My brain is a mystery box and random stuff, mostly created by others, streams into it via my nerves on a daily basis and has done for decades. It seems to be effective, at least to me.

re: "Marketing geniuses removed the headphone jack."

USB headphones can be had at dollar stores, and Bluetooth earbuds are ubiquitous. No, I think the answer is just that many people are selfish, inconsiderate, entitled assholes and don't feel the need to repress it anymore.

I encountered a couple of these at a large restaurant... two gangstas (whom my wife was afraid was going to shoot me) who pulled out their multiple smartphones and insisted on playing tinkytinky hiphop that was far too popular a couple of years ago, as loudly as possible. I didn't say a word or look at them but simply started playing jazz on my phone. They stopped. I stopped. They started, I started. They seemed to get after a couple of iterations and didn't play it anymore. YMMV.

re: "That was the day I realized people have no business FORCING these on people and I promptly disabled that shit."

Could be worse... at least you get to disable it. In Canada our thankfully-soon-to-be-gone fed. gov. legislated all phones sold in Canada to have it baked in the firmware that this can't be disabled, muted, minimized, etc. The alerts got over the 911 emerg. channel so even come through without a SIM, and it maximizes the volume and plays through the phone speaker overriding anything but a physical hardware jack shutting it off.

Caveat: Every time I post about this some non-Canadian will explain how I just need to go into setting-such-and such to disable it. I will proactively ask them to kindly STFU as they are wrong.

Trump and his party have or will have the presidency, House, Senate and Supreme Court... minor inconveniences like NDAA and anything else done in the Biden administration will be annulled.

re: "They're just doing the classic internet approach..."

The classic internet approach I was thinking of is Betteridge's law of headlines

"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

re: "...masks and vaccines made a big impact, right? /s"

From the last COVID deaths stats:
US: 329.48 million population, 1,021,276 COVID deaths
Canada: 38.01 million population, 42,219 COVID deaths
(Source: statista.com)

So the US has 8.668x Canada's population, but had 24.19x its COVID deaths. 24.19 / 8.668 is very close to 2.8. The US has had 2.8x as many COVID deaths per capita as Canada.

Canada had/has higher rates of vaccination, mask use (with or without mandates), lockdowns/isolation and other COVID measures. How else could we have only 0.35x the COVID death rate?

It certainly isn't some ethnic resistance as Canada is one of the most ethnically diverse countries on Earth.

It isn't that we're socially isolated through living far from each other either. Because Canada is so northerly/cold, most of our population lives close to the US border; Canada is even more urbanized than the US.

What, then?

Their cost is about a tenth of lithium ion per unit of storage and they last 17x the number of charge/discharge cycles. The technology has been developed and is being scaled up for commercial use and are expected to be on the market in the next couple of years.

As would be expected from iron. they would be too heavy for mobile applications, but are perfect for stationary storage.

"We management already own paid-off homes in this vastly overvalued city, so we don't care if you're unnecessarily stuck wasting well over half your income for a one-bedroom dump to be within commuting distance, instead of investing in an owned home somewhere distant but affordable."

You win by default, Elon. You're always the biggest dick.

Right. AI cars only kill people sometimes, so we should focus on the really serious life-threatening stuff like copyright and DRM. Gotcha.

I do IT support, and have seen an excess of hardware failures on USB-C laptop charging ports due to stress on the connector; this was very rare with the proprietary connectors as they were larger and sturdier. It's more noticeable on a small device ie a smartphone if there's tension at right angles to the USB-C charging cable, but on a larger and heavier device such as a laptop this can be easily overlooked.

It's very similar to HDMI-Mini which I consider a failure as I don't see it on modern cards anymore; the weight of thicker HDMI cables could bend the connector. Never saw this with regular HDMI.

Smartphones and actual tablets (no folding or keyboard) only please.

High-energy neutrons released in nuclear reactor cause the reactor material to become weak and brittle over time. In a fission reactor, after about 40 years of operation the reactor has been weakened enough that it may require replacement.

The neutron flux per unit area/time in a D-T fusion reactor is ~100x that of fission. The entire reactor vessel could possibly require replacement every half year or so unless a workaround for this is found. Even if planned/engineered for such as by a replaceable sacrificial liner, it would still be undoubtedly very costly and require the reactor to be shut down and started up to complete the replacement.

Meanwhile, we have enough energy in conventional fission reactors' waste alone, if it is properly put to use, for a century of power needs. I can't see fusion power ever being as economically feasible.

This reminds me of an software project to algorithmically moderate conversations ie forums and social media through natural language parsing.

One of the functions was identifying discrimination, ie racism, in language. It turned out that An Unnamed Ethnic Group's posts kept being identified as racist, ie they would being people's ethnicity into conversations they had no purpose being, and use racially charged language to describe themselves and others.

The solution for that was to introduce bias into the completely unbiased algorithm by identifying if the writer was a member of the Unnamed Ethnic Group, and if so, then adjusting accordingly to make their fails into passes.