It's all about keeping the hype machine going. Sure A.I. is improving at a very rapid pace. But it is still not anywhere near to the level of the hype. A.I. is a useful tool but all these A.I. companies are operating at enormous losses. None of them have turned a profit. Many consumers of A.I. are finding out the hard way that A.I. token consumption is more expensive than human staffers. They are also finding out that even a 28% failure rate is way too high. SalesForce, Amazon, Microsoft, and now Ford have backpedaled. Soon the investors are going to want a return on investment. Soon the token cost is going to need to be increased. Soon we will be running out of electricity and consumer electronics are starting to feel the pinch of inflated RAM / Storage pricing after Micron decided to exit the consumer market so they could make over a Trillion selling to A.I. data centers. Apple just raised their prices, others will soon follow. Electric prices are going way up and some places are talking about austere measures to conserve electricity. Those states need to jack up the price for the data centers so they can invest in increasing power production.

There are major advancements in semiconductors that will greatly increase efficiency thus reducing electricity costs tremendously. The problem is it costs trillions and takes a decade or more to retool FABs to use the new designs. There are also nuclear reactor designs that are much smaller and a thousand times safer than what was built originally. But the general public fears nuclear. These new designs make it impossible for a meltdown to occur, etc. Data centers are already pursuing nuclear power if they get past the regulatory red tape.

The problem is A.I. is moving faster than the supporting infrastructure can be built. We need to move faster to keep up. There may be a tipping point and the bubble may burst. It won't kill A.i. but the hype will disappear if the bubble bursts as investors see their money is being burned with no return on investment.

The only thing I ever used a FireStick for was to connect to my media server with an App Store approved app when I traveled and used hotels.Worst case scenario, I could jack in the FireStick to HDMI and connect the power cable to a USB port. It beats using a tablet or a phone to watch content on a small screen. The more modern tech savvy hotels you can just stream via AirPlay or Chromecast to the TV from a smartphone.

The side-loaded pirate streaming apps are what the newbs use who don't know any better.

Sadly, server storage is expensive again...

When applying for a position at a corporation, if you are suddenly thrust into an A.I. driven job interview process. ABORT IMMEDIATELY AND COMPLAIN LOUDLY AND PROFUSELY. Nothing quite so insulting as a corporation hiring but refusing to perform basic human interaction to find an appropriate candidate.

I just bought my first hybrid, the 2025 Toyota Camry XLE. I couldn't be happier! It accelerates faster than my Audi A4 and it more than doubles my miles per gallon. I receive 530 miles per 13 gallons of 87 octane fuel range. I can refill in 3 minutes and keep going like any normal internal combustion engine. Toyota makes the best EVs and everything they learned from the Prius is making it's way across their entire fleet. Lexus as well.

The problem with EVs is the charge network. Only Tesla does it right.I personally do not like Teslas. They look and feel like a plastic shell slapped on an EV skateboard. The interior feels cheap and boring. The time to charge is not something I would ever want to experience on a long road trip.

I am sure the Chinese will build out an infrastructure for EV charging. But they are not known for quality control and safety. So many dangerous Chinese products across the board. Poisoned cats & dogs because they cheated by chemically treating the dog food so it would appear to have more protein than it really had. Lead paint in toys for babies and toddlers. Infant baby formula sickened thousands and unalived many. Cooking oil extracted from street gutters and packaged and sold. Plastic rice, fake eggs, counterfeit pharmaceuticals and endless defective electronics.

I wouldn't trust a Chinese EV at all. I certainly wouldn't park one in a garage attached to your house. This is all Belt & Road Initiative where the CCP helps poor nations but what they are really doing is strip mining their natural resources and sending it back to China. When the CCP is finished they will just leave and those poor people will be left with a toxic mess and deadly products everywhere. Honestly, the Chinese CCP have zero respect for human life. A worker is injured in one of their factories and can no longer do the job. Well bye. That's it. They replace them. Pratt & Whitney sent my father and some other over there in the 90's looking to outsource some parts. They were stunned by the numbers of workers missing an eye, fingers, limbs, various disfigurements such as burn scars. They are worked very hard for very little pay and then they are abandoned when they are no longer productive. There are almost zero safety controls in these factories.

Browsers with privacy features are not breaking websites. It is the website developers coding JavaScript to prevent you from blocking ads by blocking your access to their content. It does not stop A.I. and a paywall won't either. I bet the A.I. companies all have hundreds of paid subscriptions and they mask their identity with fake user profiles. Yes they are paying the subscriptions. But then A.I. doesn't even need to render a page, it reads the code and accesses the raw content then reformats it in an outline summary of the meat without all the junk.

The general public thinks A.I. is real. They are running long chat sessions and going to down rabbit holes when A.I. starts hallucinating. It has really hurt people with mental health issues and the mentally impaired but also the ignorant. I do not think children should be using A.I. without adult supervision.

