This sort of drama was fairly prevalent in the iOS jailbreaking scene even before AI. The issue was mostly that whatever exploit you found, it would get patched right away anyway, so it ultimately ended up being less about producing something neat that the average user could play with and more about bragging rights between the folks finding and implementing the exploits.

Or just buy the "smart" TV and don't connect it to the internet? I fail to see the issue here.

It's sold as a gaming console. At no point does Sony give the impression that you're buying anything buy a gaming console. Additionally, keeping the system secure is typically considered a desirable aspect of a gaming platform, since it's not really all that much fun to play online against people who are using cheats and/or hacked player profiles.

Granted, I do think gaming consoles should be unlocked by the manufacturer once they reach the end of their supported lifespan, as the hardware could then be repurposed for other uses (and wouldn't just end up a useless brick once the servers shut down).

Can't forget the parody, which was incorrectly attributed to Weird Al back in the Napster days (along with just about every parody song).

You did not just diss Dole Whip? That stuff is the frozen nectar of the Gods when you've been walking around for hours in the hot Florida sun.

That market seems to be pretty saturated. Around here it feels like they passed an ordinance that every strip mall must have at least one smoke shop (with the obligatory obnoxiously bright LED signs saying things like "VAPE", "KRATOM", "THC", etc.)

Most of us here should be old enough to remember when people tried to do serious work under Microsoft Windows in the MS-DOS era, and it crashed if you looked at it funny. Another amusing "it's never going to work" technology story was the development of lithium ion batteries. Early attempts to design a working cell kept going up in flames - literally.

It was even one of the old running gags in Disney's Carousel of Progress that new technologies were inherently buggy.
"But we do have television - when it works."

Hell when I worked at Radio Shack as a teenager, the store had all the typical things you'd expect a Radio Shack to have and it was still rare to see any customers. That was still a well known retail chain at the time, too.

Presumably if the store does sell any cars, they're of the toy variety. Though in this economy, $1 for a toy car is still a win.

Haven't you seen Idiocracy? Fox lets Pete and Bernie on their network every once in awhile so their viewers can point and laugh at the "faggot" and the "communist". These people don't even hear the argument, they just see the caricatures Fox has created for them.

The problem with your theory is that if these people really had a problem with "sin" per se, they wouldn't have held their noses and voted for Trump.

Some of these folks don't like the idea of the world being different than the one they grew up in. Others don't want their kids growing up in a world that's different than the one they grew up in. You've also got the control freak weirdos who don't even have kids but hate the idea of other people's kids growing up in a world that's different from the one they grew up in.

Lastly, you've got some folks who just really find the concept of two people of the same sex getting freaky with each other to be disgusting. It's like if you knew your neighbor was beating puppies to death in his house, that'd probably bother you, right? Well, now imagine you've got some weird irrational miswiring in your brain that puts gay sex on the same level as beating puppies to death. Those are the people you just have to wait for them to age out of society before their homophobia finally goes away.

It's fine to point out hypocrisy, but there still are people who are genuinely just homophobic for the same reason Karens will be Karens - they feel if they're not taking some kind of action against what they see as the world slipping into depravity, then no one will.

Also, it's worth mentioning too that the meme of marginalized minorities being the source of their own problems (by making it seem as if most homophobia is perpetuated by self-loathing gays), is itself a form of victim-blaming. It turns a broader social prejudice into an internal problem within the marginalized group, as though if those supposedly closeted gay individuals simply came to terms with themselves, homophobia would largely disappear. It makes prejudice seem less like something society has to confront and more like a problem the minority group somehow created for itself. In reality, plenty of homophobic people are perfectly aware of their own sexuality, or are straight. and simply hold adversarial beliefs about gay people.

For a cost of entry starting at $1.2k, I really DGAF if anyone doubts the authenticity of my phone's photos. For better or worse, Apple gave the Duo all of the limelight this cycle. Everything else iPhone related that they announced felt like they just phoned it in this year.

I don't want one.

But... I'm sure Apple is going to sell* boatloads of these damn foldable phones. There are lots of people who still want the latest shiny, and unlike the ill-fated Vision Pro, at the end of the day this is still just a standard smartphone with a different form factor, not some new wearable toy most people can't think of a use for.

* Lease/finance/whatever

I had a 13 Mini before my current phone. Part of its appeal was the "mini" price. Screw paying some insane premium for a more compact device (which is what Apple did with the iPhone Air).

Also, someone on Reddit already said it so I can't take credit for it, but "It's called the iPhone Duo because it costs as much as two iPhones."