Old fart here, no stranger to IoT devices as I'm a nerd for life, but as you - I've noticed this trend for years.

It's in the nature of startups, they usually come with some brilliant idea, and they get greedy and want the consumer to depend on their services, so they will tie their new gadgets to their servers and services, making it near impossible for the user to "free themselves" of their infrastructure.

This is all good and well until two things happens:

1) The device isn't a success, the company decides to no longer produce it, and discontinue its services, hence rendering your smart gaget - not so smart anymore, essentially useless.

2) The device becomes a huge success - and the company decides to gauge the prices untill it reaches a pain-point where it's almost unbearable, but you still use it because it's so mainstream. You're now locked in to their infrastructure of devices, and often forced to purcase devices that comes from their partners or them only, rendering it impossible for you to get creative.

This is sadly a new trend growing with the recent techification of all cars as well, subscription models to simple things like using your remote-keys with a license to turn on/off your car or open your doors even, even basic things like heated seats... you need to subscribe to (looking at you BMW), imagine paying subscription fees for basic functionality?

That's the world now - but you can fight back, ditch the products with these draconian demands, and vote with your money, it really is that simple.

I agree completely.

I can have seriously long and quite controversial discussion with the OpenAI version.
Do that with bing - and you're flagged in no time, it will straight out refuse to answer even the slightest controversial subject.
I sometimes talk about humanity, the development of our culture, how various historical events affect the population and the individual etc.

ChatGPT 4 is AMAZING at these long winded talks I have with it about that, and quite entertaining. Try that with bing - and you're on a list now!

One simple task I remember particularly well was when I was asking ChatGPT 3.5 to help me develop a Greeble Script for Blender.

I wanted to develop a city maker, but needed some basic framework for it to develop my skills faster and have some groundworks to experiment with.
It ended up with me running out of patience with it, as it constantly would get outdated syntaxes, and it would get basic math wrong with commands ALL the time, I simply gave up on it.

Then I tested with version 4. Oh boy was there a difference, I had a pretty decent script going after just 5 corrections with it.

ChatGPT 3.5 has a tendency to forget everything you mention after 5-10 tries, then it needs all the information from scratch again, it's like having a retarded assistant that just don't remember much, and don't have a very good understanding of conceptual ideas.

ChatGPT 4 however is an entirely different beast. Yes you still gotta give it a good amount of details to get it right, but it tries way harder, and will usually correct its code quickly and to a working standard, it also have the ability to develop its understanding of what you are discussing while you're discussing code and visual examples with it, that makes ALL the difference.

The minute chatgpt 4 is for free, I'm out of my 20$ a month plan.

I agree with you that ChatGPT4 is super useful, far more useful than it's free little brother 3.5. That's why I am silly enough to have been a member since it was out, but I've gotten really good use out of it for my part.

However - if they secretly introduce version 5 to us paying customers, I'm keeping my subscription a lil longer...

This is nothing but religion, but modern.

Difficult to prove - how convenient?
It's science's job to prove things, if it's theoretical it might as well be theological.

Having theories is fine and well, sometimes it will work out on paper or in a simulation, that doesn't make it real.

In Sweden there's an hatred for EV's.

Many of my colleagues at work complain that there's no "soul" in new EV's. They feel like it's smartphones on wheels, and there's no end to their excuses on why you should never get an EV and it's a big scam, explodes, freezes in the winter, low range etc.

When I talk with my coworkers (95 percent whom have regular ICE cars), they absolutely LOATHE EV cars, one of them passionately talks about the lack of smells like exhaust, gasoline and "real car feel", he likes the wrooom sound, he likes the shift stick and oils leaking from a car, he talks about it as if it was a thing that's is living.

Me? I've never been interested in car, I'm one of those who doesn't have a drop of oil in my blood (figuratively speaking), and I've used my cars over the years as little as I can get away with. I don't get that "gotta drive" feeling with an regular gasoline driven car, and I also always think of the startup gasoline costs everytime I have to go somewhere, warming them up and starting is expensive.

