Remember the Evil Bit from RFC 3514, and how it got us rid of all malicious network traffic, once and for all?

Irresponsible people (including irresponsible employees) have evidently shown a lot of interest in automating away all kinds of stuff by installing "OpenClaw" and giving it access to all kinds of sensitive information and credentials to act on their behalf. If you run "OpenClaw" in some sandbox that does not give it access to all that sensitive information and credentials, the purpose of "get it done for me, I cannot be bothered" will not get fulfilled, and therefore that sandbox will either be intentionally be circumvented or the bot becomes useless in comparison to what people (ab)use OpenClaw for. No kind of "security layer" can change that.

... only to learn later that the thing you paid for was largely made in Asia, with only some packaging or branding happening in the US? It seems kind of ironic and well-deserved that the same kind of deceit now also happens to companies that want to buy "made in USA" labor.

Power electronics have become cheap enough that inverters, including ones that synchronize to an existing network, are quite easy to manufacture even for home use. And yes, running multiple such in parallel is possible, and actually supported by some of the "balcony PV"-inverters sold in Germany, not least to sneakily circumvent the 800W regulatory limit. You can even mix balcony PV with multiple home battery units, if you want. Of course one still needs to take care that the cabling won't be overloaded, and especially the battery units are still so expensive that they need to last way longer than their warranty time before you can break even.

No, that would be true only if all balcony panels were battery-buffered in one's home. But buffer batteries for home use are still quite expensive, so depending on how many years they actually last, they may or may not break even against the savings from power you did not have to buy. For most people, balcony PV is less of a profit center, and more of a virtue signal "look, I'm doing my part for non-fossil energy!". The utilities of course hate balcony PV, and while the safety issues are just a pretense, they do have a point that balcony PV provides the grid with even more power exactly at the times when there is already more than enough available from the existing PV farms. It would really help if both centralized and decentralized battery storage became cheap enough that every kWh from PV could easily be stored somewhere.

Yes, and in addition to the usual platform lock-in, there will just be way fewer humans capable and willing to do thinking on their own. Applicants will roll their eyes when asked to perform intellectual work instead of delegating it to some LLM. Brains atrophy at least as quick as muscles when not used.

... when the media every so often told us the horror-stories from behind the Iron Curtain, where the evil Stasi or the KGB spied on their own people, and did so as lessons about the difference between "free" and authoritarian countries. But now it seems the "cold war" was thoroughly won by the Warsaw pact states, at least with regards to spreading that habit of excessive eavesdropping on everyone all around the globe.

Given how quickly all sorts of nonsensical web-sites can be created by vibe-coders that don't really know much about AI other than that it is a current hype, it is no wonder so many such sites are competing for attention... and if only a little successful in attracting media coverage, will be swamped by the usual scammers and spammers. "Moltbook" hat a fun-to-talk-about idea, but otherwise is just pure garbage, just like "rent-a-human.ai" and many others.

... of reading that boring state-the-obvious study: Visioneers - it's such a good depiction of corporate madness.

Fascinating how magnetic hard drives keeps improving significantly over decades, while none of the many new "wonder storage" devices delivered... where's that Petabyte duct-tape, the holographic crystals, the DNA storage?

Yeah, it was the day AMD's credibility died when they (and their board manufacturers, like Asus) had "supports ECC RAM" written all over their web pages, and then suddenly said "you know what, we disabled this feature, so we can sell you a PRO CPU for extra money, later".

Too bad one cannot believe anything a company writes these days anymore, everything requires confirmation from independent third party testers.

And by that you mean stories like "AI companies convince US government to lower accuracy requirements for corporate accounting"?

... than the existing 8700G model, with less CPU cores. The somewhat higher theoretical NPU rate is not something I have seen used for important purposes so far.

For 4 and 8 bit values (regardless whether integer or "floating point") the operations may even just be in-CPU table look-ups. (Or maybe in-FGPA table look-ups, as AMD's "NPUs" seem to be just renamed FPGAs.)

Yes, but with significant red tape and data harvesting to go through before you received a "code" to free your phone from the boot loader lock-down. So it would be a new thing if all you had to do was pressing a button to confirm you want to "unlock" the phone.