Oh and one more thing. Walmart could pull a "Winco Foods" and not accept Credit Card payments at all. In my area there's a Winco Foods about 30 miles from where I live. They only take debit cards, not credit cards. They do beat Walmart's prices so whenever I'm nearby, I take advantage of that.

Yes they could, but they'd lose out on a lot of money. Winco foods likely saw their average receipt size and realized most of their patrons could either do debit or cash. Being a grocery store, cash is likely a viable option if you're not doing big shopping trips and spending $20-40 a trip, and more for debit.

Walmart however does sell more expensive stuff that most people will not have cash for which can be expensive. Think video game consoles, TVs, etc. Limiting yourself to debit and cast would make those transactions very annoying.

It's why Costco always retains a credit card option - because they know cash and debit only get you so far. (And because debit protections are worse, I refuse to use debit, so it'll be cash only).

Sorry, no, any touch screen interaction is requiring you to look at what you are pointing at.

Which is fine when they're things you shouldn't be touching while the vehicle is in motion.

Other controls, like HVAC, radio volume and the phone answer button have to be real buttons you can access without looking. While the car is in motion, the touchscreen should disable itself and be a view-only thing - showing things like where you are on a map or what your next turn is. Anything you might need to adjust quickly should be a knob or button.

That means changing the radio station or media source - you do it while parked (it's not an emergency if your least favorite song comes on). But if you need to turn down the volume that is something you might need. As with answering a phone call. Texts and other things, not important enough to be done while in motion and if they text you, they aren't expecting an immediate response.

Ditto HVAC controls - defogger, A/C, heating, fan speeds and temperatures are stuff that need adjustment while moving to be comfortable whilst driving.

Nothing wrong with a touch screen. Just as long as the UX designers take into account that the screen should be view only while the car is in motion, and anything you might want to adjust must be available on a button. You shouldn't need to use the touch screen while driving.

And a large screen is nice - it can display a huge map, show driving information and other things without crowding out things. But it shouldn't need to be interacted with whilst in motion. Heck, why not toss in a couple of unprogrammed buttons so you can have the option of a few more adjustments you can program on your own. Maybe you might want bass boost or something. Or a quick "everything off" button that turns off climate control, radio, etc.

The available information isn't terribly specific; but on the surface it doesn't sound any deeper into application internals than it already does.

You can certainly go deeper into etw trace hell; but Task Manager knows how much CPU time you are eating, your memory consumption metrics, your network traffic, and has a (currently less granular) look at your consumption of GPU time. It also having a view of consumed NPU time seems totally analogous for a new flavor of coprocessor. Only one that might involve gory poking at the application(though I'd assume would be more logically pulled from the GPU driver) would be distinguishing "GPU Neural Engine" from GPU utilization generally.

Well wtf does he mean by speedtest then? If he's doing it from his phone or wifi connected laptop, then it's going to reflect the speed of his wifi. If he's doing it from his router, and complaining that the speedtest is wrong because his wifi is slower than his router uplink, I'd say that's a statement only a doofus would make.

USE FUCKING FIBER.

Not hard, either. Because there's a cable you can use - the poewr lines. Fiber lines can go along with power lines quite neatly, and many power companies already have fiber network deployments. In fact, there are more than a few rural utilities where your electricity provider will also do fiber. (Typically GPON).

The power cable is being run to the house anyways, and the poewr company's portion is the triplex to the weatherhead. From there it can run down the weatherhead and end at the ONT. Fiber cables cannot carry power so running them along power cables is perfectly safe.

"Now I'm currently using fiber at the speed fast than my wifi router, which makes my speedtest always wrong."

oh please expand on this - this is gunna be hilarious

Mostly in the inaccuracy.

You can tell at best a "blob" walked between two endpoints that are participating in the monitoring network. You can't tell what that blob is, or even how big the blob is - you can guess based on how much distortion was caused, but telling the difference between a toddler and a dog would be impossible.