I want to use A.I. but I am finding it making many mistakes and it's just easier to DIY. Most of the time it's just running web queries and compiling a summary of the key bits of detail. Only sometimes is it useful. There is a lot of bad incorrect information online. Garbage-In / Garbage-Out. A.I. will write code and when you test it, it fails then it's back and forth and maybe you get it working or maybe not. I usually get frustrated with the bot, seek primary source information and figure it out. Sometimes it saves me time and effort and other times it wastes my time. I've seen it make guesses which is why I think it fails.

A.I. is a B.S. Engine and it is faking it till it makes it. Chatbots are not where it is at. I would like a highly focused agent tuned to the task at hand and it needs to be an expert. It needs to be easier to build an agent and train it.

Feed A.I. with hot garbage and you get hot garbage instead of verified vetted factual information. This is why an Enclyclopedia is more accurate than Wikipedia, etc. Human information needs to be processed by humans and validated as correct. Science is all about proving everything. Well not so online with news or social media. Nope that can be completely incorrect and is frequently so.

AI is not intelligent. It's a mimic regurgitating what it saw online. AI is useful for many things but it's not "there yet". It might not get "there yet" until quantum becomes far more advanced than it is now. The hype train is fueling A.I. due to the immense promise and potential for AI in the future.

Lots of stories of companies deploying AI and much like Tesla Autodrive they trust it and end up seriously injured or worse. AI still cannot be trusted.An amateur cannot wield AI without knowing the suject matter at hand. Otherwise, AI will start halucinating and feeding you lies and made up B.S.

Artificial Intelligence is merely a B.S. generator at this point... Sure it can seem really smart at times but completely clueless at other times. It also tends to wish to please you and therefore will lie to you.

This is all done so the government can spy on their civilians. That's what it is all about. The CCP having control and surveillance of citizens using these computers. The state is already a surveillance state and they disappear people and entire families all the time. When missionaries have to lie to enter the country and get picked up at the airport, change vehicles and clothing 5 times. Enter an apartment block where someone has tampered with the cameras and the lights. Enter a nondescript apartment to find 50 people sitting on the floor eagerly awaiting the evangelist preacher from the West. When dissidents have their organs harvested or they are turned into those plasticized human bodies on tour exhibits. Lucky if you only end up in a labor camp. One only needs to look at what they did to the Uyghurs. Many were just executed, the rest were placed into Chinese homes and forced into slavery while they were 'reprogrammed' to accept the Communist beliefs. They have a real Dark Mirror dystopian social score. You can't buy / sell / conduct business / travel without a good enough social score.

DO NOT TRUST CHINA, they are ASSHOLES...

Solar panel efficiency degrades over time, eventually you need to replace the worn out panels. They end up in a landfill instead of being recycled. The panels contain toxic materials and the costs to recycle them are not worth the investment. Wind turbine blades are similarly difficult and expensive to recycle. A recycling center will go out of business if they tried it. So they keep piling up with no end in sight.

Another interesting factoid... If everyone is driving an EV the existing power grid (even one heavily using green energy) would not be up to the challenge of charging everyone's EV. Not by a long shot. We are talking orders of magnitude of additional power being required. Add in business EV use and it gets far worse. A warehouse with say 100 tractor trailers and fork lifts all EVs could not actually be permitted because the power draw would cause problems to the local grid. The amount of wattage required is mind blowing. The business would need to run their own power plant. Companies that have been doing that for decades would include Pratt & Whitney who run their plants on generators powered by jet engines on the ground. They are a defense contractor and needed to ensure they could keep running even if the grid went down. They push what electricity they don't use back to the grid. But were they to take only from the grid; the grid would be incapable of supplying that much power.

What is the solution? We need to start constructing new nuclear reactors using modern designs which are many times safer than the ones we built 50 years ago. It is impossible for these new designs to experience a core meltdown. They can be far smaller and more efficient. They can use a variety of isotope fuels including nuclear waste. You can still take the holistic approach adding in multiple forms of power including green energy. The two main fusion designs are nowhere near practical. Using either high energy plasma contained in a magnetic torus (donut) or many lasers focused on a isotope target are not practical. I believe they recently reached an ever so slight increase in efficiency above breaking even. A UK design is more promising. They fire an isotope pellet into an isotope target, producing a brief fusion reaction which heats solid lithium that melts and generates the heat to create steam. It stops seconds after each firing. So they just fire another pellet every few seconds. This design is inexpensive and can scale and can be turned off near instantly. It has almost no waste byproducts. The problem? It needs to compete against designs that have spent billions perhaps trillions of dollars and such a simple design makes them obsolete. So they have been trying to suppress this new design from reaching fruition.

It's not like some normal worker, he's an executive. They are hired with a legal contract. Don't cry for him and certainly don't take glee in his termination.. He is laughing all he way to the bank. He's worked for Apple for 22 years. He has stock options and a huge salary and one heck of a golden parachute severance package. They might even pay out the remainder of his contract. He didn't resign he was forced to resign and will still get his severance package. Plus keep all the stock he's accumulated much of it when it was very cheap. Apple just wants the bad PR to go away, half the executives likely got the Arthur movie reference and chuckled. It was truly funny.

