OP didn't say "don't buy", he said "don't finance". Financing means taking a loan, putting yourself in debt, and almost always means you pay way way more for the product in the long run. It's how people end up stuck in debt for their entire lives, and it doesn't matter how much you enjoy something, possibly ruining your financial future for some fun (especially for a product that might be abandoned in a couple of years) is a really bad idea.

No, the whole point of the suit is that the individual actors aren't looking at the market and judging supply and demand to set prices themselves, they are instead turning to a common third party who they use to set prices. If everyone in a market all asks the same common third party what price they should charge, it's not longer an open free market, the price is set by the third party. And that is a blatant violation of the Sherman act, even if none of the market members directly talk to each other. In fact no human needs to be involved in the process: for example you could have an algorithm that takes an average price and tells the supplier to set their price just slightly above that, but if everyone uses that algorithm, this results in everyone raising prices, causing the average to rise, so the algorithm in turn tells everyone to raise prices, etc. That isnt a far-fetched hypothetical example, by the way, that is almost exactly what is actually happening.

The 32GB limit was first added in 1994. exFat didn't exist till 2006. I'll let the reader draw their own conclusion about your claim, given those facts

No, you don't. Otherwise light reflected from a mirror wouldn't be able to make an object hotter than the mirror, which is obviously wrong. Technically speaking the constraint is more than just the frequency of the light: for example, a laser has "negative" thermodynamic temperature, which means a laser beam can heat an object to an infinitely high temperature (theoretically), despite being, for e.g. an infrared laser (although since the object you're heating up tends to radiate energy as it's temperature to the fourth power, you quickly need a really, really powerful laser to get to high temperatures).

You're misunderstanding the thermodynamics/optics a bit. You can't focus the black-body radiation from an object to heat something hotter than the object, but the Moon *isn't* a black-body. The moon, in fact, emits no visible light whatsoever (it doesn't get hot enough). The Moon reflects sunlight, so just as reflected light from a mirror can get an object hotter than the mirror, moonlight can heat objects hotter than the moon. How hot I don't know (because the thermodynamics of optics is really complex), certainly not as hot as the sun but certainly hotter than the moon.

In principle you're correct, high purity alcohol is really good at displacing water. In practice though I wouldn't suggest immersing your phone on it: the electronics proper won't be damaged by the alcohol, but there are a lot of glues and adhesives that will be. It can also attack some rubbers and plastics, which (ironically) might damage the waterproofing.

No, it's the brightest object in the observable universe right now. "Observable universe" just means the universe as we see it from (or near) Earth, right now, and it's what is usually meant when people talk about "the universe" (at least in astronomy). Of course the universe as a whole is (probably) not just the observable universe, but we can't really say much about the unobservable parts (since they're unobserved we can't even be sure they exist), so it's usually not helpful or relevant to talk about them.

The full article requires a sign-in which I'm not doing, so I can't be sure, but it doesn't sound like they did. It sounds like someone else put the code up (which is why they needed to file a DMCA takedown to get it pulled down). Maybe an (ex)employee did it? Not sure.

I remember reading a story a few months back (on Ars Technica IIRC) about how the date apparently had an effect: literally changing just the date could result in getting better or worse results, and since a normal ChatGPT session passes in the date as part of the prompt, you can get changes like this to results even if the model and constraints are otherwise identical. Which to my mind just reinforces how unreliable and untrustworthy LLM "AIs" are.

They are labeled using the alt attribute as a caption. Apparently they also use an image classifier to make sure image and caption match, which adds all kinds of interesting questions about the validity of the labelling, but it is labeled.

No, homeopathic eye drops are often not just sterile saline (either not sterile, or more than just saline). That's literally the entire point of the story: those "medicines" lack the FDA safety reviews necessary to ensure they are what they claim they are, making them dangerous to use. Even FDA reviewed eye drops have had issues with sterility, imagine how bad an eye drops subject to no safety review is.

No, the planetary resonance is between each planet and it's two nearest neighbors, so planet a is resonant with planet b, and b is resonant with a and c, and so on, making 5 pairs. So planet a and planet f (for example) aren't directly paired, their orbital resonance occurs because of the chain of resonances between them rather than a direct resonance.

Most likely they are the one providing the video from a CDN (or from some partner that hosts the CDN, like Netflix or Youtube), so they simply default the stream they provide to 480p. That's how mobile providers offer "unlimited" video streaming as an addon to data plans. Videos watched from random (non-partner) sites won't be downgraded (though they may be data throttled), but would count against data limits.

The waves in quantum mechanics are probability waves. While it is true that those can create interference patterns, when they do so they only alter the probability of finding the particles in particular places. You can't add together two particles together in QM to create a new particle with twice the energy (not least because doing so for massive or charged particles like cosmic rays would violate the corresponding conservation laws).

Pure quantum mechanics per se doesn't even have creation or destruction operators for particles, you need relativistic quantum mechanics (i.e. quantum field theory) for that. In QFT, particles do become elevated to not only probability waves but to freely propagating disturbances of the underlying field (for e.g. the electron field for electrons, or neutrino field for neutrinos. Once you do that particles can interact with each other to create new particles, but the physics for that still don't allow "rogue wave"-like behavior, and again you still need to obey conservation laws, so two protons can't merge together to form a single proton because that would violate charge conservation (and they can't even collide to produce two protons, one with very high energy, because that would violate conservation of energy/momentum)

These rays aren't electromagnetic waves, they're protons. You can't get "freak waves" from those because the energy from them doesn't sum like it does from constructive interference of real waves.