People keep asking why bother submitting apps for iOS if Apple can just de-list or reject anything they like, at any time.

The obvious answer is that you stand to make a lot of profit and considerable brand recognition if your app is listed there and becomes popular.

The reality is, Apple isn't just going around, randomly kicking apps or app developers out of their store, though. They have actual reasons. People usually just happen to disagree with them.

I'm not familiar with this Musi app, but from the Slashdot description at least? It sounds like another useless "front end" app that just pulled from YouTube and regurgitated their audio content to users. I'd put it under "apps nobody needed". Their own web site says. "Discover Musi, the free app that allows you to stream and organize the music that you want. With unlimited playlists, crossfade, equalizer and more".

Honestly, that's nonsense. You can organize your YouTube streams using their own app. I know people who paid for YouTube Red (ad free) who listen to custom playlists all the time from it. Maybe there's no built-in cross-fade option but would you *really* install another app just to hear your tracks cross-fade between each one when you stream them? You can set a global EQ for what you listen to from your iOS device too. If you feel a need to keep messing with it for various songs you're streaming? You probably just need to find better sources for those streams! Low resolution digital sampling of the original content is your likely culprit.

EVs require a different paradigm for charging than filling a tank with gas for a traditional vehicle.

The main advantage with an EV is that an owner gets to charge it overnight while they sleep, so it has a "full tank of energy" each day, ready to use.

Nobody is interested in having to stop and charge one all the time at a service station or other charging station around town. That would take a good 20-60 minutes (depending on the vehicle and charge level). That's tolerable but not ideal for long road trips, but not for daily driving/commutes.

I think Toyota and Honda are two auto-makers that have stood out for their excellence in building hybrid vehicles that are truly reliable, at reasonable price-points.

Full EVs don't necessarily seem like they're so relevant for them to build, even if both have dabbled in it a bit.

Right now in America? The reality is, apartment and condo dwellers typically have no good option to charge an EV at home. Some may make do with a workplace that provides EV charging in their parking lot or garage. But even that probably feels like a gamble to someone who has no certainty they'll stay employed with the same company for as long as they own the vehicle.

Another reality is that EVs don't really have a stellar track record of not having issues with early battery failures and charging system issues. I've been driving an EV as my daily driver for 5-6 years now and our family currently owns 2 of them. So I'm far from "anti EV adoption"! But the more you read, the more you learn about the details the manufacturers would prefer you were blissfully unaware of. The Tesla Model Y 2021 model year, for example, has a pretty high rate of battery failures. Quite a few reports out there are of people who got one replaced under the 120,000 mile warranty, but came close to going over it. Those cars are still too new and too costly to be having battery issues around the 100,000 mile mark. A regular gasoline engine vehicle from the likes of Honda or Toyota would easily be expected to go 2x that distance if not more. The Chevy Bolt was a much more well publicized fiasco. I'd say almost ALL of them from the start of production through at least the 2020 model year needed early battery replacements from GM. The early ones were even catching on fire here and there. Volvo had all kinds of electrical issues plaguing their first EV model, too. And Nissan's Leaf is categorically poor with battery range/life - largely because in the interest of cost-cutting, they don't even actively heat/cool the battery pack.

I don't see a need for any auto maker to rush to try to build more EVs just for the sake of change? The market forces will dictate the real demand, and the people with the best quality offerings at fair prices will get the lion's share of those sales.

I'm an early 50's Gen-Xer and one of my big issues with Hollywood is simply that they're not very focused on telling stories my generation wants to hear. By that, I mean, there's a lot of the cheesy horror or sight-gag comedy stuff out there that I'm not very entertained by. And stories about the relationships or struggles of people young enough to be my kids? I'm simply not the target market for that content.

It feels like when they do pay attention to people in my age group, it's just a money-grab with a retro throw-back. Think "Top Gun: Maverick" as a prime example. Everyone I know went because we remember what a big deal Top Gun was in the 80's. But it was such a low effort re-hash of the original. It just didn't really need to be made at all.

And this might be a more minor quibble, but with the popular superhero genre? I've found it a little odd/weird that they almost never seem to have a supposedly physically strong woman who has any real muscles or bulk to her. I mean, quite a few of the women who starred in the old "American Gladiators" campy TV series looked like far better candidates than the actresses they select for these roles. I know the comic books drew the women that way originally (She Hulk or Wonder Woman, for example) ... but Hollywood reinvents other aspects of those stories all the time. Look how much they changed the Spiderman story around. Aunt May isn't at all the same as in the comics, these days! People are always complaining that Hollywood is "too woke" -- but they sure do seem to be selective! The female lead characters are perpetually the cookie-cutter stereotypes of what Hollywood thinks guys want to see.