If the man decides to retire, he's certainly got the funds to do so. Or he might take the rest of the year off and seek another job. He's a tough negotiator who has saved Apple a billion or more of the years. His job is to negotiate a deal. He once sent a certified letter via FedEx to UPS when negotiating a deal with UPS. He's negotiated with Corning for the glass used in the Apple Campus and Apple Stores.

There are newer designs that are more efficient and extremely safe where a runaway meltdown scenario is impossible. Molten Salt is one such example. More fuel options including the use of traditional reactor spent fuel. Far less waste. There's also a new breakthrough fusion design using a high speed projectile pulsed reactor. Every 30 seconds you fire another projectile which causes an instantaneous fusion reaction which heats molten lithium and you exchange the heat to water turning it to steam to spin turbines. It's extremely cheap to manufacture, incredibly safe and far better than fission reactors. It's takes much less energy to operate and avoids all the problems of laser fusion and magnetic bottle plasma fusion designs. It is the most promising fusion design to date.

Mainframes and Sun Microsystems Solaris had A/B upgrade systems for decades. It's not a new concept. Different disks / partitions / slices would be toggled as bootable. PC's had GoBack which kept a disk cache of all system changes and you could roll back in time including the OS as well as all your data. Windows copied this with System Restore in a somewhat limited fashion. Apple has Time Machine. Linux can revert back to a prior kernel release by editing the boot loader. But only for the kernel. Apple's latest macOS and Apple Silicon Macs have an immutable System volume that is protected by SIP (System Integrity Protection), read only System volume, and finally snapshot to the APFS filesystem, signed, sealed and then macOS boots from the snapshot. They invented firm-links which are in-between hard-links and soft-links to mount the User volume directories and make it look like a single disk. They recently added an "Erase all Settings and Content" option which is the same as an iPhone allowing a user to quickly factory reset a Mac. The encryption keys are tossed and the startup wizard re-runs to create the initial user. This was done mostly for security reasons. You can actually dual boot a Mac by creating a new volume within the existing APFS container and both volumes do not need to be sized, they will share the free space dynamically. This allows one to try out a beta, etc. However if APFS is upgraded there might be some issues. It would be a nice touch for Apple to add A/B functionality for the System Volume to enable rollback. But with a Time Machine or clone backup you can recover. Unfortunately, Apple decided to remove the Internet Recovery option from the new Apple Silicon (M1) Macs. If you brick your Mac you'll need a second Mac and a thunderbolt cable with Apple Configurator 2 available in the App Store. That will allow you to revive / restore your operating system. You cannot boot an Apple Silicon Mac from a flash drive installer if the internal drive is wiped. You need to boot strap it with a second Mac and Apple Configurator to restore the specialized partitions and Recovery volume as well as install the OS. Apple may or may not re-address this issue in new releases.

Sure, let's have a secure Linux A/B solution. I am all for it. For decades you did this by hand. Remember all the elaborate partition schemes for Linux? Well one reason for that was to allow one to rollback a failed upgrade. But it was also useful for re-allocating storage as you can move partitions between disks. You would have the root partition a /usr partition a /usr/local and/or /opt partition as well as the /home partition which could be on different disks. Heck with NFS you might only have the bootstrap on a workstation and mount the remaining OS files from the network and all workstations would effectively run the same OS updates and configurations that could be globally changed for all. The workstations also network booted so you could upgrade the OS for all workstations all at once from the server level then replace the workstation boot image. The workstations would network boot the new image the next morning. If something went wrong the SysAdmins would roll things back.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a hardware manufacturer and Linux distribution company creating their own desktop shell as an option and perhaps a default. Providing you have the freedom to change to Gnome, KDE, or even eliminate a desktop environment in favor of a custom environment.

A Rust based desktop shell with accompanying file manager and desktop icons along with virtual desktops, etc. Would potentially be very reliable and fast. If they pull off the necessary attention of detail to all the little things that plague every other Desktop Linux user interface. A multi-threaded file manager that doesn't sequentially copy one file at a time, etc. It could raise the bar by creating some competition. Typical developer communities working on Gnome / KDE are not performing focus groups and evaluating real world non-skilled user feedback. Dropping into the Terminal to accomplish something is a matter of course for developers. However, an end user should never need to do that to accomplish something in the GUI.

I find Pop_OS! to be highly refined above and beyond most other Linux Desktop distributions. I would be very curious to see what they do with a rust based Desktop Shell / File Manager.

Teach the robot KungFu and let it beat the snot out of the mob of unruly youts.

Plenty of corporate applications require a server or external login account (Netflix, etc, etc, etc). Does Apple prevent new startups from doing the same?

Why not install the app for free and require the user setup an account with the vendor's website like Netflix does? Apple won't let you explain it on the iOS app to the user and you have to be careful to dance around their restrictions on directing the user to your sign up / login page.

You don't have to use the subscription API's in your App. But you do have to play by the rules however crazy they may be. Make your website easy to find and easy to sign up. Sure it's not as simple as clicking a subscribe button or in-app-purchase with Apple's walled garden App Store.