Maybe it's me who lived in apartment with much simpler floor plans than everyone else, but I never saw the need for room mapping and navigation.
I've always use the randomly going around and bump into things models, and they have always been good enough for the daily cleans in house with cats.

I really don't care how silly they bump into thing as long as they keep the pet hair low in their daily runs.

What I do care about are the batteries, but luckily after-market LiIon batteries that integrate their own BMS inside the battery and are drop-in replacement for Roomba, boosting up the run by a large factore arre a thing.

A bit, but not much. (random example off AliExpress, that use this synaptic chip)

There's no real reason why latency should be more than a couple of "scan-lines" (well, at least the DSC's equivalent horizontal-lines, if the signal needs conversion between compression variants). And there's a big incentive: less on-chip built-in RAM - it's litteraly cheaper to make the chip only keep the most recent relevant data and immediately start streaming out the HDMI 2.1 signal as soon as possible, rather than keeping multiple entire frames.

Most, but not all. I litterally have a DisplayProt to HDMI + DVI + VGA combo dongle on my workstation at home.

But they tend to by a tiny bit more expensive (think 10 bucks instead of 1 bucks on AliExpress. Or 50 bucks at your local TV shop), because they require a dedicated chip inside the dongle.

Depends on the device. Can happen in some professional projectors: some enterprise-grade projectors can litteraly support "any protocol over any wiring with enough pins", i.e.: the presence of a HDMI, DP, DVI or VGA connector on a given port is mainly a convenience. This is so you could reuse wathever cabling is embed in the walls, you don't need to tear down the walls and redo the cabling (which could get expensive in a large conference room). This is also the reason you could find ultra cheap passive VGA-to-HDMI cables on AliExpress/eBay/Amazon for the last segment between the VGA port built into the lectern of some old university lecture room and the laptop outputting the HDMI that the projector is actually configured to fetch from the VGA cabling embed in the walls.

Yes, that's litteraly how the SteamDeck handles this.
The SteamDeck can output DisplayPort on its USB-C connector (similar to tons of laptops and some smartphones), and the SeamDeck's Dock has a dedicated hardware chip that does the translation into HDMI signal.
This way no need to tweak any support into opensource GPL'd drivers inside the SteamDeck and then risking running afoul of HDMI's licensing restrictions.

The problem is that unlike Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, Valve isn't selling a closed box with proprietary blob.
Their hardware runs Linux with a close-to-upstream kernel(*).
Among other, they are using the FOSS stack: Linux kernel driver, user space Mesa libraries, etc.
All this is GPL meaning that the code is released (or at least pull requests with the latest are wainting to be eventually upstreamed)

And the HDMI's licencing currently prohibits making that code available (or conversly, GPL means that every body should be able to read and modify the code that does HDMI 2.1 shit even people who haven't paid the license).

(*): except for the dock. The Steam Deck's dock has a dedicated chip that does the USB-C DisplayPort to HDMI conversion, so no need to tweak anything on the drivers running inside the SteamDeck.

Jokes aside about Thanksgiving...

The difference is that food is part of(*) rights to an adequate standard of living as per Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Not dying of starvation is a fundamental human right.

So yeah, I get that you're joking about somebody throwing an excessively opulent Thanksgiving party and then complaining that it costs a bit much.

But making sure that every single person has access to sufficient food is a core job that government has to do(**). You can make jokes around what constitutes "sufficient", but you can't deny that nobody should die of starvation.
On the other hand, making sure that your Ponzi scheme doesn't implode before you had time to make it to the bank isn't the government's job. At best government's job would be to regulate in order to make it less likely that unsuspecting idiots get caught up in such scams.

(**): Yes, I understand that from the US' point of view, I am an evil Euro-communist and my country is some socialist hell-hole.

(*): along with "clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."

You do understand that government budgets don't work like balancing your home expenses, right?

In the mobile space this is basically why Valve (unlike their competitors) is not releasing a new console with slightly bumped up specs every few months, or why the line-up of Steam Decks only vary in specs (storage, screen type, cosmetics) that don't affect performance (same APU for all, the gains from the newer process used in newer OLED's APU is used to reduce power consumption, not make the APU go faster. The entry level and the top of the line Steam Deck will give you the same FPS) (unlike, e.g, Ally vs Ally X which have different APUs).
This means that the Steam Deck has been a stable target to optimize for.

