Meanwhile, the Alexa team is hoping to have a conversation with ChatGPT on how to successfully monetize Alexa.

The infection was already there. Anyone who'd invested in any mortgage derived securities was compromised because the underwriting and scoring process was fundamentally fraudulent. Securities are rated and, at least in theory, those ratings are supposed to reflect the degree of risk. But the scoring agencies essentially became captives of the folks minting the securities and just handed out great ratings like halloween candy.

The Fed and the money printing and all that -- concerning as it all was -- really had more to do with making sure the national banking industry and therefore the currency didn't fail. There was a moment there when it really felt like a financial 9/11... like everything could come crashing down all across the world as a result of something that happened in Manhattan.

It's just an anecdote, but I vividly remember the short-term credit markets freezing up and everyone collectively realizing that nearly every business in the country uses short term credit to manage cashflow so that they can decouple employee paychecks and infrastructure purchases from sales and client payments in terms of timing. Most people just didn't know that and, without credit to make the accounting process move fluidly, like half the country was looking down the barrel of "well, we'll pay you when we know we have money in the accounts."

It's easy to run the Fed down now, but we were one or two days away from a grim fable with an unhappy, bloody ending.

This all powerfully reminds me of the deals the big banks like Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns struck back in 2006 and 2007. If you're too young to remember that particular shitshow, the mortgage industry was fundamentally toxic and a bunch of securities were created by mushing bad mortgages in with good ones so that the combination looked secure enough to invest in.

And then THOSE securities were subdivided up and repackaged into even more securities. And so on. And so on.

Bad debt ended up "infecting" the entire market such that it was essentially impossible to invest in "safe" mortgages and so, when the collapse happened, many of the banks found out that the bets they *thought* they were making to hedge their bets on the risky side of the housing bubble were, in fact, just MORE BETS on the risky side of the housing bubble.

At this point it's essentially impossible to invest in technology without investing in AI which means its very hard to bet against AI in the tech industry. And that feels very, very dangerous.

Have US tech companies considered following the laws in the countries in which they wish to operate?

That may explain it. I have a Qrevo S, which is from 2024, while yours is from 2022. The only thing that it ever gets stuck at is one spot where, from under the couch, it can see out the ground-level window, and get stuck between the couch and window ledge (not actually stuck, just confused), because the LiDAR sees out the window. And I fixed that just by setting a small exclusion zone there. It never "gets lost" - maybe your house has some vast open spaces that it can't handle? But the LiDAR seems to see pretty far. The only other issues I've had are things like where I'll have a loose cord on the floor or some large piece of debris or whatnot, and even then, it's usually good at not getting stock on them. I'm also impressed with how well it deals with doors vs. a Roomba - my Roomba used to always get itself locked in rooms by accidentally closing doors after it entered, while the Roborock really tries to avoid ever touching them.

The Qrevo S has actually rotating mops, and they do a superb job with the floor. Spotless. My robot has the hardest mopping job in the world, too - it has to clean under my parrot's cage, and he poops off the edge onto a plastic mat under it ;)

I've never had to contact support - hopefully I don't need to :)

although map editing sucks and it often gets lost and can't properly reset its position. It needs to be rescued pretty often which is a major fail.

That's very distinctly not my experience. What version do you have?

A real vacuum cleaner just about maxes out a standard residential 120v 15a circuit, as anyone who remembers the incandescent bulb era can attest to. A circuit with a few lamps shared with a vacuum cleaner could easily end with you flipping a breaker or replacing a blown fuse.

When you look at the absolutely tiny lithium ion pack these robo-vacs come with, ...

Sitting on my kitchen table right now is a drone pack. It's 57,5Wh, smaller the batteries of most modern Roombas. It's 50C - thus it can output up to 2,9kW. And there's even higher packs available than that. Lithium ion cells can handle some truly high power outputs. It's *energy*, not *power*, that is their limitation. Run a pack at 50C and it'll be empty in a bit over a minute. That said, on hard floor surfaces there is absolutely no reason why you should be drawing more than 300-400W or so, and you can get by with well less than that. High powers are for like shag carpeting and the like. Also, the head matters more than the power (though of course contribute) - for a hard floor, for example, a fluffy roller head is ideal.

Pet hair has never been an issue for me with robots. My long hair always is. It's way longer than any pet's.

Yeah, my Roborock has rotating mops, and I can say with 100% certainty, I haven't lived in a cleaner house since I moved out of my OCD mother's place as a teen. You could eat off that floor.

Facts. I used to have a Roomba for years, but as I live in Europe, it was getting increasingly hard to deal with modern features (like the self-emptying base which needs 120V power). I reluctantly switched to a Roborock when my power converter died, and just, wow, they're light years ahead of iRobot. I think iRobot has been coasting on its name for a while now.

Well, I'll have to admit, I didn't have "learning that someone on Slashdot believes that the Cold War was a myth" on my bingo card for today.

Who needs school when we have TikTok?

Now that they've gotten rid of this woke DEI nonsense, they can spend 10x as much on some more wholesome and less-indoctrinating educational materials! /s

You seem to be confusing "wanting to get rid of communists" with "wanting their countries to be poor and dangerous".

USAID was horrifically corrupt

The cuts to USAID are projected to cause 14 million extra deaths - a large minority of those children - by 2030. And USAID engendered massive goodwill among its recipients

But no, by all means kill a couple million people per year and worsen living conditions (creating more migration) in order to save $23 per person, that's clearly Very Smart(TM).

And I don't know how to inform you of this, but the year is now 2025 and the Cold War and the politics therein ended nearly four decades ago. And USAID was not created "to smuggle CIA officers" (though CIA offers used every means available to them to do their work, certainly), it was created as a counterbalance to the USSR's use of similar soft power to turn the Third World to *its* side.