There never was any luster. Not something I've ever heard anyone discuss in any context.

I am seriously confused about the rationale here.

You thought Dell was a good fit for your next purchase. You've done some research, and Dell appears to have met your needs for quality and price.

The owners of Dell pledged $625 billion to a system that should help children in various ways. There have been a lot of complaints recently from young people about how the system has failed them: housing is too expensive, not enough high paying jobs, they can't afford to get married, own a home, and have kids.

This donation seems like it would be a start towards fixing this. Perhaps other high-end donors will add to the accounts.

Having an easy way to add to your children's future over time seems like it would help fixing this, it's simple and a "no brainer" for parents: they don't have to learn financing or do research or set up accounts, everyone online will be analyzing the accounts and tell whether they are a good idea. Parents can focus on parenting and rely on expert analysis for whether this is a good idea.

And you are so miffed at this that... for some reason... you've decided to boycott Dell and spend your money elsewhere?

I'm completely at sea here. In what universe does your decision make sense?

Addendum: Looking over the edit page of this post, it occurs to me that there is a universe where "jacks smirking reven" is not a US citizen, and is just making troll posts to foment divisiveness in America. I've seen a lot of really funny news accounts (example) of political shitposters on X being from foreign nations. Are we in that universe?

And will Slashdot ever add the "account based in" feature?

(BTW, I'm from the US, I promise :-)

ChatGPT has three aspects that make this practice - what you describe - very dangerous.

Firstly, ChatGPT implements universal positive regard. No matter what your idea is, ChatGPT will gush over it, telling you that it's a great idea. Your plans are brilliant, it's happy for you, and so on.

Secondly, ChatGPT always wants to get you into a conversation, it always wants you to continue interacting. After answering your question there's *always* a followup "would you like me to..." that offers the user a quick way that reduces effort. Ignoring these requests, viewing them as the result of an algorithm instead of a real person trying to be helpful, is difficult in a psychological sense. It's hard not to say "please" or "thank you" to the prompt, because the interaction really does seem like it's coming from a person.

And finally, ChatGPT remembers everything, and I've recently come to discover that it remembers things even if you delete your projects and conversations *and* tell ChatGPT to forget everything. I've been using ChatGPT for several months talking about topics in a book I'm writing, I decided to reset the ChatGPT account and start from scratch, and... no matter how hard I try it still remembers topics from the book.(*)

We have friends for several reasons, and one reason is that your friends will keep you sane. It's thought that interactions with friends is what keeps us within the bounds of social acceptability, because true friends will want the best for you, and sometimes your friends will rein you in when you have a bad idea.

ChatGPT does none of this. Unless you're careful, the three aspects above can lead just about anyone into a pit of psychological pathology.

There's even a new term for this: ChatGPT psychosis. It's when you interact so much with ChatGPT that you start believing in things that aren't true - notable recent example include people who were convinced (by ChatGPT) that they were the reincarnation of Christ, that they are "the chosen one", that ChatGPT is sentient and loves them... and the list goes on.

You have to be mentally healthy and have a strong character *not* to let ChatGPT ruin your psyche.

(*) Explanation: I tried really hard to reset the account back to its initial state, had several rounds of asking ChatGPT for techniques to use, which settings in the account to change, and so on (about 2 hours total), and after all of that, it *still* knew about my book and would answer questions about it.

I was only able to detect this because I had a canon of fictional topics to ask about (the book is fiction). It would be almost impossible for a casual user to discover this, because any test questions they ask would necessarily come from the internet body of knowledge.

Fuck no, and Fuck you. the only thing that turns one misogynistic is a low iq.

That's true, but if you understand their goal, you can, sometimes use it appropriately to achieve you're aims. You just have to understand their thought process and run books.

Yeah it sucks, you want to be mad at HR, but they didn't decide the policies. So you want to get mad at your boss, but they direct you back to HR. Its a classic, no one is responsible for unpopular things tactic.

You know they won't spring for the good chatbots. I just did a couple chat bot sessions for support, and they were awful. Can't disclose what I said without doxing myself. But they literally have one job, but they don't know how to do that. Instead they want to direct you to sales. which makes as much sense as trying to boil the ocean to bake a potato.

Yeah thats really odd. A WTF if there ever was one. There was some cool tech like Grand Central dispatch, but seriously it wasn't worth the training and tying you to a single hardware vendor.

Enough to be statistically significant? My own experience isn't but it wasn't good. For work we had two mac mini build machines, and they both died within three years, granted this was in the intel era where heat management needed to be better, but still sad.

Amazon wants to sell products, third party companies rely on selling their products via amazon. Now you doesn't want you to buy products through them if it's via another app?

One explanation is in the rise of women in careers and education.

A woman has roughly 16 years of fertility, from age 14 to 30. At age 30, 10% of couples can't conceive after a year of trying and the numbers get worse after that. Yes, older couples can have kids, but the probability goes way down.

Culturally, having a child before age 18 is assumed to be a bad thing (4 years). Then if the woman has a college education (another 4 years), then goes for an advanced degree (up to 7 years), or wants to establish herself in her career (5 years?), or wants to work off some of the college debt (5 years), the remainder of her fertile years is not enough for population replacement.

It's largely the same for men, at age 22 they may want to start a career and pay off some college debt for several years. Men can father a child at any age, but by and large they tend to marry people roughly their same age.

It's also harder to raise a family in an apartment than in a house, so for both parents it may "make sense" to work for several years to save up for a house.

(Don't take this the wrong way, I personally feel that women should be in colleges and have careers, I'm just pointing out the conflict of interests here.)

It would seem that culture has to change somehow to allow (encourage) couples to have kids earlier, but I'm not sure how that would work given our current economic system.

Maybe the US wants both companies to prosper?

Not everything is a team sport...

Imagine a black unit cube cake with white frosting. Take a knife and cut out pieces of the cube to make a black hole outline within the white frosting. When you do this at an angle to the sides, it turns out that a cube 6% larger than the original cube can pass through the outlined hole.

All the platonic solids have this property, along with a lot of other polyhedral solids.

Yeah, I think they need to answer some basic questions first, like what do they see people using these phones for? If its goal is just to be able to play youtube, spotfy, etc, then whats the real point? Those are free either. Their approach with free operating systems made more sense, by focusing on free applications to replace the proprietary unix ones and someone came along and gave them a great kernel. Thats a thousand times more difficult now with phones. but ultimately phones or computers are a means to an end for most people. What is the end here?