A lot of the current concerns around AI very much remind me of the outsourcing trend of the 2000s. Basically keep the senior people in-house, and outsource all the junior positions to some other country with lower wages. It ultimately failed then too, for similar reasons. Too much effort required to review and fix the work, and the removal of a pipeline for new senior people.

Of course the kids are glued to iPads for games and watching videos around the house.
But for me, I honestly haven't figured out what to actually use a tablet for.

I have a nice Samsung Galaxy Tab S8+, which only gets used for watching video content when I'm on airplane flights.
It works well for this, because all the "streaming apps" (which have download features) only work on phones/tablets, and because phones/tablets have great battery life for this. (and because the design of airplane seats makes laptops geometrically uncomfortable to use nowadays)

But I literally only ever use it for watching videos on airplane flights. Outside of that use case, it basically never gets touched. At all.

For nearly everything else I could do on a tablet, a phone or a computer just seems to be a better choice. Am I missing something here?

And if you don't want pen input, it will keep trying to convince you that you do want pen input. It'll even show some floating icons on the screen related to pen input, which it doesn't want to let you remove. If you do manage to make that go away, it'll be back as soon as an update has the chance to flip a setting back.

The aspect ratio really did a number on perception of TV size with the jump to HD.
Its true that 27" diagonal was common during the 4:3 CRT era.
But to get the same vertical size in a 16:9 display, you basically need at least 33" diagonal.

. . .

And the sad part is that anyone could have come to this exact conclusion the moment the product was unveiled. We all kinda assumed it was more of an early-adopter demonstrator at that point, and not something that Apple would quickly give up on the moment reality set in.

Those CPU/TPM requirements being the main reason this is even a problem in the first place. By putting in those requirements, Microsoft has made Win11 incompatible with a huge number of older computers that would otherwise be perfectly capable of running it with completely acceptable performance.

Faster hardware won the race against slower software a long time ago now, so relatively "old" computers are nowhere near as slow as they used to be. Thus the motivation to actually upgrade also isn't what it used to be.

Um, a USB-C port *is* today's equivalent of that standard barrel connector. Except it actually is a standard connector, with standardized specs about what it can and cannot do.

Those barrel jacks have none of that. They come in a variety of sizes, a variety of configurations (both center-positive and center negative), both AC and DC, a variety of voltages, and a variety of current ratings.

Meanwhile, ICE cars keep getting quieter, and aren't subject to such rules. So in a modern parking lot, new EVs are actually becoming the loudest vehicles.
They really should have made the rules based on some sort of decibel spec, not based on propulsion technology.

I'm using a 4k 30" display on Linux, with 125% fractional scaling. No matter what I do, including all of the tips out there, all of the icons and UI controls in GIMP 2.x are microscopic. In other Gtk2 apps (e.g. HexChat), icons and controls are also microscopic but the UI is mostly text which renders fine.

In legacy Qt4 and Java apps, things are also microscopic. But sometimes text is comically huge, depending on how they decide to size elements. Regardless its a mess all around.

Meanwhile, anything built in a more modern toolkit (Gtk3+, Qt5+, etc) looks perfectly fine.

As someone who has a HiDPI display, I find GTK2 apps to be nearly unusable now. So the GTK3 update alone is enormously welcome.

Fortunately, most GTK2 apps are semi-abandonware at this point, but they still tend to have no obvious drop-in replacements.

Unfortunately, there's also long tail of niche commercial Qt4 apps with similar issues, which the vendors have zero incentive to ever update unless Microsoft horribly breaks their DPI compatibility hacks on Windows.

And yet I seem to know a bunch of people who obsessively share links to BlueSky, which doesn't seem to get much media attention at all.

Given how Threads is basically something anyone on Facebook/Instagram automatically has an account with, and how there are obsessive notifications pushing people to open it (whether or not they actually care to), I have a hard time believing any such high-level usage statistics. Simply tapping those notifications by accident, then leaving two seconds later, is likely enough to increase the counter those monthly user stats are based on.

In other words, Threads is the only social network people are likely to use by accident (rather than intentionally), as a consequence if it being pushed by a much larger social network they're already a part of.

That being said, I think a lot of the Model M rage came before the mechanical keyboard market exploded. So for a while, you pretty much had to dig up an old Model M to get an type of experience that Kailh, Gateron, and Cherry (and a ton of boutique downstream brands) will now happily help you get in on.

And because they're basically lawnmower engines, the fumes are actually significantly worse than car exhausts.

There's nothing inherently EV-specific about that gripe.
You'll be pleased to know that even some modern ICE cars now have gigantic electronic displays on the dash these days. I only expect more of that in the future.

Which means that when you do launch the app, your mobile OS has revoked all its permissions and the servers have canceled your auth tokens.
Thus you need to set it up and sign into it all over again, which is where the failure points lie.