(And the Steam Deck is also useable as a portable computer, too).

The problem is that overweight people are more likely to come from lower socioeconomic levels. (i.e.: obesity rate are high among poorer people).
So you're putting additional financial burden on people who are already struggling financially.

I agree on the "cultural" problem part, though my own impression is that the insane-level of car-centricity also plays a role.

contrast: I also have a high education and a computer desktop job. I do spend 1 hour commuting each day by bicycle. Here around it's much more bike-able than in the US. Lots of parents here around have cargo bikes, kid seats, etc. to bring their kids (and I'll probably invest into something similar once our daughter is old enough for after-school activities). Whenever my wife plays tennis, she travels to the sports terrains on inline skate. Cars do exist here around, but they are absolutely not a necessity.
(and not exactly car, but still same philosophy: my university building is not a skyscraper, it has a mere 10 floors in total from basement to roof-top cafeteria, so climbing stairs up and down when going to other floors is trivial to do).
Whenever I am not at the keyboard I am moving.
Whenever the titular 70% US adult is moving, it's just a couple of steps between their desk and their car.

What I hope is that some large enough entity (and the EU and its Digital Service Act (DSA) seem a good candidate for that) will force OpenAI to always clearly mark ads and promotions (similar to how sponsor segments are required to be marked in online video content made by streamers and youtubers).

Because of course OpenAI will try hard (and sell it so to advertiser) to make the advertisement sneaky and seemingly "organic recommendations" (as a reference point see how Ads on Google search results evolved from clear ad boxes on the side, into trying as hard as possible to mimic search results and have the people accidentally clic on them). And of course OpenAI will try to bullshit their way into publicly saying it's hard to track what though process drove the chatbot into recommendation something, while at the same time the marketing pitches to advertisers will be guaranteed perfect blending of ads into the chat flow.

Note: I'm not playing the devil advocate to say that EVs are a bad idea(*) compared to ICE.
I am merely playing the devil's advocate to point out that there's a kernel of truth underneath these poor arguments.

(*): Private cars in general are a bad idea compared to having an efficient and well designed public transport system.
Even an ICE bus would be more efficient than all its passengers each driving their own private car, and it only gets better with trolley bus, tramway, trains, etc.

But that requires have a well organized public transport system. That's not the case (yet) in all countries.

Playing the devil's advocate:
ICEs (specially with a manual transmission as found often here around in Europe) also have ways to slow down without using the brakes, but instead having the wheels drag the motor:
motorbraking.

It's like with EV, minus the "regenerative" part.

It's a normal driving technique that's taught (especially if manual transmission is available) for the exact purpose of making the brake pads last longer.

So EV's "regen" braking doesn't bring that much more to ICE's "motor braking", except that electrical motors are much better at slowing down the car without stalling the motor, so there are few situations where a ICE would have required hitting the brakes where an EV could have slowed down purely with regen.

By that time point (2000s), Glide itself wasn't that much relevant: most game engine relied on high level API (DirectX 3D as you mention, and also OpenGL: Quake3 had already been out for 1 year, and "mini GL drivers" that serve as an adaptation between high level OpenGL and low level such as Glide were all the rage).

Very few engines had Glide-specific optimizations.

API exclusivity wasn't playing a role anymore.

But failing to have distinguishing features that attract users did play a role.

VSA-100 in Voodoo 4/5/6 had a few interesting new feature (*vastly improved Voodoo 1, 2, and 3's ability to do "pseudo 22bit": more than 65k colors in 16-bit modes and to avoid error and dither amplification in 16 modes; new FSAA with a rotated grid that both allows better edge anti-aliasing and circumvents the need for anisotropic filtering; motion blur for supporting games; better texture compression, etc.) but these failed to attract users' interest (I suppose most users didn't even understand those features), whereas Nvidia managed to gain more users' interest with better number in 24/32bit modes benchmarks and some marketing around T&L (despite T&L not being that much actually used in games of that era -- better CPUs with SIMD achieving similar scene-processing in practice)

The next generation would have been more interesting with 3Dfx plans to add programmable pipelines with Rampage and Sage ("Spectre" graphics cards) instead of fixed pipelines (i.e.: to add geometry and pixel shaders in the parlance of high-level API like D3D and OpenGL) but it never reached market, only prototypes existed when 3Dfx folded.
Though some of that development eventually helped the GeForce FX

Well, look at Apple's iPhones...

