It'll be interesting to see what the overall impact is on the cost of Blizzard titles.

$1199 for the iphone 18 Pro. After the initial flurry of people who will just buy anything new from Apple, I'll be curious to see how these sell at that price point. I'm guessing the plain Jane iPhone 18 will come later on.

Given the price point of these TV's I suspect 4G or 5G service is going to be prohibitively expensive to enable. I suppose if they thought the total lifetime revenue they'd be able to earn by snagging your data exceeded the cost to gather it, they'd do it.

Personally, I just don't allow TV's to talk to my local network at all. If for some reason I felt the need to do so, they'd be on a separate vlan with no access to a gateway to the outside world.

Google and Amazon are already doing the same thing along with your mobile providers so it's an arms race to limit the phoning home only to services that you want to enable. I doubt the government plans to intervene at all as some of that profit from trafficking your data trickles down to politicians.

Blackhole most (all?) of the ads and trackers so the browser and your network doesn't spend any significant resources on those requests. I have pihole in front of everything on my home network and it makes a noticeable difference in the perceived performance of browsing and also allows me to easily have a throttle (or not) for content I don't want my young kids to consume.

https://pi-hole.net/

It's easy to setup and even a dated raspberry pi has more than enough oomph to do the work within a very small power envelope.

Roku does suck. Personally, I just use it as a front-end to play my home media on the various TV's in the house (using Jellyfin as the back-end) along with occasional content from Amazon Prime. I've deleted all the junk channels they try to foist on customers. Yes, the hardware does kinda suck, but it's just "good enough" to excrete a 4k hdmi signal, pass through the audio to my receiver where needed, and the interface is "good enough" for my family to use it. I've also neutered most of the "phone home" traffic with Pihole. Before that, they were easily the chattiest devices on the network, whether they were being used or not.

I have zero interest in consuming AI generated content or advertisements of any sort.

If Fox breaks it any further, I'll just go back to rolling my own endpoints out of raspberry pi or similar devices. I stopped doing that a few years ago as it was just less hassle to pick up the cheap roku boxes, but that worked fine too....it was just a bit more work.

https://www.flocksafety.com/bl...

From a recent investment round announcement:

Flock is thrilled to announce our fundraise of $275 million, bringing our valuation to $7.5 billion. This investment will allow our team to continue to drive innovation in safety technology, expand research and development, and support U.S.-based manufacturing.

The financing was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with backing from Greenoaks Capital, Bedrock Capital. Meritech Capital, Matrix Partners, Sands Capital, Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Tiger Global, and Y Combinator also participated. This builds on a year of rapid expansion where Flock surpassed $300 million in annual recurring revenue — reflecting a 70% year-over-year increase.

that anyone thought for an instant this data wouldn't be misused. Follow the money.

If you'd seen some of the aftermath images of car accidents in China that I've seen first hand, you'd question the safety of cars manufactured in China. Perhaps things have improved, but I saw first hand where there were fatalities in car accidents at speeds that shouldn't have caused anything more than minor injuries in countries with strong safety regulations for auto manufacturers in place.

Test them out on Canada first. :) If they can pass rigorous safety tests, I don't have any real problem with them competing in the auto marketplace in the US. Domestic manufacturers will have to compete or find a better use for that industrial capacity. That's assuming there's a level playing field without significant government subsidies that enable predatory pricing (on both sides).

Meh. I'm going to pile on and say that most homes:

a. aren't going to have multiple higher end devices with fancy gpus or a number of Apple M4 or M5 devices with enough RAM "laying around" doing nothing
and
b. even if they did, they're not going to be willing to have them on 24/7 and sucking up electrons like nobody's business to crank on AI inference jobs. The power usage would dramatically go up along with their monthly electric bill.

I could potentially see this working at a smaller business if their fleet of devices was up to the task. Game development shop?

Seems like a real reach and a "solution" in search of a problem to solve.

There clearly isn't any financial incentive (or disincentive) to do jack shit about the problem. The carriers would rather collect the fees than deal with it. Turn up the heat. Nobody at the top gives a crap about how much of a nuisance this is.

The big valuation correction can't be far off. We've seen this movie before.

Well, there is the hope with new elections the executive will be disciplined (whether that is better or worse, who can say) and Trump can spend the remainder of days hounded by lawsuits.

Better get cracking on it now though before this becomes the new norm.

It's way too obvious. They trade on the inside info leaking in a way that isn't easily traceable. Santos is a complete buffoon and this is yet another testament to how stupid he is....political leanings aside.

I wasn't a consumer of those devices, nor do I expect to become a consumer of those devices.

That said, I do take some umbrage at the increases in costs for devices I DO care about, but Amazon isn't the producer of any of those.

I don't find the rpi 5 and equivalents to be particularly attractive at current price points. I have a few around that do things like my media server, pihole, Homeassistant, etc and that's pretty much it. For only a little bit more, you can get a decently configured AMD Ryzen sff box and call it a day.

Not ultra-portable, but more useful for things that I need to get done.