And because where income is high, cost of living is high, and the marginal cost of children goes from "investment in the future" to "big hole I sink money into".

Oh, there are also "reaction" channels with an anime character in lieu of an actual human reactor. But again, those are older and probably not what the article is talking about. (I suspect those may have got started because there were people who for one reason or another wanted to create reaction content without showing their face, which is fundamentally unworkable for obvious reasons, but that doesn't always stop people from trying things.)

I think it's talking about the AI-generated science-fiction stories that keep showing up in the sidebar (if you use the default-view mode). If they're talking about the ones I'm thinking of, the titles are typically along the lines of "We thought everything was fine, until the humans came," or some schlock like that. I've never actually *watched* one of the videos, but I don't need to; you can tell they're AI generated from the thumbnail and title. I've hit "Don't Recommend Channel" on at least a couple of dozen of them, but of course the AI slop purveyors just keep creating new channels (in much the same way that low-quality manufacturers keep creating new unpronounceable brand names to flood Amazon search results with hundreds of copies of exactly the same thing).

There are also channels where an AI voice just reads the comment section from a reddit thread, and the video is a loop of recycled junk gaming footage; but those have been around for a lot longer and so are probably not what the article is talking about. Also, until you've seen (at least the first few seconds of) a handful of the videos, it's not obvious from the thumbnail and title alone, just how lame those channels are. The new ones are much more obviously AI-generated.

This practice is unsustainable, and makes trash processing less sustainable than it is today.
Once again , pure idiocy and lack of foresight.

Eww.

Just grab some sheet music that's too old to be under copyright, and run it through a synthesizer. You'll get an uninspired performance, but at least the composition will be good. Much better than AI-generated slop.

You're saying, I should *not* drink weed killer?

Well alright then. I'll keep that in mind, thanks.

So what you're saying is, the job LLMs are really best suited for is acting.

Or generating scripts for a children's program called "Let's Play Make Believe".

I've always loathed the term "Nintendo Tax" because it implies some kind of penalty, like a wealth tax or a vice tax. Though I can't argue that it's not a real thing - Nintendo's best games hold their market value far better than rival games, even from other top-tier Japanese developers.

Still, I would approach this phenomena from the other direction. Nintendo is not able to maintain high prices because they're somehow fleecing people (as a tax would imply), but because they work to make games that stand the test of time. And then back it up with a sales strategy to match.

So much of the industry treats video games as ephemeral entertainment - something to consume, and then throw away as you move on to the next game. It's the traditional media model for TV and movies extended to interactive media. And for most of the industry it's an accurate observation: game sales are ridiculously front-loaded, and few games (especially single-player games) have a long tail. After the initial hype subsides, you need to lower your price quickly in order to keep unit sales (and thus revenue) from cratering. All the while you're already hard at work on next year's game.

But Nintendo has been able to channel the lifecycle of board games and card games. In their eyes they aren't creating media, they're creating a digital plaything. They're creating something that you'll play now, but you'll also want to play next month, next year, next decade. Case in point: Mario Kart 8 is 11 years old and the only thing that has really diminished its value (and sales) after all of this time is that it finally has a successor in Mario Kart World.

When is the last time you saw a permanent price cut on Monopoly? Uno? Settlers of Catan. The occasional sale, sure. But a copy of Catan is still going to sell for $40+, even today. That's the business strategy Nintendo is tapping into. If a game is good - like really, really good - and it's repeatedly replayable, then why does the price need to be cut soon after launch? Why can't people come along and discover it years later? Why does it need to be priced like it's a quickly depreciating asset - like a movie instead of a board game?

And that is the ultimately where the Nintendo Tax as we know it comes from. Make a game good enough, make a game gamey-enough, and don't devalue it by replacing it 3 years down the line - and it's something people will want to buy even years later.

Though this is a relatively recent phenomena. It's only after we hit the PS360U generation of hardware that systems had enough processing power and memory for games to not be constrained and do whatever they want. And that games stopped being obviously dated in terms of visual when compared to the previous generation. It's no coincidence that this was the last generation where Nintendo offered their Nintendo Selects line of discounted games.

someone needs to step up and act like an adult!

