I was happy to see that, because that was always my conclusion. I've worked entirely remote, entirely at an office, and in hybrid arrangements. Hybrid just makes the most sense to me -- and it's something I did at one employer years before COVID.

I think if people are honest? They like at least 1-3 days a week they can work from home, vs coming in all the time; not only to eliminate the commute, but to be able to handle little things at home that need to get done. (EG. Amazon is dropping off an expensive box so you want to be home to bring it in the house ASAP, vs it sitting on the doorstep all day while you're at the office. Or maybe it gives you a few minutes to throw a load of laundry in the washer and dryer?)

But I wasn't a fan of complete remote work because you feel a little detached from the company you work for. You don't really get the in-person socialization that solidifies connections with your co-workers. Plus, I think a lot of people (myself included) get tired of spending THAT much time in the "same 4 walls" of their residence. I may not like spending money on gas and getting stuck in traffic on a commute. But having to do one occasionally DOES get me out of the house to observe more of what's going on around me. Like this morning, I drove in and discovered they're putting new lights up on the bridge that leads into town.

I know it says there's no button or obvious option to turn these notifications off. But this is Microsoft. We all know you OFTEN have to dig into the registry and modify or add a new key to accomplish things.

I've got several perfectly good desktop PCs with Intel Core i5 CPUs (1TB SSD and 16GB RAM configs, basically) that I cleaned up and upgraded after they were taken out of service in a workplace. Resold one already, and wanted to keep the others as spares for things like running my slicers for 3D printers, or sell to someone if the need arose.

They're great in Win 10 but won't run 11, so I'd hate to have it nagging to upgrade to an OS that's not even supposed to officially run on them.

I say I "fear" it in the sense I could see Apple trying to gate-keep the functionality of the new chips; refusing to document how others can utilize the capabilities directly and writing only closed APIs limiting it to use with Siri for everything "AI" it does.

Maybe it's too early to tell? But the only reason I can see caring much about an "AI enabled" processor is if new applications start coming out, implementing it, to allow doing AI tasks locally that require cloud services to do right now.

EG. I just paid almost $100 for a 1 year membership to Suno AI, a service that lets you create songs with their AI engine, including surprisingly realistic vocals singing the lyrics you type in (or alternately, ChatGPT style AI generated cookie-cutter lyrics). I was blown away by how far this tech has come, vs programs I used to use to help create music on the computer like "Band in a Box". But it would probably make me upgrade to a new Mac if this same capability was offered in software like Garageband or Logic Pro, using just my Mac's own processor instead of a cloud server on the back end doing all the work.

I fear, though? It will wind up used as some sort of co-processor for Siri, to make it process results faster or let you use APIs to run a local version of Siri as part of your own programs or something. That's something I never asked for or needed.

Yep... this!

Snowden needs to be pardoned first, IMO.

I never really understood the fixation on banning TikTok, while SO many other products and services Americans use daily come out of China and even collect info in data centers under their control?

The most popular drones people fly are made by DJI, a Chinese company. The Roborock robot vacuum cleaners are made in China and stay signed in to a cloud server that keeps maps of the rooms of your house stored on it, and can even store images from the vacuum's camera to help it avoid certain types of furniture. Bambu Labs is making the most popular 3D printer on the market right now, and they're owned by some engineers in China who came from DJI. All their printers are cloud connected, too.

I think TikTok is ultimately pretty useless. Just one more place to throw poorly made videos, to pretend you're more important than you are. :)
But it's hard to see how their site poses a security risk to the nation any worse than other social media platforms.

It might not be true people can simply cross our border with NO interference... I mean, obviously we DO still have border checkpoints and some barriers to entry put in place. We do hire border patrol people and we have an immigration enforcement group.

But the point is, we're getting floods of people coming through who are NOT getting vetted, and many people who get caught trying to cross illegally are just sent back across to the other side so they can attempt it again another day.

The "MAGA agenda" of "build a wall" is kind of a simple-minded attempt at a solution. Realistically, we had previous Presidents try to ensure a continuous wall was built along our Southern border and the plan failed. They didn't realize how complicated it was going to be to try to use a lot of that privately owned land to construct a wall along it. (Eminent domain would be required and the courts would be tied up for decades fighting every farmer along the way.) Perhaps America lacked the foresight to reserve a strip of land around all of our borders as government-owned, from the very start? (Our public utilities have easements but our own borders apparently don't.)

Still, our 2 party political system forces everyone to choose between two, often lousy, options, to go with the one more closely resembling one that gets the results they want to see. Right now, that "MAGA agenda" is looking slightly superior to the status-quo to me.

