Back in 1997 it was like $6 in the Philly area and as late as 2008 it was maybe $12. Neither of which cross the $20 line with inflation.

s/aren't/aren't only/

Also...get off my lawn.

and at worst you got ten minutes of ads and trailers.

Now it's $20 plus, you can't pause it to take a piss, and you're sitting in a chair someone else spread bed bugs on.

Movie theaters are dead. My ten year old 40 inch TV shows me anything I care to watch for less money and less bullshit. And there isn't much I care to watch nowadays given the near-generation's worth of utter dreck and creative sterility in Hollywood.

The consumer grade stuff has tiny ink tanks packed inside of drm'd cartridges. The machine is sold at a loss and all of the profit is in selling the vendor-locked consumables at a markup.

All the big names are like that and have been since the 90s when "consumer grade computer printer" became a market.

Office/commercial grade stuff is less bad. I have some sort of ink tank printer downstairs that takes actual liquid ink that lasts longer and isn't as marked up.

The kiddos like their coloring pages. And a printed chore chart is a lot neater than a hand-written one on a whiteboard.

At work there's still the need to print out a slide deck and lay it out on a big table to mark up with a red pen before briefing it to a bigwig.

I understand that typed and printed homework is still a thing and might be around when the kids are old enough for that to be relevant.

Not all contractors are online. The bigger ones are but a few small ones still need contracts and such signed on paper. Building permits too now that I think of it.

Paper isn't going to disappear anytime soon.

Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by insularity and shortsightedness. Or stupidity if we're being judgy in our attempt to not be judgemental.

Information bubbles exist. Some are defined by language barriers. Others by geography and others still by culture.

Maybe they're deliberately peddling shit. Or maybe they believe their own propaganda. It's not like that never happens.

Outsourced to some third world fuck making slave wages sitting at a computer waiting to answer your prompt.

It is, at best, a close approximation, some of the time.

"MSLs" are no more a One Weird Trick than anything else is. And they invariably have some other downstream costs.

Java (sort of an early MSL...of sorts) solves dangling pointers and hardware specificity (sort of) but makes dealing with hardware or even non-java numerical datatypes an absolute exercise in pulling teeth.

If you never have to do either...then java (or rust or whatever) is for you. If you need interact with the outside world and software ecosystem in a nontrivial way...then six of one half a dozen of the other.

Sure, I'll be your god-king.

Send over the virgins.

Circle the bigger number:

Amount of people smart enough to "have deep philosophical discussions" with a chatbot, and to be able to think in terms of "breaking math and physics" *and* crazy enough to actually go over the edge.

Amount of people smart enough to realize that there's more fun, fame, and profit to be had in pretending to be crazy than to actually be crazy.

Yes but Toyota doesn't put those engines in their cars.

If the gas engine is sized right the ecvt is theoretically superior. If the ecvt and battery are an excuse to cheap out on the engine then they're only good for city driving and highways on flat terrain.

Kinda like "fix it in software" only makes up for hardware deficiencies 9 times out of 10, and if your use case is that last 10% you're SOL because some beancounter insisted that the arithmetic is representative of all reality, not just some of it.

So do many of my colleagues, and the ability to do this is integral to a good bit of my organization's electronics design workflow.

Was looking into a hybrid toyota suv a while back.

Gas engine was standard 6 cyl 270 hp.

Hybrid was a 4 cyl 180 hp plus 60 hp motor.

Not much of a difference in peak power but quite a bit of difference once the battery runs out and some of that 180 from the gas engine needs to be bled off to charge it up.

Not an issue with city driving but not that great with overtaking on a slight uphill grade at highway speeds.

Remember test driving a 4 cyl gas toyota suv with the wife a few years back. Tried it on one of these uphill highways we have a few of in Boston. Thing struggled.

Conclusion: whatever you can get out of a 4 cylinder is only sufficient for a small sedan, even if it's a hybrid.

Ended up buying the 6 cyl gas engine for myself. Toyota has also recently started putting back bigger engines in some of their hybrids. Might look again in 10 years or so when it's time to replace. But now that Trump killed the ev mandate (and even Massachusetts chickened out and instituted a "two year pause enforcement action") might just get another all-gas one then...