microwave labotomy ... We just put the machine against your head here for a bit and those bad urges go away, all better.

Another poster mentioned that it's actually focussed ultrasound.

Still sounds like breaking a piece of a system by stirring the brain with a knife (lobotomy) or burning it out with heat (cauterization), electricity (electroshock) or mechanical shock (blow to the head) - just carefully focused without (substantial) damage to other parts of the brain or its casing.

Ultrasonic destruction of a piece of the brain's reward/punishment/desire/avoidance mechanism rather than persistent unwanted fat.

Garbage regulations like IP create these behemoths. If you want freedom, stop regulating monopolies into existence.

Statism creates billionaires.

Apple's iMessages are E2E encrypted. Only the sender and recipient have they keys to decrypt the messages on device; Apple does not. The new Siri search is run on device also.

You might want to read up on how current hybrid vehicles actually work, 'cause it seems you have more than one misconception going on.

I have. For instance, my latest vehicle is the Ford F-159 XLT,, the full-hybrid model of the F-series pickup truck line. Power train is:
  - 6 cylinder dual-turbo engine. (runs low power but approoximately doubles output when a lot is needed.)
  - 47 HP motor-generator "pancake" on the engine side of the ttransmission, to scavenge / return power to./from a 1.5 kWhr lithium battery.
  - 10-speed automatic transmission, working with the lithium battery;s main alternator to fine-tune match the engine/mogen to the current driving situation. Max power of engine plus hybrid mogen; 430 hp.
  - full four wheel drive.

So it's primarily a gas-engine power train with an electric-car motor mechanically coupled to the engine shaft. Many other hybrids, from the venerable prius onward, are similar, with plug-in variants having a big scavaging/peaking battery good for pure electric operation of tens of miles rather than a minute or so and a wall-powered charger added.

What I'm looking for is essentially a pure electric - totally electronic "transmission" consisting of alternator(s) between the batteries and the motor(s), plus a tiny engine-generator able to burn gas and feed some teens of KW of charging power into the batteries when running down the road or parked near it.
 

Do the Waymo batteries use one of the lithium chemistries including cobalt, or a non-cobalt chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate?

Cobalt chemistries have a higher power/weight and energy/weight ratio, which made them the go-to chemistries for vehicle batteries. But they also produce oxygen when the cells overheat, leading to an unextinguishable runaway fire hazard: A burning cell makes enough heat to ignite the adjacent cells, so the whole assembly of them goes. Bad enough when it's a car's worth, but a disaster if it's a shipping-container sized module of a utility energy storage site. (And even worse when the site is a building full of racks, which someone had "protected" from fire with water-spraying, equipment-shorting system, so the whole site burns up, as happened recently with one in California creating a toxic mess.)

That's why purpose-built stationary lithium energy systems use non-cobalt chemistries - heavier, but a shorted cell just kills itself without getting hot enough to light off its neighbors.

I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids.

But not like the current ones, which are primarily an engine/tranny powertrain with a motor/generator + small battery for scavenging downhill/braking energy for later accelleration/uphill/cruise/power-boost.

I want ones that are primarily a battery-electric with a small aux engine-generator (say 15-20 HP range), big enough to power crusing with a bit left over for gradually charging. That would let you range-extend by the size of your gas tank plus fillups (i.e. indefinitely if only gas is available) or go from battery empty to back on the road in a couple tens of minutes.

The backup engine would only run at max-efficiency speed and could use an atkins-like cycle (see "liquid piston engine") to get the max power out of the fuel. Most operation would use power-grid charging (when available and cheaper than fuel).

It doesn't matter. What matters is the politicians "did something" and the companies followed the law, so everyone is blameless.

FYI: Apple discontinued their Time Capsule in 2018 without replacement.

Yes because no CEO would want to add new features or fix more bugs per unit time with the same number of programmers; they and their customers are happy with the same rate of progress with fewer programmers.

AI is being used as a convenient scapegoat. If a few big tech companies do layoffs, more do because it's a case of monkey see, monkey do.

Even if training is legal (and I don't concede it is), you still have to have a legally authorized copy to train from to begin with. Unless Meta paid for every book they trained their AI from, they're already guilty of copyright infringement.

Democracy is for retards.

Government did this. All of this. Government regulated so much that only a rare few can afford to compete.

This is late stage statism. Retard voters are to blame.

Like you.

Acting - as part of "the arts" - is more play than work for the people who do it. That merits not automating it because without enjoyable things to do, we become nothing but consumption machines.

Why should the movie studio executives, board of directors, or shareholders care? To them, it's a business to maximize profit. You can do that if using AI costs less than paying actors.

Woz, despite his technical chops, had no influence after the Apple ][ days, so while he was initially influential, he hasn't been influential over most of Apple's history.

What if nobody implemented it?

Then Microsoft and Apple among others would be fined per day until they implemented it; or perhaps even being held in contempt of court if the government sued them and won up to and including jail time for executives; or given the current regime, being designated a supply chain risk.

Even if the companies eventually prevail in court, most wouldn't want the hassle or being on the bad side of Orange Man.