(What the heck does a PalmPilot organizer have to do with any of this?) Well ... I remember back when they first got popular, my buddy was a software developer at the company I worked for. At lunch one day, he mentioned how he absolutely loved the Palm OS platform, simply because it had so many limitations. He said when writing for the Windows PCs, by contrast? You had so many system resources and so many options, you could pretty much code anything you could come up with. Sloppy code was a non-issue too, on modern systems. Only the coders reviewing the source would know any better. He liked the mental challenges involved in maximizing what you could get from a Palm device with a small monochrome screen and the whole bit.

I feel the same way with movies. All these mega-mergers may give a few big-name film-makers massive financial resources to create new movies. But most of it is unnecessary to make an amazing film. What you need is a great story, and good acting (which really isn't some monopoly held by the big Hollywood stars!). Less is very often more. (Consider how well the first Star Wars trilogy held up over time, using simple backgrounds like a mostly empty desert for Tatooine. I prefer that to the crazy "busy" AI generated scenes in the newer movies.)

I guess it's all subject to interpretation. But to me, a true knock-off is defined as a product trying to trick someone into thinking it's one made by a name-brand manufacturer -- doing its best to copy-cat the original.

What I see on Amazon constantly are Chinese-made products that have no real equivalent I can find with brand-name alternatives, but they all like to use those "gibberish" names made of random letters. And in most cases? The exact same product, or a very slightly altered variant, is sold under multiple "gibberish" names. Pretty sure a lot of these come from the same Chinese factory but they market it under various brands to improve visibility and to pump up sales numbers?

Just one recent example would be one of the "power bank" type charges for your mobile devices that has built-in cables to work with USB-C, Lightning, Micro USB and then standard USB: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CF...

Whoever VRURC is, I'm sure it's just another nonsense alphabetic name ... but I haven't seen one quite like this sold at retailers like Micro Center. I suspect it's partially because the Lightning connector is owned by Apple and you have to pay them to obtain certified ones to use in your products? Chinese vendors often just get around these extra costs by recycling/repurposing existing salvaged Lightning ports/cables. Helps allow them to sell these devices affordably.

The peak demand comes -- right at the time we'd be getting near-peak from solar.

Why isn't the USA focusing more on having people fit solar to their houses with a battery and inverter. This would take the load off the grid during these peak-sun/peak-demand periods and sure-up the grid.

This is one of the few times that the output of renewables tracks demand so why not?

I used to always own at least one console, despite mostly being a PC gamer. I felt like the console was more of an appliance, really. Power it on and it has one job. Even if I came to accept the idea of buying games digitally on Steam or elsewhere for my Windows gaming PC, I never felt like it should be the same experience on a console. It's nice to own a physical library of game titles your friends or family can look through on a shelf and decide what they want to pop in and play. It has "permanence" - even if the game itself requires an Internet connection and supports online multiplayer gaming.

I guess I could be swayed to be less concerned if the manufacturers would play fair with all of it, but IMO, they really don't. As one example? My wife's kid bought an XBox 360 and owned a number of digital games on it. Microsoft decided to ban him from their network permanently, and without any warning or real explanation. He wasn't running hacks or cheats, and he wasn't threatening other gamers with violence or anything of the sort. He did have an odd nickname/handle (something about killing a unicorn?), so he finally decided that's what offended some people and got him banned. After all that money was lost on the console and digital purchases - the entire family decided to never again buy an XBox of any type.

My wife had a similar hassle involving the Nintendo Switch and her favorite game, Animal Crossing. To be honest, I don't even play the Switch so I'm not even that familiar with the whole thing. But it had something to do with her buying the game on a physical cartridge but then Nintendo trying to move everything to digital games only. They provided a means to use the physical copy to authorize your account to download and play the digital one, but that wound up hampering how she wanted to play the game across three different Nintendo Switch consoles she owned while retaining her saved game.

No... nobody I know thinks we're "leading the world in banking technology". We're well aware how backwards the systems are. That's likely a big motivator for people to dabble in crypto and to use all the electronic payment systems that popped up, from Venmo to Cash App.

