We had some Samsung appliances in the past and found getting repairs to be a huge headache in our area. Even though we live in a major city there were hardly any "Authorized Repair Centers" and the prices were ridiculous. Just for the cost to have a repair guy drive out to look at it and tell us what might be wrong was going to be half the cost of just buying a new one.

And I feel like so many of the Samsung things I've owned lately do an uncomfortable amount of data collection. I just want you to keep my ice cream cold, you don't need access to my contact list and text messages.

Microsoft has been laying people off and scaling back other efforts in the pursuit of AI. Can't help but wonder if they're eyeing XBox (at least the physical consoles) as the next sacrificial lamb at the altar of Copilot.

This quote would seem to contradict your position: "Nearly three out of every four restaurant orders are no longer eaten in a restaurant, according to the National Restaurant Association."

Is that because people can't eat at restaurants? Or just that so many prefer to eat in the comfort of their own homes?

We see similar data when you ask people about working from home vs working in an office - the majority want at least a hybrid arrangement and a large percentage want to work exclusively from home. And what streaming services have done to movie theaters.

It turns out a lot of people would rather be at home - though they're not necessarily at home. My wife and I get take-out (we don't use delivery services) about once a week, sometimes twice. We have two small kids and it's not convenient to drag them to a restaurant.

Whether the trend is positive or not is a worthwhile question, but it seems clear that it's not a "small cohort" of "autistic individuals" that don't like to spend time in the company of strangers.

Got it for Christmas when I was a kid in the early 80s and played it a TON throughout the 80s. Football, Auto Racing, Baseball, Sea Strike...all favorites. The B-17 Bomber game I got quite a bit later and didn't play it quite as much but I remember being excited for it at the time.

Not sure the nostalgia is worth owning one today, but it could be fun to play with one for a few hours.

I don't much care about comparing us to other nations, especially on things like "How much electricity do you generate" but the subtext of the current administration appearing to want to set America back 50 years in terms of innovation, renewable energy, and even social policy is troubling.

We should be investing in alternative sources of generating and storing energy. We should be investing in education and R&D. We should be welcoming the best and brightest from around the world. Instead, we're shaking our fists at the clouds and yelling for anybody who isn't a straight, white, conservative, dude to get off our lawn.

I used to think we were better than that. Now I only hope we can be.

Our kids (under 12yo) have their own Android tablets but their daily screentime is closely monitored and limited. Both kids stream YouTube Kids videos and our oldest also plays Minecraft on his.

Neither kid has their own phone or is able to access general web browsing on their tablets.

COULD AI replace 100 million jobs in the next 10 years? Perhaps. WILL it? Not very likely. AI still falls down pretty regularly. That said, it's not AI that's going to eliminate those jobs; it's management that will. The moment they THINK AI can do the job they'll get rid of those expensive pesky humans and replace them with AI. In many cases they'll learn that the AI isn't ready yet, but at that point it may be too late to re-hire the humans to come back and fix it.

But capitalism rewards lower costs, not higher payrolls, especially in publicly traded companies.

In the next 100 years, sure, I might buy that it will be ready to significantly displace workers by then.

Will there be new jobs cropping up for people to do? Hard to say, previous automation tended to replace physical effort more than mental effort and creativity. I'll grant that there may be new jobs I'm not thinking of yet, but I'm not as optimistic as people who hand-wave and say "The old telephone operators found new kinds of work."

We're probably getting closer to needing to seriously talk about universal basic income, but...how do we fund that if we have a shrinking workforce and ever consolidated wealth?

I can't help but wonder what will happen the first time one of these is present at a crime scene, or when somebody subpoenas them for eDiscovery due to civil litigation.

I don't have a problem with using the AI to create first drafts, but I worry that some of the journalists, especially under tight deadlines, might take shortcuts and decide to just publish the AI draft.

Having the AI create a draft that the human journalist reviews and revises? Fine.

Having the AI just write the story and publishing it without review? Not so good.

I suspect that the difference between Republicans and Democrats is less down to who is currently in the White House but a fundamental difference in how they view the economy and socio-economic factors. I think Republicans have traditionally been more of the "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" group whereas Democrats have been more inclined to believe people - especially from traditionally marginalized groups - are often not completely in charge of their own economic destiny.

In my conversations with folks from each side of the aisle I find Republicans to generally be more skeptical that racism or sexism is a factor (certainly in modern America) in people's economic outcomes, whereas Democrats are generally more likely to believe those are major factors.

Not without cause - in fact you can be assured that their bosses are already salivating over the potential to cut headcount and boost profits by replacing pesky humans with AI.

But I'm skeptical that we'll be able to simply legislate them out of that. Capitalism and profit are too strong a motive. In the short to medium term helping those workers reskill to work WITH AI and be more productive may be the best we can do.

In the longer term we're probably going to have to move to some kind of UBI...but how to fund that and how to appropriately level set is going to be a serious challenge.

We're buying a new house next year and high on my list is to add solar if it doesn't already have a good solar system on it.

Basically the account. You buy a subscription, that gives you a Microsoft 365 account with a domain (.onmicrosoft.com by default) and you can add users and services to that. That whole account is called a "tenant".

If you have tens of thousands of users and an IT staff to manage your own hosted cloud and servers then that's great for you.

For "Joe's Landscaping" who has 13 people and outsources their IT from Geek Squad it's almost always going to be better to just use Microsoft 365 out of the box.

I'm not sure if you understand what this story is. This is for people who have already bought a Microsoft 365 tenant but haven't assigned a real domain name to it so they're just using the default ".onmicrosoft.com" domain. No real business should do that.

This doesn't force people to any platform. The only thing it "forces" them to is to buy or use an actual domain (which they'd probably buy from a 3rd party domain registrar anyhow) if they want to send a lot of email.