Then I got my first EV. And the world changed for me. For the first time in my life I got bitten by the "car" thing. I've never driven a car as much as I have when I got my first EV.

All the things I hate about cars was totally gone. No more smells, no more noise, no more need to purchase an insanely expensive car just to have silence while driving. And best of all, I just plug it into my wall charger when home, drive off wherever I like and I do that a lot now, because there's literally no cost associated with it, I can even plug my portable charger in at work, so even the low cost of electricity is reduced even further.

And albeit for 30+ years I've driven manually, I've always hated the manual stick. Usually in the morning - gear 1 - is cranky, even if not faulty, it's an artform to get it to be smooth, and you need to regulate and adjust the clutch till it hits the sweetspot, sometimes the weather makes the clutch pedal cranky, and it's even more annoying, you need to get it up in 500-2000 rpms to get up that garage hill I have, and it's never been comfortable for me, it works - but it's an annoyance.

Also when the neighbors warm up their car early in the morning, the deep-humming bassy sound resonates for 10-30 minutes and my mornings with these fossil fuel drivers are a pure nightmare, I've never liked it, people let their car run for half hours to hours when they come home, wrooom wroom, and they keep adjusting their cars, and fiddling with them, good for them - everyone needs a hobby, but does it have to be this annoying?

And the shiftless driving is amazing, much better than the 1-2 + automatic gear normal cars had, because in my EV there's just the traditional looking shift stick which looks cool, but it's essentially just Park - neutral, Drive and Reverse - that's really it.

And for the driving, there's two regenerative paddles behind the wheel, and I love those, I can adjust the speed with those in traffic, regenerative braking, and I use the hard-brakes when needed, but it's rare. It's actually kinda super comfortable just to do one-pedal driving, the traffic flow is so buttery smooth.

I can see my ICE counterparts constantly pressing their brakes and adjusting to the traffic while I just glide to match the speed, no gearing, no clutching, no mistakes, no stopping and running...it's the future.

I'll never go back.

At least in the Scandinavian countries I'd say they've been replaced by "fiber landlines" instead.

4-5G is still not reliable enough for gaming, and in the big crowded cities even regular use can still be an issue, but Fiber is always reliable, way better than the old dangling landlines were you could be pretty sure to lose your internet connection during a storm.

I'd say RIP landlines, you were great for 100+ years, but it's time to let go. Fiber is technically a landline, but we use them slightly differently if you don't count teams and other video-chat services for meetings, otherwise the wireless phones aka smartphones are ok for what they do, they've brought us an instant library in our pockets.

And if, as the study shows- the stress of the 9 months of pregnancy is equivalent to two years of life, and the woman only gets back a large portion of that investment with engaging in breastfeeding- then does a late-term abortion also abort the positive portions of birth and breastfeeding?

And computer clubs was a thing.

I still miss the days when every age group who got their first home computer came to meet up once a week in my city back then.

We often didn't have much software, and what we have we shared, and we often coded stuff ourselves, I remember fondly when I got
my first commodore 64 and every guest would gratefully play my weird mix of Arcade shoot-em-up I had coded in Machine-Language/Assemby code.

My first Lan party was awesome, I remember 2509+ people with kids dragging along mum and tons of heavy CRT monitors and their computers
lifelong friendships were formed and you met people with different skillsets, and oh boy was it fun.

We totally need that again.

Venezuela

Only if you're recycling the plastic into more plastic. And that's worthless.

What you should be doing is recycling it back into fuel for electricity production- but nobody wants that even with all the scrubbers- they made it illegal to EVER open a 2nd garbage burning electric plant in Oregon.

Wait until your kids discovers VR, and escapes even deeper into a world they prefer, and when they are forced to come out for work in real life, they're not gonna be able to recognize anything, because their entire world is a made up one.