It's endlessly frustrating. At least 20 years ago, I was sure paper checks would vanish because of the utter lack of security they provide people. It seems like they came from an era where one's signature meant something? (If you think about it, that theme runs deep in our Financial system. Every credit card transaction prompts you for a signature. Yet if you ever have to challenge/fight fraudulent charges, you'll find the card companies don't give a crap if your signature matches what they show was scribbled for the transaction. You're still just as liable for it. Sign with a stick figure .... doesn't matter.) But yeah, give me a paper check and now I have your home address, likely one of your phone numbers, a copy of what your signature looks like (should I want to forge it later) and your bank's routing number + your account number. It's pretty common to ask the person paying to write down their date of birth on the check too. How are people ok with this?

Credit card processing is pathetic too, really. I was selling some 3D prints just a few weeks ago at our booth at the local Farmers'/Artisans' market, and a guy gave me a card that only worked with a mag-stripe. I had to run it with Square by manually keying in his card digits! I thought mag-stripe was rendered obsolete by now!

Just don't buy these crappy licenses. Retro-gaming is booming for a very good reason.

And, if you're looking for another reason not to buy -- the way hardware prices are going, retro emulators are probably all we'll be able to play soon because nobody will be able to afford the GPUs and RAM needed to play the next wave of new release games anyway.

Poor guy reminds me of that goofy uncle in the family who means well, but just has no clue how anything *really* works.

Historically, I'm not sure there's ever been a situation where some kind of "sovereign fund" was created to collect taxes, where it didn't wind up getting raided or re-purposed in some manner by politicians down the road?

But even beyond that? There's really zero reason to mandate a huge, 50% tax, on AI companies doing more than X amount of annual revenue. You know what will happen then? It'll drive them to break themselves up into a number of smaller businesses that avoid the tax. But it'll be business as usual otherwise. You can't stop someone from owning 50 smaller AI companies instead of one big one.

Delivering "late" is not delivering at all.

For example -- "The Roadster 2 is going into manufacture *this year*" he said, several years ago.

For example -- "We will have humans on Mars by 2024" he said. Even if he eventually does deliver humans to Mars, he still broke that promise.

Saying you're going to do something by a certain date and then not doing so constitutes a broken promise -- even if you do it a decade later.

Of course Musk is a genius... those who say otherwise are idiots.

After all, how else would I be enjoying my FSD Roadster 2 that charges from my solar roof-tiles before the drive through a Boring Company tunnel to the Hyperloop terminal where I'm whisked off to the SpaceX launch-pad in anticipation of a Starship flight to join some of the others who set up that initial Mars base back in 2024.

Those who say that Musk is a snake-oil merchant who doesn't deliver on his promises are just deniers who simply choose not to see the reality of the world as it is today.

Or I could be wrong :-)

I think xAI is falling behind (does anyone using Cursor use xAI as a coding agent?).

Perhaps this is Musk's way of buying market-share for a product that's really failing to perform right now (xAI).

That's $60 billion today (with SpaceX stock near $170) but how much/little will it be in 2 year's time? If I was Cursor, I'd be wanting a fair amount of cold, hard cash in that deal :-)

Interestingly, I remember at one time, the whole "Fake it until you make it." slogan meant something much less devious. It used to be a slogan people said about a small business managing to present itself as much bigger than it really was, while delivering on promises and work that would usually only be expected from a much larger business.

To me, that was actually a positive/good thing. It was your classic case of an over-achieving startup, doing more with less and winning outsized contracts that helped it grow to be a formidable competitor with the established players.

I took the financial hit years ago, when I resold my high-end configured Intel Macbook Pro to move to the M1.

As soon as I saw the benefits of the M series processors on the platform, I knew it was the way forward. The Intel Core i9 version of my Macbook Pro had overheating issues where it would throttle its performance down every time it did anything demanding for more than a few seconds at a time. That's just wasted performance at that point.

The battery life on M series is insanely good without feeling like you gave up any processing power at all, which sealed the deal for me.

The idea of Apple using Intel CPUs was always, in my opinion, kind of a hack on Apple's part. They realized IBM wasn't going to live up to their initial promises to keep innovating the "Power" CPU to keep it competitive. There wasn't any real alternative for Steve Jobs and company at that point. They were left "high and dry" unless they just ported everything to run on the same processor all the Windows computers were using.

The M series gets the Mac back to being truly unique again. You're not just buying another Windows laptop on the inside, wrapped in an "Apple shell".