Or, what if the engineers who implemented the flawed design all contacted recruiters, got similar-or-better-paying jobs elsewhere, then say "take this job and shove it."*

* I assume being a Windows programmer at Microsoft still has enough cachet that you won't have any problems finding work elsewhere as long as you do it before you resign.

>What if a life in isolation sounds heavenly, how do I get it?

You can approximate this lifestyle by just staying a home all the time and having groceries and other necessities delivered to your doorstep. You'll probably still have to expose yourself to other people in person from time to time, but we are talking a few times a year, not a few times a day.

When I said "Until ... .. the person that doesn't get vaccinated infects someone you love who can't get vaccinated for medical reasons" in my reply to zawarski, I meant if some anti-vaxxer in zawarski's locale infected and as a result killed one of zawarski's loved ones who wasn't vaccinated for medical reasons.

Other readers who share zawarski's beliefs are invited to put themselves in zawarski's place, especially if they have a loved one who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons.

Your point about the anti-vaxxer possibly accepting the death of their own loved one may be true for some anti-vaxxers, but it's not relevant to what I was trying to say.

>by it's nature must record and send everything back to some faceless intermediate

Someday soon it will be possible to do all of the AI work on-device. The only thing stopping it now are the weight and cooling constraints imposed by the teddy-bear form-factor. If you want a low-power AI and don't mind frequently recharging the batteries, you can do it today in a teddy-bear-shaped, teddy-bear-mass cuddly form factor. You will need to handle cooling though.

Connected toys that spy on you, on the other hand....

By the way, the companies that make and sell these toys are putting their stockholders at risk of a future privacy lawsuit. This is one of those times where corporate in-house lawyers should put the brakes on a product until the law is more settled. As it stands now, "will we get sued in 2030 and lose a fortune for what we are selling in 2025" is an open question.

Let's assume 2500 employees lost 2 hours of productivity each. Let's assume the productivity value for each employee is at least $40/hour. That's $200,000. That's far below $862K. But if the downtime were higher and the lost productivity were higher, it at least puts $862K within the realm of a credible number.

Don't forget, cleaning up a mess like this isn't as simple as resetting passwords back and having employees log in and change their passwords. There's also things like making sure none of the accounts were mis-used or rolling everything back to a known-good state in case they were.

.. the person that doesn't get vaccinated infects someone you love who can't get vaccinated for medical reasons.

Those who can't get vaccinated for medical reasons are depending on the rest of us to create "herd immunity" to protect them, because short of living a life in isolation, that's the only protection they have.

... but it won't: The True Believers will believe it is true, and for everyone else, the current administration's credibility on health-related matters died months ago.

The "AI photos" with too many body parts a few years back gave "AI" a bad name.

From the hallucinations and confident-but-wrong output of 2025's text-AI-chatbots, this bad reputation is still deserved.

For most people, It will take a few years of trust-able output from AI before people accept it as mature enough to use without sanity-checking its output.*

* When the day comes that people mostly "blindly trust" AI output we may all be in trouble. That day is probably within the next 5-10 years, maybe sooner.

>Will japan sue for the all the ddos they get hit with?
Cloudflare doesn't have a monopoly on protecting against DDOS attacks.

Sorry, I took a shortcut with the definition.

The longer version is something most people can make at home with things most people already have in their kitchen.

This assumes sugar, butter, milk, fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, dried pasta, spices, cut or ground meat, etc. aren't processed enough to "count" as ultra-processed foods.

>A $1,000 ticket better come with ...

I'd settle for the ticket coming with a signed album of their latest gold record, but only if the record was made of real gold and the gold content was worth at least $1000.

One very loose definition is that if it's something most people can make at home, it's probably not ultra-processed. If they can't, it probably is.

Not the hard-and-fast definition that most Slashdot readers are looking for, I'm afraid.