It requires a transmitter and a receiver to work. If you don't want to participate, all you have to do is not use their equipment. The gateway by itself is useless - you need their mesh network nodes and other stuff as well. And it only covers the path between the devices.

If you wanted to defeat this, you can either buy your own equipment - use your own mesh network nodes for example, or position it so the detection area just isn't somewhere you're likely to be (e.g., putting the mesh node on top of the gateway on the floor above).

Sure they could use better technology, but it relies on the body interfering with the wifi signal and better technology costs more money. It also requires a receiver capable of doing the requisite measurements and the monitored area is between the two devices. So it's basically trivially easy to defeat

Jesus Fucking Christ. It's 2026, Trump has been putting his boot on the necks of major networks and studios for a year and a half now. I realize you probably fell into a coma in 2016, but ten years later, the free press, regardless of what you think of it, or fair you imagine it is, is under direct assault. Fuck off with the "MSM" bullshit and grow the fuck up.

People keep assuming the AI funnel is taking all their ram when the sad fact is that memory manufacturers simply stopped making desktop memory to use the raw materials on purpose built chips for data centers.

Well, it's not purpose built memory - it's HBM (high bandwidth memory), which is a standard thing AMD was heavily pushing for their GPUs.

But the fabs are being redirected from producing standard DDR5 memory to HBM memory because the AI companies are literally throwing money at the RAM companies "take my money!".

You know those eBay auctions you see where someone puts something up for sale at a ridiculous price? You know, someone wanting to sell it for $100 whilst they go for $50 normally? They don't sell and just sit around. But the AI companies are going "I need it now, I'll pay $100!". And prices rise because everyone sees those sales happening at those ridiculous prices.

The whole term "base load" was invented to justify inflexible nuclear power plants. It is not special and the trifecta of wind, sun and batteries can provide it just fine.

Exactly. "Base Load" is a fallacy. Nuclear suffers the exact same problem as wind and solar. In fact, the industry has a term for it - it's called "non-dispatchable".

The term means a power source whose output cannot be synced to a load. If you turn on a light, the power plant needs to supply extra power for that light. And wind, solar and nuclear cannot do that.

Wind and solar are obvious why, but nuclear is also problematic because it takes hours to change its output.

Dispatchable sources include fossil fuel (natural gas especially), hydro, heliostat solar, as well as storage technologies (grid battery). These can vary their output in minutes which as far as the grid is concerned, sufficiently fast. Battery is especially fast and can react in under a second which can fix sudden grid lopsidedness.

Nuclear advocates want it, and it makes sense. But it's just another source of power that cannot be controlled. Grid batteries make nuclear more practical, the same way they make solar and wind more practical. Because it's actually a disaster if grid demand drops below what a nuclear plant is producing - you cannot shut down a nuclear plant and a grid with too much production will also shut down to protect itself.

Of course, the other problem with nuclear is heatwaves, as we've seen Europe struggle with production through their heatwaves when cooling water that is too warm to use, jellyfish, and other things. And remember, European nuclear power is far more modern than US nuclear so it's not old designs or anything.

So the US can have more nuclear power, that's no question as its deployment is far lower than Europe, but it's no panacea because the US can suffer with nuclear power the same way Europe does.

I find it interesting that in the end it was for-profit businesses that helped Linux hit the mainstream.

What do you mean? Because this has always been the case. Most of the kernel developers work for for-profit companies - some of the biggest kernel contributors include companies like Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Nvidia and others.

Many projects are sponsored by companies like RedHat (now IBM, but IBM did a lot before acquiring RedHat).

There are for-profit Linux distributions as well - Canonical for example has Ubuntu, a Linux distribution you might have heard of.

And Linux is mainstream in the telecom space - Android is maintained by Google and given for free.

The whole Linux ecosystem is basically being developed by people working for for-profit companies.

In fact, it is so corporate the few times you run into a library maintained by someone in their spare time it's generally highly noteworthy - usually because the person behind it wishes to retire from the project. You'd generally assume that most of the libraries were really already maintained by someone in some company somewhere.

