There are still Walmarts where pickup is in store???

Parking lot pickup took over hear I don't know how long ago.

And then we got the walmart++ (or whatever it's called); untippable home delivery.

On the rare occasion that I'm inside it these days, it's generally because it's the closest grocery store (by a couple of miles; my neighborhood is so bad these days that it would qualify as a "food desert" without walmart) and we need something quick.

Delivery has been faster than amazon at least since 2020, and prices the same or lower than amazon.

Oh yeah... If there's one thing you can be 100% certain of regardless of make and model of any product - not just cellphones - it's that new features have nothing to do with bringing value to you and everything to do with putting you under closer surveillance and monetizing the surveillance data.

I've been rocking exactly this on my Fairphone for years. How is this new?

Also, how much do you bet Google feels it has the right to see what your "private" space contains (for your own good of course) and helps itself to the data you keep there?

I'm sure the bad guys with their non-Google models will follow suit and watermark their deepfakes too.

>not least filtering in traffic so they're not going away anytime soon.

when two wheel vehicles get "filtered" from traffic, they tend to "go away" for extended periods, if not permanently . . .

word 5.1 and excel 4, Mac, were the last products out of Redmond that I saw any reason to buy (and I did).

At the time, Word on the Mac and Word for dos had *nothing* in common other than the name.

Well, they could *kind of* read one another's files--but you lost things like inserted charts in the process!

The Mac Word was the best available at the time (unless you needed certain things like WP), while the DOS/Windows version was a distance third, propped up only by the lack of a viable fourth.

Word 6, though, tossed the Mac version and imposed the second rate dos version on everyone. It was reported that a researcher found timing slugs in the Mac version so as to make it slower than the windows version.

Anyway, many things that worked and were useful in 5.1 (usable equations, anyone? plain text mail merge?) were gone in 6, replaced with glitz. And to add insult to injury, when word 6 opened a 5.1 file, it would rewrite it in 6 format *on opening*, and without seeking permission! I think it was even overriding RO status, as I recall having to use physical write protection on diskettes.

The problem isn't AI.

The problem is mega-corporations that don't answer to the rule of law anymore and their megarich psychopathic billionaire tech bro CEOs deploying AI to cut expensive employees out of their expense sheets, even if AI isn't ready - even if it results in the collapse of the very economy they're operating in, when a vast majority of the people is unemployed and incapable of buying anything anymore.

And everybody will keep using it because everybody knows [Microsof product + Microsoft product} works better than [Microsoft product + competitor]. Because Microsoft will make sure competitor will be less polished, less well integrated, less stable and less convenient than the fully-integrated Microsoft stack running on the Microsoft OS. Only people who actively dislike Microsoft would even bother trying third party Teams replacements, and those people aren't likely to go with Office to begin with.

Microsoft has done that many times in the past and it got them to the monopolistic position they've been occupying since the 90's.

You don't understand: we had more than 3 non-AI stories in a row. No news outlet worth its salt lets more than 2 hours pass without talking about AI in 2024!

So Slashdot used whatever material they had on hand to correct that intolerable slip. Expect this interview to be milked again in 2 hours.

When billionaire tech bros say they want empower the people, I feel a slight wave of nausea welling up.

Mark my words: one day, one of the legions of people who will have lost their jobs to AI will off him.

AI is not even his fault. It would have happened without him. But he made himself the face of AI and he'll pay the ultimate price for it.

Both sides lost. No mirror therapy for me :)

3...2...1...

Shocker...

For a gene therapy shot to cure my tinnitus.

Incidentally I could use gene therapy to cure my phantom pain too, but I can deal with that one since it's infrequent. Still, when it happens, I'd really rather it didn't.