For me the robotics vs laundry issue is ironing, not folding. It might be different in the US but I don't do a lot of laundry folding here in the UK - I just hang them up in the wardrobe or put them in drawers. Towels and spare sheets maybe? Not much.

But an ironing robot - yes, that one I would interested in. It needn't be some humanoid thing that stands by an ironing board and moves a traditional steam iron up and down - could be a static cupboard for all I care. There was a spate of announcements about 10 years ago but nothing came of them, only these blow-up air pressure ones that don't really work at all on work-style clothing. Ironing robots please.

Manuals are great if you know the API you want to call and need to know the details. They aren't good if you don't know the API, or even if one exists. Or if the problem you're debugging is more complex than just "passed the wrong parameter to this function".

Point me to the 'same grade' CPU equivalent of the M5 Pro and M6?

I mean, they literally show the use case for it on some of their the videos. It's not a general purpose one by any means, but this one is an actual Pro box, not a "I'm a consumer and just want the name Pro on my device" box.

The current use case is music production. Logic Pro. I have an Akai MPC Gen 2, with a touch screen for moving around the DAW and manipulating the virtual instruments. Logic Pro with the same level of interactivity would be fantastic, and no the iPad version doesn't cut it. I'm actually very interested in it for this specific reason.

Price? Well, I paid around £4k for my Intel 4Tb beast in 2019 to store all the sample-based instrument libraries I have. It's not a "let's buy this to look cool at the coffee shop" machine, although I'm sure some people will. I'm actually very interested in it for a serious step up in the way music production works.

"I'll tell you the experience. It's pissing me off!"

I log in to read, but I regularly open threads by right-clicking and open in a different tab. Since I mostly use private browsing (Safari or Firefox) to stop advert tracking, this means that one tab is logged in but most of the ones I open to read later are not logged in. So now that pattern is dead? Then there's the "site:reddit.com" searches I do on topics that I just need an answer for rather than ever wanting to participate in. Again, same pattern - I use private browsing and I usually right click and open multiple tabs on several likely looking search results before then starting to read each tab to see if anything useful turned up. That pattern gone as well?

The summary touches on this next bit too - I'm wondering what will happen when I send a link to someone else, some of whom don't have and will likely never have Reddit accounts. Are they now simply unable to see it? Even Facebook isn't that harsh, and it's the perfect example too. I do not have nor will I ever have a Facebook account, but I'm sent the odd link now and again which I do open and look at without needing an account. A world where Facebook is more open than Reddit is just...odd.

I get their dilemma, but this seems a bit too far to me.

I have account number 13,802 here, which I've never been able to persuade the admins to recover for me. Notice how there's no activity on it. That's because when I created it and saw that user number come up I thought "huh - no point in carrying on here then, how could anyone possible read or make sense of anything with nearly fourteen thousand people on it?".

Since then, the chorus on various sites has become rather larger than merely fourteen thousand. The background noise is incredible. I'm amazed any signal gets through at all vs the constant noise to be honest.

Spirits walk among us.

It should change slightly, I think. It should now include questions to filter out idiots who believe what this Anthropic loon just stated.

It's not either/or though - if you're generating more than you're using, then you can redirect that back into the battery (or sell it back to the grid). I have limited winter experience at the moment, but the battery is fully topped up during the day while still powering the house from solar. That said, the darker nights/evenings right now means you kick into battery power earlier, so for me for example at roughly the same lattitude as London, the battery is drained by about 9pm.

It's interesting to watch and fun too if you're in to that kind of thing. Which, quite clearly, I am.

That's increasingly true here too (UK). I'm on an EV-focused tariff which guarantees me up to 6 hours cheap EV charging per day, and in addition there are lower, cheaper overnight rates for the electricity.

What's been noticeable recently is that these periods are now tending to be different. I've been driving EVs for eight years and on roughly the same tariff (the 6 hour cap is new), and usually the "cheap EV charging" and "overnight low rates" coincided. Now however, I've noticed that if I plug in the EV during the day it pretty much starts charging instantly and you're right - I could say that's 100% around lunchtime. My usage means I can't really take advantage of that much since I commute in the day and plug in in the evenings, but it's still a noticeable pattern for the days that I am either working from home or its a weekend.

Completely agree, however this should just be rolled into the "how much does a data centre cost?" bill. Add the solar, add the necessary battery storage...that's your cost. Not "we'll build it without anything and hope everyone else will give the power instead".

It's not, but that's where home batteries come in. I'm a new'ish convert to solar, having had it installed in March and so this will be my first winter with it. I also installed a 12kWh battery to go along side it. The combination pretty much takes care of all my daytime home usage, although it does not take care of my full usage since I also have an EV.

I charge the EV overnight, plus top of the battery on cheap overnight rates. Result is barely any daytime usage for me. How that translates to a 24 hour data centre of course is a question in its own right, would they start affecting the overnight rates? Hmm.

They're brilliant at making games. They have their suite of exclusives that people love and will buy the console for. And they keep a consistently high quality bar for those games. Even the worst Mario game was still good. Same for Zelda. Same for Metroid. As long as they keep that the case, and their consoles are reasonably priced they'll sell. Which, combined with cheaper parts, is why they generally made a profit per console rather than a loss.

Xbox and PS don't have that. They used to each have some exclusives- but they've gone away from that road due to the high cost of creating them (Nintendo's focus on gameplay over high end graphics also reduced the cost of making a game). Even the exclusives they do have don't have the reputation for quality- they tend to run hot and cold. And MS in particular has waffled between wanting to push xbox vs PC gaming, reducing the number of exclusives as they launch on PC. It leaves them in a place where there's no driver for their new product other than better graphics quality. And with the economy tightening, that's something that will be dropped first.

Do they work with my Monster Cables?

USB-C? Apple were laughed at for only including USB-C on their laptops and there are still weird antique societies around keeping USB A kicking when it should have been buried over a decade ago.

If you mean only the world of phones - Apple changed their charging and connection standards three times. 30 pin -> Lightning -> USB C. Each one lasted about a decade, which is what they always said. Lightning came out in 2012, USB C didn't even exist as a standard until 2014. Should they have changed yet again after two years, thus annoying everyone?

Meanwhile, over in the rest of the world you had an assortment of barrel connecters, USB Mini, USB Micro, USB C. USB C emerged the winner (although you still get these hateful USB A->USB C power-only cables. I hate the USB C 'standard', never know what cable you're picking up), and yes Apple was arguably forced to change but then so were others. I'm still plagued by more USB Micro devices than I am USB C, a connector that Apple entirely skipped (thank god).