If you have to rely on AI to do that, all hope is lost. If you cannot take the output of AI and then fix the error yourself in the original document.

Are people so damn lazy that they're helpless if AI doesn't help them go to the bathroom nowadays?

If you're so worried about being caught out, you can still use AI in meaningful ways. Sure they cost more work than being lazy, but that isn't seen as a bad thing.

You want AI to proofread your work? Go for it. But instead of asking it to output a fixed copy, ask it for criticisms and suggestions. Then fix the document yourself using those suggestions. If you are doing your job, you probably have more context and can make it work.

The people who are scared the ones doing the scamming. Like a lawyer who files a brief written by AI who doesn't take 5 minutes to verify it. Probably takes them 15 minutes, but they charged the client a full hour for it and profiting off the charged 45 minutes of work that wasn't done.

Use AI, it's a technology that's not going away. But use it smartly and watch what happens to the output. And maybe apply some human effort to it and maintain a pipeline where human content comes in, and human content comes out. Ai can enter the pipeline, but the original document is only touched by humans who operate under suggestions made by AI but otherwise have full agency.

My resume was human generated. It was run through ChatGPT for suggestions on improvement. It made some, including helping me reword a troublesome bullet point. But I took that and edited the original document myself, throwing away the rest of the content which contained so much hallucinated junk I would lose any job I applied for.

If you're so worried about being found out, you're using AI wrong.

Will anyone even be able to get games that are 10 years old or so in 10 years? That's how you save money on games.

Generally, yes. This is one area where a physical game might not be available or get extremely rare. If it was a game that did well, then there will be reprints (all those "game of the year" or "classic" editions), but if a game didn't do as well, they often get heavily discounted and then destroyed. Though they usually only get a really small print run.

The question of whether 10 year old games will be cheaper, is a completely different question, however.

Digital games cost basically nothing to keep online, so if there are no licensing issues they generally stay online for ages.

This would also mean the PS6 would be a console I wouldn't need to get first day - because any game I would want to play will be available to purchase later on. There's no need to scramble and find a physical copy that sells out in minutes as they do nowadays - if it's digital, it's forever, so the rush to buy a game on day 1 is basically gone. Might as well wait for a game to go on sale.

It's a policy I apply for PC games - I generally wait until a game gets below $10 with few exceptions. Sure it means I play the game a few years after it comes out, but it works remarkably well enough. I mean, why pay $70 when a few years later I can pay $10. It's also not like I'm hurting for content since Steam has been around for over 20 years now. It's one of the biggest advantages of digital.

I only expect to pay maybe full price for 1 game on each platform every year. Everything else I expect to buy to cost $10. Maybe $20 if I really wanted it.

Actually, the company they used was Open Source Storage to hold the backups. OSS used Iron Mountain for their storage provider (Iron Mountain provides both physical document storage, but they also have a data center in their storage cavern to serve as long term data archival in digital format.)

OSS just up and disappeared on them suddenly (they did have a 30 day agreement to cancel). PBS is suing Iron Mountain to basically get at OSS' stored data so they could recover their archives.

Basically, by filing the lawsuit, it block Iron Mountain from deleting the data while the ownership gets resolved and means as long as the data still exists, Iron Mountain is responsible for keeping it so they can't just delete it.

Pretty sure it is NOT an "AI" chip. It is an older chip / chipset that is legal to export. Think Nvidia Shield class, more than AI class.

It's an Nvidia Jetson chip, which is an embedded AI chip per Nvidia marketing. And it's designed to run AI models on it - maybe nothing sophisticated nowadays, but you can certainly use it to train and run your own image recognition models.

I believe Dave's Garage used it to train a model on what vehicles are his and what are not his, so it can send a notification when an unrecognized vehicle comes into his driveway (e.g., delivery truck). It's a chip released in the early days of AI hype where you could train it and run models while the board itself consumes very little power.