FYI: Apple discontinued their Time Capsule in 2018 without replacement.

You can use it as a living room gaming box; my wife uses it like that often. She uses it as a handheld when playing old arcade games on an emulator, but for more serious games she hooks up a big screen, keyboard and mouse in the living room.

Why do you think the Dutch authorities are now blocking the acquisition of Solvinity by some US based firm? Solvinity manages the servers for the national identity provider scheme (DigiD).
Personally I don't think the government should be using 3rd party clouds for anything remotely critical. They have the scale to make running their own infrastructure worthwhile financially, and the know-how to run it effectively.

Pragmatic? The decision was made at the very last minute despite the grave risks having been pointed out months ago. No action was taken. Now they unnecessarily blocked the takeover instead of taking actual pragmatic action. Such as: offering Solvinity to let the acquisition go through, if they are willing to end the contract for this service early, and sell the servers that are already living in a Dutch government-owned data center to a new partner willing to operate them.

"Competing with things in even higher orbits" is exactly what they are doing in this scenario. Round trip to a Starlink satellite with on-board AI compute is less than 100ms. Round trip with older satcom systems like BGAN to a base station is 700-1500ms. This in an environment where regular radio transmissions are highly unreliable, and putting the processor on board is not viable. As I said, it's a niche application, but a real one, and there may be others.

Low latency AI edge computing. There's several military applications, such as directing drone swarms or even providing AI to individual drones.

I'd be more than happy to invest in SpaceX, the space company. Sadly the company has been poisoned with X and xAI. Looking at the market valuations of each of those individual companies, that doesn't seem to be like a big deal at first glance. But in the IPO filing, the company points out that their addressable market opportunity isn't space, it is almost all AI. Around 3/4ths of their spending in Q1 has been on AI. If you buy into the SpaceX IPO, you're buying into an AI company. Maybe they want us to believe that they will be a vertically integrated AI provider with data centers in space. I am highly doubtful about the latter; there certainly are business cases for having AI datacenters in space, but they are edge cases.

Maybe few people will by enthusiastic to buy into that; even with investing into indices or EFTs, chances are that you're already overexposed to AI. The worrying thing is that SpaceX will be included into the Nasdaq 100 index shortly after their IPO. Doesn't that mean that anyone running EFTs or trackers on that index will have to buy SpaceX stock to cover their position?

Yes because no CEO would want to add new features or fix more bugs per unit time with the same number of programmers; they and their customers are happy with the same rate of progress with fewer programmers.

AI is being used as a convenient scapegoat. If a few big tech companies do layoffs, more do because it's a case of monkey see, monkey do.

Screw immoral. They have been pushing for years now to move from media ownership to it being a license (and a non-transferable one at that). So let's treat it like that. If I own a book in whatever form (physical, digitally, or perhaps stored on an e-reader that is broken and no longer supported), that means I have a license which should morally permit me to format-shift, and own that book in whatever other format exists, read it on any device that is capable, and obtain it by any means that does not amount to actual theft, or constitute distribution (like Torrent).

Personally I buy a great many books on my Kobo reader, knowing that most of them will be gone if the service ever ends. Not a big deal. But books I need to reference, lend out, or plan on re-reading at some point, I will either buy them DRM-free, or get a physical copy. I do wish I could get an actual license for them, one that ensures that I can continue reading that book regardless of what happens to the publisher. Right now, that only applies to physical or DRM-free books.

It's only unethical if it 1) doesn't work or 2) is carried out involuntarily or without appropriate counseling, or without an actual diagnosis. Around here, that isn't the case (or at least it didn't use to be, things may have changed). People undergoing the procedure know full well what they are getting into, they are rigorously screened and diagnosed, and offered options (for some, counseling is enough, for others, hormone treatments without surgery). And given the low incidence of regret, and the generally improved quality of life following surgery, the conclusion must be that both the treatment and the screening work.

Other than the things I mentioned, how do you imagine that gender dysphoria is treated? It's no longer considered to be a mental disorder either, but something akin to being gay: it's all in the head, but it is innate to the person and not something that can be treated or "prayed away".

"It is worth noting that it is at least almost always comorbid with depression and anxiety, and transitioning does not alleviate those symptoms." Actually, it does, to varying degrees. And yes, surgical intervention for a mental disorder seems weird, but it's the best "cure" we have. People with gender dysphoria do not "grow out of it", and the incidence of regret for sex reassignment surgery is low. Very low. 0.1% or so, and to put that into perspective, that is 1/10th of the incidence of regret for knee surgery. At least it was before they started offering the surgery to people not diagnosed with gender dysphoria (and that is a condition almost impossible to accurately diagnose in children and adolescents, for instance)

The depression and anxiety often remain not because of disappointment after the transition, nor other internal issues, but by the acceptance (or lack of it) of transgenders by society. Thankfully that has improved by leaps and bounds: 30 years ago it was unheard of, 20 years ago it was awkward, 10 years ago something to be curious about. These days people hardly bat an eyelid.

Even if training is legal (and I don't concede it is), you still have to have a legally authorized copy to train from to begin with. Unless Meta paid for every book they trained their AI from, they're already guilty of copyright infringement.

When it comes to "(anti) trans crap" (for lack of a better word), the question is not about the biological sex of transgenders, but whether biological sex or perceived gender should prevail in various social contexts, and when one would be considered a transgender (self-declared, diagnosed with gender dysphoria, or having undergone sex reassignment surgery). And so on. They are social rather than biological questions, even though biology does play a role, for instance when considering transgenders in sports.

"We need AI to do stuff we can't do"
I am letting AI do that... for stuff that I personally can't do. I've had AI design logos, make short clips, draw cartoons, create avatars for online use, write and perform music. I can't draw, sing or perform for crap, and since this is all for various hobbies, I can't afford the humans who can do all that either.

Not the "brain drain" we were worried about...