Their entire business model is that you are reliant on their servers to run AI. The last thing they want is you buying a power PC that can run it locally.

The only hope seems to be that Chinese manufacturers are improving rapidly. Already a lot of mid range products are using Chinese RAM, and they are supplying DDR 4. Once they reach competitive DDR 5 and GDDR levels, the price should come down.

Same with SSDs. The only decent offers are from Chinese brands using Chinese flash memory, like Fanxiang. The performance isn't mind blowing but they have proven to be reliable.

It's funny you think that China is communist.

It's because they are already invested in the Apple ecosystem, i.e. lock-in, or because it's the default safe choice for people who don't know much about phones and tablets and computers.

Android has better privacy protections, if that's what you care about. You also have the option of running a privacy focused version of Android, like Graphene OS. Even on standard Android you get extensive privacy controls and access to F-Droid, an app store for open source apps that bars anything which requires Google's services to work.

Android has supported IPv6 since the early days. I've got an ancient Galaxy S3 that I was seeing what I could do with, and that is on Android 4.3 which supports it.

Unless you are trapped deep in the Apple revenue farm, I don't think there is much point buying an iPad these days. At the low and mid levels Android tablets are cheaper and more than good enough for sheet music, web browser, most games, watching video, and so on. At the high end, Samsung tablets are better anyway. Better pen for drawing, better handwriting input, better screens etc.

Gouging, but also Chinese tablet manufacturers can use Chinese made RAM. It's a bit lower performance than the latest DDR5 stuff, but it's fine for tablets and quantity is more important than speed here.

Have a look at the price of AM4 Ryzen CPUs now, even used. They have shot up because DDR4 RAM is cheap.

That would suck. Some of the best features of modern EVs are that you can do things like pre-cool them remotely, and they take a lot of the effort out of cruising long distance with lane following automation.

The best outcome would be if such features were available with data not leaving domestic servers, or even better being able to use your own home server.

A better reference would be automotive batteries. 100kWh is on the larger end, but still fits within a typical European mid size car.

I have some portable ones. They aren't really the sort of thing you would need at home though, more for public areas where people come and go. Cafes, offices, that sort of thing.

Sort of concurrence, but on behaviorist grounds. In general I think theoretical and clinical psychology have as little scientific validity as most economics, but applied psychology has made a lot of progress in selling soap, toothpaste, and lying politicians.

Give the man his funny, but the real question is how much "exercise" the immune system needs to receive and even the best AIs still have no real idea on that one. Ditto diet and physical exercise about about 20 different things.

My joke? It don't matter much. Still gonna die. And I bet you wanna complain about that, too.

In the morning?

I have a really funny idea for how to use computers to make voting better rather than ever more meaningless. Just as a tangential-topic typing exercise, I'll share it:

Still needs a good label, but the key ideas are ranked guest voting and equalized representation. Guest voting would allow you to pick from a neighboring district, which would be even more effective when your district has been aggressively gerrymandered. The electronic ballot would start with your own district, but you could click to get all the neighboring district candidates. Then you would rank the candidates. Most people would probably stop after a few, perhaps even after one, but why not allow as many as you like.

The next trick is in the counting. Still thinking about this one, but I like the idea of starting with top votes only. It’s simple if the candidate who gets the most #1 votes wins that district. But we aren't done yet. What about the voters who didn't pick a district winner? We'd look at their #2 choice. The voter might have been willing to accept another candidate from their own district, and that might be the winner, or perhaps the voter prefers a candidate from a neighboring district who won that district. On down the list of choices until the voter picks a winner, with the goal of each voter getting to pick a representative that voter actually wants.

Now for the twisty bit: The winning representatives are NOT equal, but rather have voting weight in accord with how many voters they actually represent. The result would be that each voter would have exactly equal representation in the legislature and each representative should care exactly equally about each voter represented.

Oh, yeah. One more wrinkle. What about voters who didn't pick any winner? How about a tertiary election while primaries are eliminated? Those voters would be contacted and get a chance to pick from the winners of their own and the neighboring districts.

I have a much simpler but even sillier idea of how to fix the Supreme Court. But since when has Slashdot been about solutions, even fantasy solutions?

I checked with the AI and it's just research. Completely legitimate scientific work. The AI also said that Anthropic's lawyers must be smoking crack if they think the Chinese government is going to penalize or hinder any AI research in the Middle Kingdom.

Your mileage might vary depending on which AI you ask, but I actually suspect all of them agree on this one. But it is NOT any sort of conspiracy.

Why am I not surprised to hear that Microsoft is using cheap Chinese AI these days? Can't possibly be a lapse to their old evil ways. And no one ever suggested (in my hearing) that Microsoft's lawyers were on crack.

Yeah, low hanging fruit and in a just Slashdot someone would have already made the jokes. Easy to make them better than I did.