There's always the option of going Linux for your main OS and using VirtualBox for the 1 or 2 small things that still require Windows.

(Spoken from personal experience a decade ago or so. By now my universities' office 365 can run in Firefox (container) tabs, ProtonDB on my SteamDeck is stellar, I don't own any electronic gizmo that requires a Windows app to sync/updateetc.(*), and I don't care enough about anything else to dust off that VM)

(*): By now electronic gizmos either have Wifi to update themselves (though this comes with its own bag of problems) or have other routes (SD cards, USB sticks, dfu-utils on Linux, etc.) like my Linux retro handheld.

lolwut?

One is suddenly making available to the regular person at home a tool to do computations (despite a lot less complex and powerful) that was previously available only to universities, government and corporations,
while the other is money extraction scheme designed to keep hopes of growth and confidence in stocks of a few big corporations who are in a race of "who is going to build the largest possible datacenter / boil lakes the fastest / and completely break the internet with AI slop?"

To keep with your computing metaphor, it's as if we where in a timeline where "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" wasn't merely a mis-attributed quote to Thomas Watson but was the official company goal of anyone making computers, with the large corporations trying to out compete each other buy luring investors with the false promise of becoming the one corporation that will get a monopoly and build those 5 behemoths. And the general public could only get to do computation be renting extremely expensive glass terminals and accoustic modems (but currently temporarily offered for free while each corporation tries to gather more users than the competition).

(Regarding current usefulness of AI: mini AI models running locally would be the actual game changers, but it's not going to get any much emphasis while the corporations are currently busy in their arm race, and there are tons of ethical questions around training of models and the slop they produce).

You haven't been paying attention to the 143 pages of legalese in the EULA, have you?

(In a time-line where Disney would try to lawyer out of a allergy death on the grounds of the arbitration clause of a trial subscription to a steaming service couple of years before, I am only half joking)

No love for cheese fondue?

(sad kitty eyes, while holding a caquelon in the hand)

>Big announcements were made for sub-10kg laptops (22lbs).

I had a backlit Macintosh Portable (actually, I still have it, but it needs recapping). In its carrying case, and with power supply and spare battery, it came to 26 pounds.

Which was the same weight as the desktop Macs of the time.

I actually hurt my shoulder lugging it through an airport once.

I think it was the powerbook 180 that replaced it on which I had a problem with airport security--they wanted to see a C: prompt. I think it was finally a manager that told him to let me through.

better yet, set an activation time at which a few weeks worth of drones will simultaneously activate and attack a range of Russian sites . . .

uhm . . .. let's see . . . "In soviet Russia, the data backs *you* up!" ?

I understand your knee jerk intuition about crypto currency. But very earnestly I suggest learning a bit about monetary policy. It's indispensable. And after that you may want to read about bretton woods and how banks in different countries actually can trade money to each other. The US treasury and its impact on monetary policy enables this. It's not just a methodology in the sense that bitcoin is a method for moving money. Monetary policy is how countries can perform the miracle of Keynesian economics to regenerate Growth in a downturn. That cannot ever be done ever without fiat currency and a central bank. Period. This was. Why for example Germany plunged in to pre-hitler ruin after world war 1. There was no way to climb out of turned down economy when you had no gold reserves (France took them). Germany only managed to recover when they pegged their mark to a kilo of wheat-- not a long term solution but a desperate move that mostly worked. But the economic malaise didn't end till Hitler started spending money into the economy. That was made possible by moving off the gold standard prior to Hitler.

Without monetary policy you are left with the austerity of Austrian economics which pretty much inverts the rational of monetary policy and loses all it's advantages.

If crypto ever rises to rival the dollar you can kiss the USA goodbye because it will mean the end of monetary policy and central banking. If you say good riddance, I think you may not understand how the world works

It will be about five minutes before someone is using this thing to do bullshit like prank call doctor offices to ask for pricing estimates for things like penile enlargement.

What is even more infuriating is when they literally say "Call for pricing." That almost certainly means they're either going to be overly pushy, or they're going to try to screw me over. You know, "adjusting" the price because of how much they perceive they can bilk me for.

Yeah, I think every generation thinks this.

But honestly, if you haven't found anything full of human spirit and culture, that's probably on you. There's still tonnes of original music made by indie bands out there. Go looking for modern punk/reggae/ska bands that are writing protest songs. Maybe explore some of the culture of other continents--I've heard that French African music is undergoing a bit of a renaissance (and there are plenty of European french people lowkey mad about it because they never like slang coming in from outside the country).

But even the pop stuff--yeah, it's generic. It always has been. That's what makes it pop music. But they've still picked up on the last 20 or 30 years of musical trends and integrated them into their songs. The tone and musicality of the songs has shifted slightly. It's not for me either, but it's not meaningfully better or worse than the pop of the past, tbh, it's just not MY music.

AI slop is so much worse, because in general, it's ONLY copying music from a single genre. Remember that musicians today probably listened to a bunch of stuff when they were young. If they're kids of GenX, they would've heard their parents' music growing up and then integrated some of that into their own work. You get weird crossings over of genres and sometimes something interesting pops out.

Anyway, AI slop can only ever be as interesting as the average of the current corpus of human music. It has no feelings, no experiences, no struggles. It will probably never write anything as hilariously bad as 'Friday' by Rebecca Black, which came back around and accidentally became the zeitgeist for a brief period, and now is actually weirdly nostalgic for a lot of people that experienced it at the time.

I made this Slashdot account 20 years ago when signing up for anything pretty much guaranteed you'd be spammed to Hell and back. I merely presumed Slashdot would do the same thing.

C++ is also largely changed by a committee. Honestly, the best thing that's happened to C++ in its whole lifetime is that the committee started ripping features off from other languages.

Gone are the days where a language can be designed, written and MAINTAINED by a single person. I don't know why we'd even want that, to be honest. Committees are fine as long as they get the job done.

VPNSecure.

I too bought a "lifetime" VPN from them through Slashdot deals. Started off great, then one by one they shut down their nodes til only 5 eyes locations remained. By that point I'd switched to something else, but they sent out a long "woe is us" e.mail explaining why lifetime didn't mean that and if you'd be so kind as to buy it again at ~20$/year, we'd be ever so grateful.