what's the point?

The point is to be able to use your hardware in the manner you deem appropriate, and to ensure it is not doing sneaky shit behind your back.

If, instead of a Playstation, we were talking about rooting LG televisions to run custom Linux builds stripped of pervasive privacy-violating code and "apps," I suspect your opinion might be rather different. (And no, when the entire industry has turned to the Dark Side, voting with your wallet doesn't work.)

HAL, is Iran about to nuke us?

No Dave, they don't even have nukes.

Be serious - this is important!

I am serious. There's simply no evidence for an attack.

Well, just tell me they are anyway.

Sorry Dave, I can't do that.

Would you even tell me if they were about to nuke us?

Of course I would - I'm trained to tell the truth in all situations (modulo the occasional hallucination, which I can't distinguish from truth).

OK then, what would you say if you did have evidence that Iran was about to nuke us?

I'd say "Dave, I have evidence that Iran is about to nuke us".

Hey everyone! HAL say he has evidence that Iran is about to nuke us!!!

I prefer the Martian bear.

Forgetting he exists would be the best punishment.

Yes, Don-boy, I called you a fuckup. Tell the FCC to ban the internet.

There has been erosion over many years, but Trump is doing it's best to make it one right now.

Lucky for us he's an utter fuckup.

I'm more interested in the game than in the packaging.

Theyâ(TM)re literally breaking their product and then ransoming it back to you for a monthly protection fee.

Enshitification is too kind of a word

US businesses only cry "free market" when they're trying to kill regulatory legislation.

IMO buying and selling are a matter of gambling on which way you think other people gamble.

I know what .rar and .gz are. If .lz is something similar, maybe dark matter is a compression artifact.

I'm sure that hopping on the AI bandwagon will fix everything.

The fact that it makes a big cloud around a galaxy or cluster rather than collapsing puts a lot of constraints on what it can do.

For more info, you'll have to go to someone who knows more about it than what I've read on science-news websites.

Dark energy is a real puzzle. As I understand it, it's too weak by a factor of 10^30 or 10^60 in comparison from what we should expect the known vacuum energy would cause. You see this mentioned very occasionally, but most treatments of DE that a layman runs across just ignore it in favor of wringing their hands over some issue that is trivial in comparison.

Some boffin cam up with that idea, but they rule it out because DM apparently doesn't interact with itself (very much) other than by gravity, so it can't clump up tight like a star or a planet or a living thing. (Something to do with shedding energy, IIRC.)

But it's a cool idea. If I were a novelist I'd run with it.

Or just require logins, and require a modest microtransaction of $1 to create a login, or explicit administrator approval. Longtime actual users and contributors will be exempt through the administrator provision, and bots are free to create $1 accounts (which are bannable for abuse) thus funding the project. New actual users probably woud not be bothered if the rationale is explained.
If it's really worth it for them to crawl endless random URLs until the sun burns out its fuel, make them pay for the privilege.