They don't need AI for that. Teams - and pretty much all Microsoft products - are honeypots designed to collect data.

Well, no so much "honeypots" in the case of products that employees are forced to use at their workplace: they're no honey needed to attract them and get them to give Microsoft data. If you disagree with Microsoft's privacy invasion, you lose your job.

That's the genius of Microsoft's particular brand of invasiveness: instead of convincing individual people their products are good enough to relinquish their privacy for (Facebook), or convincing a large part of the internet to let them sneak in their trackers (Google), Microsoft convinced the bean counters at most companies to install their spyware and ram it down the throats of people who need to make a living. Disgusting...

Anyway, the AI thing is just the turd on top of the shit cake.

Part of the problem is that trains are really, really heavy. A double-decker passenger train car might weigh 180,000 pounds and carry only 100 people, for a total weight of 1,800 pounds per car plus the person. So you're carrying half the weight of that Prius. The trains are still vastly more efficient because you have one powertrain accelerating all of those people in Priuses (Prii?) instead of hundreds, they accelerate and decelerate slowly (and rarely), they have low rolling resistance, etc.

Imagine how much more efficient they would be if train cars were improved with modern technology to bring the weight down.

Wow. Their refrigerators reportedly have among the worst reliability stats out of all the major brands, but ads are the reason you're rejecting them? I'm kind of assuming the ads are to recover the unexpectedly high cost of warranty repairs and food loss claims. :-)

Having used a lot of their Blu-Ray players and TVs over the years, Samsung reached peak ensh*ttification a long time ago, IMO. What remains is the long-tail death spiral.

Depends on whether the test pilots were in them at the time. ;-)

The thing is that places that historically didn't have to worry about this, now have to worry about this.

If they want it preconditioned? Yes, welcome to 2025, they can install the app on their phone. Or they use the 'remote climate start' option on the keyfob. Or they shoot you a quick text asking you to hit the button in your app.

You keep trying to paint these advancements in convenience and comfort as terrible burdens, and it's weird.

Until the tools get better, yes. Slavery would likely have ended by now even without the Civil War because of the cotton picker. The same thing is happening to the remaining agricultural jobs now, thanks to AI.

Strawberry picking robots are already good enough to do the job, just with a ridiculously high up-front cost (like $300k each, which is probably well over a hundred years worth of labor costs, and possibly several hundred). The next generation are going to be more like $12k, which is more like 20 years of labor costs, assuming $4 per hour sub-minimum wage, 40 hours a week, and 4 weeks of picking in a year, and more like 5 years at U.S. minimum wage.

But that's not the whole story. The latest generation are also faster than people, and can work 24x7, so you can use less than a third as many. So now you're at more like a year or two for break-even.

Heck, it wouldn't surprise me if all the screaming from California about lack of farm labor isn't just a cover story, all while quietly letting the Trump administration reduce the immigrant farm labor because they won't be needed in the future. It makes the left look good to their base by paying lip service to defending them while making the right look good to their base by terrorizing them and scaring them out of the country. And it wouldn't surprise me if some of the farm tech companies building these picking machines aren't actively lobbying for it. I mean, maybe that's happening a few years too soon, but we're not talking about decades before that labor no longer provides any real benefit; we're getting very close to that point.

Speaking of Watson, Slate recently ran a retrospective article on IBM's Watson playing Jeopardy!. Coincidentally, it also mentioned when Watson made up the response that Toronto was a U.S. city:
https://slate.com/culture/2025...

See that's the opposite of what we actually need to do. Realistically, the average person gets maybe five or six usable hours in a day, so right now, work gets five of those blocks and we get two. With that scheme, work gets six of those blocks and we get one.

A better plan is four five-hour work days. One extra usable day for ourselves, plus working hours tailored to knowledge workers' actual ability to focus rather than longer hours in which productivity rapidly goes towards zero or even negative.

Spend half as much time working, and everyone will be healthier. More daylight hours to be outside and get exercise. More time to spend with friends and family and de-stress. And so on.

Honestly, I'd rather Apple:

• Enable full support for macOS on iPad
• Make a detachable trackpad/keyboard combination
• Make it so that you can detach and reattach it in a position that leaves the keyboard inactive and underneath the iPad

But yeah, a hinge that can let you A. open it flat and B. spin the display around and close the laptop so that it looks and acts like a thick tablet would also work.

But the biggest thing I'd like is for Apple to get Back-to-my-Mac working. I do not want to store my data in the Cloud, but I do want access to it — terabytes of it — far more than I could ever realistically hope to store in iCloud. (Translation: No, I will not pay you $1200 per year for Cloud storage, and even that wouldn't really be enough. Yikes.)

What you're missing is that some of the mapping services have maps that are horribly wrong, and also that people store coordinates badly.

Case in point, I live in a mobile home park that's almost big enough to be its own zip code. If your entry system lets me put in the space number *and* uses Google Maps as the back end, you can find my home that way. But as far as I know, no other mapping company has the per-unit data that would be required to find my house by its house number. That's simply a level of data gathering that nobody else even attempts as far as I can tell. Apple Maps has zero site number data for my neighborhood or any other nearby neighborhood, and they're the next-most-capable competitor in that area.

So if you are using some other service, you'll have to find it by the house number and the street name. Unfortunately, the house numbers are not in order. They added more sites at some point, and did not renumber the old sites, so there are low numbers that jump to higher numbers and then jump back down to lower numbers. So if I have to give a site number plus the street name (e.g. Apple Maps), you might be within a couple of blocks.

But to make matters worse, the road is a private road, which means that it isn't in the list of county-maintained streets. So if your database doesn't have those streets at all, it will end up substituting the nearest roads with the same name, which are in Sacramento, or it will assume that it is a misspelling of some other street in a nearby town. So you could end up 10 miles off or 120 miles off.

So you use Google's API to do geocoding to verify that you can deliver there. Then instead of sending the coordinates, you foolishly hand off the street address to the delivery service that uses some other service, and smoke starts coming out of your machinery.

Or you round the coordinates too much like Uber used to do, and all of the streets are off by a hundred feet, putting my pickup point supposedly on a different street.

You get the idea.

https://neildegrassetyson.com/...

Great. Tapping the 'climate start' button in your car's app on your phone not only will absolutely not 'make you late for work,' it will potentially get you to work quicker, *and* in a better mood, *and* more safely than driving an unheated car in -30 weather.

Because it's more pleasant to drive in a warm vehicle than a -30c vehicle? Especially when all it takes to accomplish this is three taps on your phone's screen?