Even if there is no alternative, and internet for some reason is an absolute must, I'm not above cutting a ribbon cable with an exacto knife. Dead screen on fridge is better than ads on fridge.
YES! I replaced my GE fridge because it broke with a new Samsung and I was amazed that the fridge was perfectly happy to work without a filter. The GE one had a goddamn RFID sticker on it, which made replacements $80-100 as opposed to the previous RFID-less ones (which were internally the same damn thing) which cost about $20. If you wanted to put in one of the $20 filters, you had to watch a YouTube explainer video of how to carefully remove the RFID from a "donor" filter, carefully install it on the new filter, and ignore the fridge warnings about how it needs to be replaced constantly.
With Samsung? Remove the filter, done. It has a built in bypass when no filter is present. We don't bother with filters, our water tastes fine from the tap and aside from ice, we use water from the kitchen tap 90% of the time anyway.
There's a cell IOT signal designed for single kb/s that is so cheap it's basically free. I know because my former company did some testing on these for IOT devices like temp sensors, water sensors, etc. Those devices were usually less than $20, and included a battery that lasted months.
Something like that can't serve visual ads, but it can send fingerprints of your activities so they can be served to other devices with higher speed connectivity.
I love our samsung fridge and microwave. They "just work", have no screens, and the features they had were perfect for us. We replaced old GE devices, that were about 5-6 years old and broke. Not saying you should change your opinion, just that individuals can have different experiences.
If builders built things the way vibe coders do, the first wood pecker would destroy the building. Fixed it for ya.
A lot of the cost is involved with the training. AI companies got caught in the "stealing public work" cookie jar, and that's unlikely to be allowed to happen again at any meaningful scale. That means new AI cos are unlikely to form. They are more or less out of places to steal from without actually paying someone, and that will increase costs as well.
Facebook's LLaMMA is OSS only because of how far they know they are behind, and even to get there they got sued for stealing from pirate sites to train their model. Deepseek cost less (though not as little as they claim) mostly because they very likely utilized OpenAI to feed their model.
OSS is being stolen at an epic pace, and the licenses don't matter because no OSS dev or group has the money to take an AI company to court in this env.
None of this is sustainable nor "here to stay". Eventually AI will have to start training on AI content and that's where the death spiral starts because the hallucinations will compound and constantly add up.
Huh, funny... You actually thought Fox News was "news" and not a show or "entertainment side of media"?
Probably not. They tend to scream READ THE TRANSCRIPTS, but when asked if they, themselves, read the transcripts, the answer is no. Honestly kind of like Christians and the Bible.
I mean... yes... because I'm not a brain washed person who can think independently...
I keep hearing about left leaning bias in the media, but when pressed tor any evidence, people making the claim rarely can supply any. Instead, they tend to provide only evidence that reality itself has a "left leaning bias" because the right leaning ones lost their grip with it.
So, I'll give you the opportunity to try to back up your claim now. I'll go first...
Fat chance of catching it anywhere else.
That's what Bittorrent is for...
TBH as a owner of EVs since 2012 and an all in owner (no gas left) since 2018, I can say I have no idea. Because I have used L2 chargers for almost everything and think I used super chargers maybe 3 times ever. I haven't used them in the year since I traded in the Tesla's for Ioniq's.
While I have no doubt fast charging can matter. I think the actual need for it is overestimated by non-EV folks.
As a three time Tesla owner, I can state their cars were not low quality. In virtually every possible way they were better than any Big 3 car I ever drove. Owned a 2016 S that I traded in for a 2022 S. Wife had a 2018 3. Both traded in last April.
We ditched our Teslas last year for Ioniq 5's, but that decision had nothing to do with the car quality. I just couldn't keep dealing with the Musk that hovered in the air being a Tesla owner anymore.
True to a point. Legally they can't take the funds off the books, but they do re-appropriate it into other projects to cover up for any extensions to the national debt that they seemingly have no meaningful plan to repay. So while they aren't "stealing" it and are technically "borrowing" it, the reality is they seemingly have no plan on how to pay back said borrowed funds.
That's why discussions about reducing benefits and such come up because it's a way to reduce the cost of the IOUs congress has spent years issuing.
So the logic that I've heard by someone who sounded reasonably intelligent (ie: not MAGA) is that Social Security has a hard limit on the payout side. To offset the fact that there is a payout limit, they also limit the amount of income that is brought into it. Reasonable people can argue if that should have been the case or not, but it's a decent justification of the income limit.
Remember SS was never designed to be another tax. It was meant to be a taxpayer funded safety net with very strictly defined benefits. Congress already basically steals from the SS fund to do their pet projects. Now imagine if the SS fund exploded because there's still a benefit limit but no income limit. Congress would simply rob that money too. So removing the income limit without addressing the benefit limit may just make things worse, unfortunately.
"Don't tell me I'm burning the candle at both ends -- tell me where to get more wax!!"
