When this change was made many Slashdotters said it was ridiculous.

Cayenne8 said: "Yeah, my first thought was WTF would they ditch the very popular and VERY well known company name "HBO" for just Max? Seems like the latest round of marketing folks coming to businesses these days haven't a clue about the job they are trying to do, and how it all works."

Then we piled on from there...

An American dream for the very privileged: Getting paid generational wealth despite messing up so badly.

Will the typical person be able to tell the difference between a human and AI voice reading the stories?

Certainly the best-sellers will retain humans, even famous humans, to read their books. But for the rest, AI could save them a lot of time and money.

Hopefully this technology will spread fast and then every book will be available with narration on many platforms. That would lead to price competition and competition for quality. Let the free market decide if this is a good idea or not.

What prevents one or a handful of IDs from being used by millions of people?

An obvious solution for that problem would be for every ID verification to be cross-checked against governmental registries.

This is also very convenient for the government to 'protect the children' and 'fight terrorists' by knowing every 'sensitive' thing that your ID has been registered to have had accessed. Your personal liberty will certainly be secured by this enlightened system, and no dragnet will ever ruin your reputation and good standing.

Oh, and if things you have already accessed are later deemed to be 'sensitive' then could that blemish be added to your permanent record after the fact - long after you had a chance to decided to click the link?

Bring a sled! This slope looks slippery.

This seems like a distraction for the driver. Distractions cause accidents. Accidents cost money.

The lucky drivers of these vehicles will pay again in higher insurance rates.

Will this be a 'feature' in rental cars too? I do not want this feature.

Use AI to maximize productivity &out compete your peers: Get a job!

Use AI and lose your ability to handle irregular situations: Lose a job!

Everything will be fine as long as nothing goes wrong in a novel way.

These new rules sound useful for customers on Steam. Since Steam is a heavy weight this could impact game sales across the industry. The other game service providers don't even have to explicitly follow suit in order to benefit from this; cross platform games could meet Valve's expectations across platforms as a consequence of doing this for Steam. Will Microsoft, GOG, Epic, Apple, Google Play, Sony, Nintendo, and others follow suit?

The free market works when there is competition. A similar DLC rule from the FCC might not even be as effective of Steam doing it. Sure the FCC might get around to suing some company for breaking the rule, eventually. But Steam can knock a company down, right in the pocket book, as fast as customers complain with merit.

I look forward to seeing how this plays out with customers of Steam, purveyors on Steam, and competitors to Steam.

Protesting is completely possible. If there is a will to make a subreddit unusable as a sign of protest, then invite 'bad posts' and upvote them. When the many lurkers log in and see the same protest pictures & posts filling their feeds, the protest message will get out.

Reddit relies on the uploads, likes, and shares of the masses. The attention of millions of people is filtered through the actions of relatively few moderators. If the mods are mad, then they can allow the feeds to funnel garbage. Without a complete redesign for how Reddit works the ability to direct the attention of the visitors will rest with the mods. That is power; political power..

Reddit can solve their reliance on human mods by investing in robots. Reddit can solve the robot uprising another day; kick that resistance is futile can down the road.

I never liked the concept of overloaded operators, one symbol with multiple meanings based on the context of the variables it is used against.

Sure, it might save a lot of lines of code if done properly. Sure it might be intuitive to the original developer and support team. But someday before the sunset of the system, someone is going to read that code for support or upgrades and be in one heck of a mess. I preferred to use clearly named functions instead of overloaded operators.

The part of wellness programs that made me avoid them: Onerous requirements to share my data.

I loathe the idea that for a tiny little benefit, even a cash deposit, I would have to give up data on my steps, workouts, diet, and other out of office habits. Some programs also came with an app on my personal phone. Most came with more email, which I didn't want to read, and advertisements for even more programs/ books /classes that I did not have time for. The wellness programs reduced my wellness by increasing my stress!

After trying the programs the first year they were offered, I opted out thereafter. This also increased my stress because my spouse was upset I was missing out on some cash for enrolling and sharing my data. bah!

"By monitoring tire health, tire grip, vehicle weight distribution, and other critical parameters, engineers can anticipate potential problems and schedule maintenance proactively, reducing downtime and extending the vehicle's lifespan,"

More likely: The manufacturers will use this data to sell more parts, maintenance, and nice-to-haves which really should have been included in the first place. The manufacturers will use this data to monitor customer adherence to subscriptions and to sell more downloadable content on a subscription basis. This data will be used to avoid lawsuits and expensive recalls.

Articles like this are less useful when they point out all the optimistic possibilities without talking about how those ideas make money. In my opinion, once money enters the equation, as it must to exist in the reality of our timeline, the optimism typically boils away to neutral, at best.

It is possible to annoy YouTube by harassing the content creators, the very content that YouTube relies on to deal ads.

If there were a concerted effort to downvote/ dislike every video that won't play because ad blockers are blocked, then the content creators would see the trend and move on to other video sites. YouTube would have to respond ...

I wonder if the content creators already see negative impact on their video views due to ad blockers being blocked.

Today's Unity story might be a follow-up on yesterday's story, "Unity Says 'We Apologize,' Promises Changes to Previously-Announced Pricing".

Two front page Unity stories in less than 24 hours almost made me skip the 'dupe'.