2035 ??? are they for real?
Without major intervention now, by 2035 we're likely to breach ~1.6–1.8C warming, with escalating extreme weather, melting ice, and climate tipping risks.

To stay on a 1.5C trajectory, global emissions need to drop by ~57% by 2035—but current policies are headed in the opposite direction .

Yet the truth is that were already at ~1.6 C
The truth is we are already seeing mass displacement of people and multiple breadbasket failures just as was forecast in 2019 or earlier - yet .. still more time and energy wasted on studies and conferences that lead nowhere and only tell us what we already know .... Were basing government policy now on lies , propaganda and greenwash.....

Arctic sea ice is forecast to see glacierfree Septembers at least once by ~2035
Permafrost thaw, wildfire intensification (e.g., Canada’s record fires), and disruption of ocean currents are increasing faster than projections predicted .
climate “tipping points” (e.g., Greenland ice sheet melt, coral dieoff) may be reached between 1.5–2C, now increasingly likely before midcentury .

2035 my arse

Sorry, but no.

I mean, on the one hand, sure, eventually _something_ else will displace the US dollar as the world's leading reserve currency, because that's how history works: nothing stays in a dominant position forever.

But the statement you added "yet" to was much more specific. And no, Communist China's ridiculous "dedollarization" propaganda campaign is not going to have any measurable impact on the dollar's dominance, any time soon. Among other things, the RMB has never been anywhere near stable enough to make it into the top five currencies, and as things stand now, it looks to only be getting worse. It's relatively heavily traded, but it's not stable, at all. (Contrast with, say, the Canadian dollar, which is stable enough but nowhere near heavily-traded enough.)

The further into the future you try to look, the more difficult it is to see clearly, but if I had to predict based on what we know now, I'd say the currently-existing currency that is most likely to eventually unseat the US dollar would probably end up being the Euro; the Pound Sterling and the Japanese Yen are potentially also in the running. History is seldom predictable, and it'll probably end up being something we cannot forsee right now; but even something like the Brazilian Real, has a much better shot than the RMB, which will never be stable with the CCP in power, and probably cannot survive the CCP's collapse.

As for gold, that's not new, at all; we know what its role is, and that isn't changing. People have always turned to precious metals as a reliable store of value whenever financial times are tough. And that generally works except when new technology messes things up (e.g., what happened to the price of aluminum when people figured out how to do high-temperature electrolysis). For gold, the most likely new technology to mess it up would be if somebody managed to devise an energy-efficient way to extract the dissolved gold from sea water; but even then, gold would still be a precious metal, just not quite *as* precious as it is now. (The total amount of gold in the oceans, is only a few times the quantity of gold in circulation, and less than the amount of silver in circulation.) Short of affordable transmutation (which would be *much* more disruptive than just lowering the price of gold), I can't think of any other way to turn gold into a base metal like aluminum.

Honestly, I can't think of a single use case for bluetooth on a desktop computer, that isn't better served by some other set of physical-layer and data-link-layer standards.

For a cellphone, yes, it makes sense to have e.g. a bluetooth headset.

On a desktop computer? Are you kidding? I don't even. *Maybe* on a laptop, but even that is a bit of a reach.

With that said, Windows 11 is undeniably a terrible OS option for a desktop or laptop, either one. Its main use is to make a modern multicore 64-bit system with gigabytes of RAM, perform like a Pentium-era single-core system with RAM measured in megabytes, spending most of its time ignoring user input while it swaps memory pages in and out. In case that is an era of history that you wanted to revisit, for some reason. Nostalgia for the Good Old Days, perhaps. Enjoy.

I'll be over here using a system with a virtual memory subsystem that actually works, and an update subsystem that doesn't try to store half the internet in virtual memory every time there's an update. Because I like being able to actually *use* my computer. Call me crazy.

Honestly, I think there are probably more such users on Libera chat (the largest IRC network) than on Slashdot at this point.

Once again more evidence to suggest were in the final few years of this civilisation. Everything is going according to plan.

Their population absolutely dwarfs Canada and the US as well, so that isn't much good, is it?

BTW, remember the secret of Ti Kwon Leap- Anger is a weapon only to one's opponent.