I mean, when Amazon is selling its own products directly from its warehouses, as it used to do almost exclusively in the "old days"? (Remember "Amazon Auctions", anyone? That was where you went to sell on Amazon back then, in most cases. It was separate from what Amazon sold on the rest of the site.) Amazon could decide the benefits of no-questions asked returns outweighed the negatives from fraud losses. They could always just auction off palettes of of the returns and still potentially recoup a decent chunk of their initial costs. Alternately, they might even donate some of it and take the tax write-off? Who knows?

Today's resellers are expected to maintain these same standards of friendly returns for nearly any reason or excuse, and are getting hammered by the scammers. Many of them can't afford to absorb the losses. I know a few of these sellers personally. They're people like college students who made a business out of designing and making their own journals with pretty covers, or people with a small 3D printing business running out of their home, trying to cash in on some useful prints they created. If you fight back as a seller and refuse the refund? Amazon comes down on you hard, in short order, saying you can't do that and you lose your rights to sell on the platform.

I'd say it's the very definition of art! Nothing "idealistic" about stating the truth.

If "art" is being created without those motivations at the core of it, it's really not true art. Will some fools still pay money to see or own it? Absolutely. But this is the essence of what happened in America during the Cold War when the CIA invented the "modern art" concept out of thin air. You know, hype up the idea that throwing paint splatters at a wall has hidden meaning and is desirable/relevant, and nobody came up with this amazing new idea except American artists! Go Western Civilization! You can market anything and convince some people to buy into it.

As an Independent, I even see the obvious problem America has with the flood of illegal immigration across our Southern border. Mexico is a nation ruled by drug cartels. Their official President is nothing more than a figurehead, controlled by the cartels, and this has been the case since around 2007.

Allowing people to freely cross over to the U.S. means we have ZERO control over the type of people coming through. Are they all "bringing drugs, crime or rape" to America? Obviously not! But we sure can't tell who is guilty of any of this and who isn't, when we're not even following reasonable steps to process people through legally with proper background checks.

At some point, you have to ask why you even HAVE a "border" at all, if you don't enforce the concept. What makes you a "nation"? I'd say it's about people sharing a common culture and general system of beliefs about what the rules/laws should be where they live. That really disintegrates when you start letting large numbers of people pour in without vetting them to even find out their purpose for wanting to come to your country.

There's really nobody else on the planet freely letting people in to their nation to the extent America has been doing it lately. In much of the world, you'd instantly get a bullet in the head for attempting it.

All the AI stuff is over-hyped right now.

Artists are reacting to everything they see and hear in the news, including a lot of "predictions" of what AI will do in the future.

In reality? All of the "arts" have always been about humans translating emotion and feelings into a concrete form that others can appreciate and get something out of. As soon as you substitute computers simulating it -- even if it seems convincing on the surface? You strip away the purpose of it.

New art, whether it's music or a painting or a sculpture, has to come from a human who was compelled to create it for personal reasons. A computer has no emotions or "soul". It just analyzes existing works and tries to make authentic-looking mash-ups from the database of that content it has access to work with.

I'm not one to put a LOT of faith in humanity to make sensible choices... but I think people will see through AI music, or any other art, and largely reject it in favor of new creations from other people.

I noticed in just the last week or two? My Echo Dots at home are suddenly MUCH more responsive than they've been for quite some time. As soon as I give a command like, "Alexa, turn off the living room light.", I get a near instant response of "OK" as the light is turned off.

It was getting progressively more sluggish up until now, and I assumed it was a sign of Amazon cutting resources for the Alexa-enabled smart devices. (They laid off a big chunk of staff supporting them, etc.)

I'm wondering if Amazon is throwing more resources at it again, now, with the idea it's needed for AI tie-ins?

I'm pretty sure I always get more than just 4 hours of sleep a night. But I tend to be more of a "night person" who can't even get to bed before midnight, and yet I have work during the week that expects me there in the morning. So I'm definitely shaving an hour or so a night off the "ideal" amount of sleep I should really be getting each week.

I find that on a weekend when I can sleep in later, I wake up with more energy and essentially feeling a bit "younger". And as a work week rolls on, I often get to feeling worn down and "older" by the end of the week.

That said? I think quality of sleep matters as much as anything else. I can really tell it takes a toll on me if I had one of those nights where my sleep was restless and I partially woke up several times, vs a really good, solid night of sleep.

"The settlement would lower those fees by at least 0.04 percentage point for a minimum of three years." ?!?

Will I even really notice a .04 percentage rate cut on the fees, unless I'm buying something really expensive? And this "break" is only for a 3 year period, too?

Seeing as it's government who pursued this in the courts for so long, that means taxpayers like myself helped pay the legal costs of the whole battle. So I'd say I probably don't really come out ahead at all?

various Microsoft tools - such as the setup programs for SQL Server Management Studio - like to lock out the Explorer window

I've not observed that behavior in a long time...and as it happens, Winget is upgrading SSMS as I type this. Everything else continues to work as normal while it does its thing.