Speaking the Sega Dreamcast, the whole snafu of "Katana" (the actual NEC / SuperH + PowerVR) vs "Black belt" (competing prototype with a 3Dfx gfx card) also did cost quite some money to 3Dfx and accelerated their demise.

The main problem is that PowerVR works in a way that is completely alien when compared to everything else (outputting fully-rendered tiles, when everyone else is drawing polygons one-by-one on a pair of frame and depth buffers).

And tile-based-rendering's performance boost is less significant when there are more transparency layers in a scene which is where most of the industry was heading. (So the advantage that Kyro II had would have melted away with successor cards).

Speaking of TBR, 3Dfx had acquired GigaPixel to get patents to such technologies, did toy with software-based hidden surface removal (HSR) that worked in some OpenGL engines (Everything built on id tech 3 / Quake III engine) and was hoping to add hardware HSR with TBR in the next iteration of Rampage/Sage ("Spectre 2" / Mojo) but never got there before folding.

(And again, more transparency layer in scenes would eventually have made the performance gains less significant in future games).

---

*: Even the venerable Voodoo 1 "Pseudo 22bit" 16bit modes are different from everyone else on the market.

All competition used pure 16bit math pipeline. When combining multiple pixels (multi-texturing, transparency, effects, etc.) rounding error accumulate. It's even more visible when Bayer dithering is used (with an Intel integrated graphics core back then, this was visible on, e.g., Quake III's logo which had multiple translucent flames effect. The errors accumulated with each layer and the logo ends up looking like a checkered board.

In contrast, when in 16bit mode, all 3Dfx chips run at "pseudo 22bits" internally and on their video output, and combine the value of 4 sources pixels (hence the 2 extra bits per channel), less error accumulate on translucent layers, less visible dithering on the output.
On Voodoo 1 and 2, this is simply done by using 4 horizontally adjacent source pixels, giving the characteristic "slightly horizontally blurred" visual effect that is typically for early 3Dfx cards.
On Voodoo 3, the 4 sources can be also arranged in a square and there's more logic in how to combine them (I suspect something like conditional blur, but never read any full description)
On Voodoo 4/5/6, the chip introduces multiple buffers (2 per chip, up to 4 buffers on the most common dual-chip Voodoo 5) (equivalent to OpenGL's accumulation buffers), which introduced tons of cool efffects (introduce an offset between the buffer, and you get both antialiasing on the edges and the same result as anisotropic filtering by using plain trilinear on texture surface; render each buffer at a different time increment, and you get motion blur; etc.) - but this also allows even less blur when pick the 4 sources pixels for "pseudo 22bit" output (just pick 4 pixels at each same coordinate on each 4 buffers)

3dfx also did a couple of pretty stupid things: at a time when most 3d companies were just making chips and collaborating with 3rd party graphic cards manufacturer, 3dfx decided to "cut the middle man out" and produce their own first-party cards instead. Cue in all 3rd party graphic cards manufacturers switching to use Nvidia's chips instead (and also some trying this new ATI that was starting to enter the 3d chips market).

Yup, if only there was some small Central-European country that could have demonstrated that direct democracy could work at the nationnal level.
But no, nope, there absolutely none, nothing to see here, move along...

The main missing point on your list:

- popular initiatives and regularly held referendums (i.e.: the general population voting on most decisions, and bringing new decisions to be voted upon).

i.e.: what a *direct* Democracy (a.k.a. the only *true* Democracy in the sense of directly giving political power (cratos) to the general population (demos) - not merely putting, in decision-making roles some "representatives" who will be then subject to legalized bribes... huh... sorry to "lobbying")

You might notice there's a certain overlap between "country that follow direct democracy" and "country which avoided the last two rounds of world war" (despite rampant fascism at the same time in the rest of the continent around). These might be at least somewhat linked.