option for me. I'm sure that I'm not the only person reading this thread who has to avoid regular sugar except in very small amounts (Sugar in my morning coffee is part of my morning carbohydrates.) or in emergencies.

Prepared foods should in theory cost more because you're paying for not only the ingredients but also the preparation, the only reason they're cheaper is because they can hide all kinds of unpleasant or inferior ingredients in there.

You can believe that if it fits in with your particular set of conspiracy theories, but it's not true. The USDA is very big on inspecting commercial food plants and comes down like a metric ton of bricks on companies that try that sort of thing. No, what keeps the prices on factory food down is something called "economies of scale." I'll let you look that up for yourself because that way there's a slight chance that you'll learn something.

Maybe I'm just a weirdo but I am very annoyed at them for trying to take away the option of local-only accounts. Why do I need to let them be a third party to everything I do starting with logging in? Nobody asked for this.

I would have thought by now, after 40 years of computerization, that there would be some robust Asian language fonts available in the public domain or perhaps licensed through government agencies to promote their use.

All the way back in the 1980s, I was involved in a Japanese/Chinese/English photo-typesetter project using what I believe were freely available font sets.

Seems like the Japanese game companies should switch to Google or MS fonts. $20K/year in Japan is someone's salary.

Just how many innocent mice were killed and autopsied for this "research", just so wags could make jokes on social media?

What are "wags"?

Hell, my thought was,...MAYBE, we'll see the same effects of blue and green hair dye....and pretty soon, all the wailing far leftist protesters and complainers on TikTok will just basically dye, pierce and tattoo themselves out of the gene pool and we can maybe get back to a bit more normal like the days I grew up in .....

The Chinese learn fast and iterate frequently. Likely their future launches will be more robust.

They did this by restricting new house building to push the value of their homes up.

I don't get this where you and other post this......I see new houses and neighborhoods being built up ALL over the places I live and visit here in the US.

There is a fuck ton of land around and people are building houses in masses.....

the US is HUGE...maybe you need to get out a bit and travel outside your 20 mile circle you currently burrow down into.....?

One mans "natural" food is anothers' bush-meat. No common  food or drink is safe. You can choke on a glass of milk, as has been observed or live to be 102 drinking porter 3x a day. Japanese eat poisonous fish  & noodles while Greeks gorge on hi-salt olives and sardines. Russian & Germans eat  fat-laden sausage worth-the-name and Argentinians beef by the quarter. Mebby UKers and north Americans just have pussy constitutions and deserve condemnation to vegetarian hell !  I happen to like roast turkey and chicken, so please pass the ultra-processed honey-mustard sauce.

just remember that fully one third of Americans do not have a license,

I have to seriously question this stat you put up....especially if you are talking about real American Citizens....

But even so, not having a license doesn't necessarily keep one from driving....

We have a LOT of folks in the US without a lot of proper documentation or licensing driving around these days....

This is a guess but it's based on how people were when I was in college. The market for these would be people who occasionally need a car for something where they cannot borrow one or where they cannot get a friend to provide a lift.

Strange...everyone I knew HAD their own cars in college.....??

I'm talking very much low to middle middle class folks.....and this was decades back too....

Or even just good old fashioned human-driven competition. A 60x price increase will draw new competitors. I'm not saying this is easy and I could do it in a weekend or a year, but still, this is not rocket science.

I read the Business Insider article. Dohmke is an arrogant bastard, without doubt parroting the M$ Mafia godfathers. He's demanding suicide from devs and infantile servitude from usrland. Who would risk their time/money/sanity  with such a sociopath? Whenever Linux infuriates my meager talents I just think about the M$ option ... and laugh.

I don't think slashdot has had any actual developers working on its since the early 2000s. It's a mature legacy codebase, destined to run as-is until it can't anymore, then go away.

OpenAI got out ahead but really, how do you beat google at this?

Technology-wise, they've had top researchers all along. Want more? Just hire them, not hard when you have infinite money.

And google has access to everything. They serve about 1/3 of the population on earth every day. Not just search but webmail, texts, maps, word processor, TV (youtube), transportation (Waymo) everything.

Google is on almost everybody else's webpages too, through Google Ads.

There isn't much about your digital life google doesn't know about, and almost every potentially productive use of AI can be deployed to billions through their own services.