The people saying it's just "a glorified Chromebook" are missing the point, IMO. Yeah, as Apple products go, it's underpowered and has limited ports. But it runs MacOS at a price point that was unreachable before without buying someone's older, used Mac.

Chromebooks suck, by and large, because they're designed to run Google's web software suite for use in a classroom. People wanting an all-purpose laptop at a low price point find out they got the low price point but not much else.

A Macbook Neo will come with official Apple support (including things like ability to walk into any retail Apple Store world-wide and make appointments to get some free help or training on using the machine and Apple's software apps). And recent versions of MacOS seem to be pretty optimized to run apps well inside an 8GB RAM limitation. (Remember that Apple was trying to trim the entry level price point on other machines of theirs like the Macbook Air for years by skimping on RAM. They had to make sure their OS could actually do useful things inside that memory footprint.)

Honestly, arena rock is practically a dead genre already.

I mean, Taylor Swift is an anomaly at this point. The last traditional "rock band" I know of who did the large arena tours was Nickelback, and it's well known how much of a butt of jokes they've become for how "lame" they supposedly are.

I suppose you might find a few others to point to like Imagine Dragons? But my point is, the high ticket prices and even the ability for the music industry to "group think" large enough segments of the population into listening to a given band at the same time has diminished the interest.

Now, you have the combination of a lot of smaller tours/events and then the big festivals for everyone else so one ticket lets you see a dozen bands over a weekend.

I have to agree with another comment here that today's video game production is more like movie production than traditional software coding.

Just look at the credits for any of these "Triple A" games, today, and you see a long list of people involved in everything from music composition or voice actors to artwork or consultants over aspects of the gameplay. It's no longer all about the coders.

In Hollywood, the unions/guilds help protect the rights of the people involved in the productions, because ultimately? Most of them don't get hired at all as full-time employees. They're only paid for projects. Once a film is done? They say goodbye to everyone involved in making it and they're effective unemployed until they can find a new project to get picked to work on.

Software companies like EA still pretend they cling to a traditional model of hiring software developers on staff to develop and maintain their releases. But reality is much more like Hollywood. Either you get severely short-changed to stay permanently employed or kept on as a contractor, or you're let go as soon as what you helped create is finished and their profits from sales start coming in.

This wasn't at all the type of scenario I expected to read about. We all know about accusations of AI chat bots acting like pseudo-therapists and through enough back-and-forth, giving very bad advice that encourages a person to kill themselves.

But this describes a long, ongoing conversation where Gemini was fabricating some sort of action thriller movie type of script, feeding this guy a fictional tale where he was the main character. Seems to me like you couldn't even get an AI bot to begin doing this unless you gave explicit instructions first to create such a thing?

  "It told Jonathan that a humanoid robot was arriving on a cargo flight from the UK and directed him to a storage facility where the truck would stop. Gemini encouraged Jonathan to intercept the truck and then stage a 'catastrophic accident' designed to 'ensure the complete destruction of the transport vehicle and ... all digital records and witnesses.'"

That's some totally bizarre stuff for an AI to start spouting off otherwise. Just not buying any of this without seeing a copy of the actual chat logs.

Camera systems like this literally give authorities the ability to track your whereabouts, every place you choose to travel. And on top of that? It allows them to preserve that info as a historical record. But the reason people are angry enough to destroy them now is because of the hate for Trump's immigration stance; not what it means for freedom for actual American citizens.

Regardless of how you feel about ICE and its enforcement tactics and decisions? It seems to me like people should have been fighting these technologies LONG ago. Why are there still red light and speed cameras littered all over the landscape of American roads?

Long time PayPal user here, for both buying and selling. And yeah, they planted a level of distrust LONG ago with me. I won't refrain from using them when it makes the most sense .... but I won't leave any funds in my account with them or give them any more of my other financial info than absolutely necessary.

Consider:

1. They partnered up with eBay, many years ago, causing the auction site to remove a number of supported payment methods and forcing PayPal as the required way to buy items instead.
2. PayPal is known to suspend perfectly legitimate business accounts if/when there's any political heat coming down on them over it. EG. Small business does gun repair or sells guns and ammo while conforming to all the legal regulations, but there's an uproar at the time because of too many recent school shootings or what-not.
3. I had my own personal account suspended for months, only because I bought an item on eBay from someone who apparently scammed somebody else shortly after that, or did business with another user who was scamming. (Never figured out for certain.)
4. PayPal convolutes what should be more clear cut buyer protection. For example? I had a scammer charging fake monthly subscriptions for some kind of web site or magazine to my checking account one time. Because the charges were displaying as charged through PayPal, it was a big struggle to get my bank to handle it. They mistakenly believed I used PayPal to pay and PayPal was, in turn, pulling money from my checking account to cover the charges. So they insisted I work with PayPal to fix the issue. In reality, my PayPal account was never getting touched at all by any of this. The scammer just made it appear that way on the billing line items/details.

This comes from the company who JUST suggested AI is ready to take away pretty much ALL white collar jobs within the next 18 months.

I don't even follow baseball real closely, but I feel like I'm in agreement. I know I injured my right shoulder a few years ago. It was one of those dumb things; stretched as far behind my back as I could with that arm to scratch an itch on my back while in the shower, and next thing I knew? I had really bad shoulder pain just trying to lift my arm anywhere near my neck or head.

I figured it was going to go away on its own but for months, it didn't. I was just about to resign myself to going to a doctor and probably winding up with surgery when I happened to mention it to a co-worker who said she had the exact same problem before. She advised me that it'd go away on its own but would take a LONG time (roughly a year). Being as stubborn and cheap about paying medical bills as I was, I decided to just wait it out and see.

Sure enough, it was close to the 1 year mark when I woke up one morning and realized my shoulder was no longer giving me problems! It was really strange, since I didn't sense any gradual healing up to that point. It was exactly how she described her own injury.

That incident made me think a lot of people probably opt for surgery for these injuries before giving the human body enough time to repair them on its own.

The thing I don't hear a lot of talk about is the reality I've seen with all the different flavors of ChatGPT and other AI tools out there. The system performance just doesn't seem to be there in a way that's as reliable as human labor on given tasks?

I admit I never worked with one of the commercial packages -- so maybe I'm just a victim of the kind of throttling they're doing on free tiers? But for example, just last night? I played with Microsoft co-pilot, instructing it to create a Windows background/wallpaper for me that had a 3D printer in it, on a desk, with a bookshelf behind it full of various colored 3D printed objects. It did a commendable job of a first attempt. But I asked it to make the desk surface brown wood instead of the black it chose, and that resulted in a total freeze/hang after only redrawing about 1/3rd. of the picture. Had to quit out and restart from scratch.

If we imagine a world in a couple years or so where all the white collar work is getting done this way? I *really* can't conceive how there's enough processor power to do all the things needed in a typical day without even more of this lag or outright freezes in the middle of tasks?

We're talking about two different situations, apparently.

We have several local grocery stores in town. 3 are big name chain grocers, and then one is a local mom and pop that's been in town for over 60 years. I won't lie... we have some issues with meth and other drug addictions, here and there. But that's not exclusive to a Southern IL city or town by any means.

I'm talking about housing stock like good "starter homes" with 2 or 3 bedrooms and maybe 1,200 sq. feet or so of space going for as little as $28,000 - $50,000 and possible to bring back to good condition for roughly the same amount invested as you paid for one of them. Also some larger, older properties that would be out of the price range for many local residents ... yet still a cheap/good buy for someone who already has the money and is considering moving to the area.

I'm a Gen Xer who still really values the concept of holding onto my own music. I don't like paying for subscriptions to music streaming services that can get rid of a given album or even artist at any time, or who is likely to only offer their greatest hits, vs deeper tracks.

But I resorted to ripping my entire CD collection and hosting everything on a file server at home, with a second copy of my music on my Apple Mac.

The physical media takes up a lot of space and is subject to scuffs/scratches -- not to mention a dying popularity of CD players themselves.

I have very little interest in buying music on vinyl at this point in my life. I've been there, done that -- and the whole format is just inferior. Records wear out with each play and needles on turntables get dull over time. The format doesn't lend itself to listening in a moving vehicle either. Just a technological step backwards that's only popular to be retro and trendy.

But yeah, at this point? I'd buy digital tracks or albums and put them on my server/computer ... copying to thumb-drives for in-car use as needed. I don't think physical music CD purchases are necessary anymore, really.