Discs means that I can buy a used game at a fraction of what Sony is selling it for on their digital store. It also means that I can play a game 15y later if I want to on my PS3, or my PS4 games on my PS5.

I can still play games on my original GameBoy from the 1980s.

At some point I had a used PS 1, the disk reader stopped working which I fixed for a couple of dollars by replacing the motor.

I guess I'll have to switch to a 'gaming' machine that I'll hook to the TV. The RAM and GPU shortage should get better by 2038 as the AI bubble deflates.

Casablanca

There is a percentage of the population that will pay for this, I have a brother that is enamored with AI but he is also mentally unstable and he has jumped into the crypto fad.

I'm actually glad that companies are starting to charge customers for AI use as we are starting to move away from the purely speculative bubble and into the real market realities. This should give a reality check to investors and we might hope that it will bring market corrections, which in turn will correct the supply chain for chips. Because AI has taken over most of the supply for RAM, storage and general chip manufacturing causing massive shortages, there has been some investments into increasing the supply capacity, with more foundry investments. This will likely lead to massive overcapacity as the bubble deflates and we might get a few quarters of very cheap RAM and storage prices.

Unfortunately the big manufacturers such as Samsung and Micron will probably work on keeping the prices artificially high for a while, like when gas prices go up fast, but are slow to go down.

On the other hand, I hope we will see developers stop saying "RAM/Storage is cheap", because that's never been really true, and that's 100% not true right now. Even Microsoft seems to have gotten the memo that Windows is very inefficient compared to macOS, and they are now working on making their OS less wasteful of hardware resources.

Part of my point about buying direct from China is that if a manufacturer is going to mistreat me by selling me subpar products made in China for more money and give me poor customer service, I'm not going to reward them anymore with my dollars. I'll buy from the source directly and there I do not expect good customer service, but if I do I'll be pleasantly surprised instead of being upset.

I had quality issues with LG appliances and customer service that 'pretended' to care and help, but did not help. So when my LG dishwasher broke down after only 5y, I decided to buy from a much cheaper Chinese brand. So far I had a lot less issues with the Chinese dishwasher than I had with my LG units that needed repairs, done poorly, with weeks of wait times. I paid a lot less money for the Chinese branded unit and it works just as well as the LG washer did, but without any of the headaches I had dealing with LG. One nice thing is that, like Ikea units, the outside is unbranded so it looks nicer than the branded units.

I know LG is Korean and not a domestic brand, but they used to have solid appliances and a solid reputation. Now I will avoid them even if their products are superior on paper. Samsung appliances are just as bad, if not worse.

I do not mind paying more for a better product and support. Apple has always given me excellent customer service with my laptops when I ran into hardware issues, even with models bought abroad. They even replaced a laptop batterie out of warranty when my mom was visiting from Europe, when they had swappable batteries. I never had to get support involved with our iPhones. They still provide good customer service. Samsung and Google ... not so great support with their phones.

Most of these big companies were split up due to political will. That will has pretty much disappeared, and in the best case is a 'stop your monopoly abuse for a few years' such as what happened to Microsoft when they pushed Internet Explorer.
There are plenty of companies that abuse their dominant positions and the only way they get corrected is if a new technology displace them.

For cable tv, Comcast is getting displaced by streaming, but they still have plenty of localized monopoly for cable internet access. For cell phones we have 3 main providers with smaller players just subleasing access. Sit down restaurant chains menus are getting more standardized because Cysco has monopoly as a restaurant food distributor in most of the US, and are a leading cause of price increases.

We need politicians that break away from the big BiParty that is driving American politics. Sure the BiParty has two official camps to make voters feel like they have a choice but both sides get funded by big corporations so they will never legislate to make things better. Just look at the right to repair law passed in California, it is toothless so corporations like LG decided to ignore it completely.

Out best bet is to vote with our wallets and buy directly from the Chinese as these big corporations are just branding and marketing firms that add markups with no benefits to the consumer.

Probably because spreadsheets are easily abused as databases and VB used to be the simplest way to automatically query the data in a spreadsheet to generate fancy graphs. There are plenty of much better modern ways to do these things of course but old habits are hard to kill.

Agreed, saying that filtering by IP is useless is like saying you should never lock your front door because a motivated burglar can just break your front door down or break a window.

Except that the key for the data is the user's profile and LinkedIn does compile a report based on that key, which per that lawyer's interpretation is covered by GDPR.

Without the user profile, the compiled data would not exist and since the GDRP has wording covering that, and LinkedIn does compile and sell it, it should be legally released.

I definitely am biased because I personally consider that Microsoft kind of turned LinkedIn into a wannabe Facebook with gazillion notifications, which I had to turn off one by one.

I've been buying used machines for my home server needs for a while now. The current server we have is a Dell with an i7-2600, 16GB RAM and I put a 1TB SDD in it. The PSU died a few weeks after I got it but a $25 used PSU has been working well for years now.

The setup is more than enough to handle the web and email services as well as a couple of game servers for my son. Most of the time the machine uses under 1GB of RAM and has low CPU load.

I would like to upgrade to a more modern machine, but other than negligibly lower electrical consumption the benefits would be invisible to us. Once the AI bubble bursts, prices will come down crashing, even more so on the used market as there will be a spike in folks upgrading their machines.

I guess that lawyer analysis of the GDPR is that linkedIn cannot both withhold the information behind a paywall and claim privacy issues for releasing it for free at the same time. I would agree with that.

I remember interviewing at LinkedIn years ago, before GDPR, and they gave me a printout of my connections tree. That was kinda cool and I still have it somewhere in my home office. AFAIK they do not do this anymore as it could be legally challenged under GDPR and possibly the similar California laws.

Personally I'm a little sad of LinkedIn state after Microsoft purchased them. The push for monetization transformed it into a wannabe Facebook and I don't find it as useful as a recruiting tool as it used to be.

Anyway, I'm rooting for the little guy here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The processing might be done on the phone, but I'm pretty sure metadata is still being synced to Apple servers. Right now Apple is one of the few companies that do value privacy but this is partially because Tim Cook is a very private person and he strongly values privacy compared to say Zuckerberg. This is one of many reasons I prefer Apple walled garden over Microsoft and Google alternatives. I have no idea if the next Apple CEO will value privacy just as much.

While I prefer Apple hardware, I do not buy every device they make as soon as they come out. I upgraded from an iPhone 7 to a XS Max to a 16 Pro Max. My current laptop is an M1 Pro. Even my main WiFi is handled by an AirPort TimeCapsule, discontinued in 2018 and that is only being unsupported by Apple this fall. I do not know of many companies that provide upgrades for this long for free to their customers. I already upgraded to a NAS from Synology for my backups and will have to figure out what wireless station to upgrade to before this fall.

I remember attempting to buy $100 worth of bitcoins when they were around $0.10 or maybe around d $1. I could well afford the loss, just in case, but all the sites had massively suspicious credit card handling and I just gave up. I would be very wealthy now, but this did convince me that the whole crypto environment was just shooting everything from the hip.

Coinbase is just confirming that nothing has changed. Having folks with zero security mindset shipping production code, is already bad when they are trained developers but when they are not even that. Ughhh!

And no I do not regret not jumping on the crypto hype. There are many other ways to invest that are not nearly as volatile.

I'm mostly interested in Siri getting better at understanding me with semi complex queries such as "find me a cheap burrito on the way" when I go fishing.

My first startup, back in 2001-2004 was able to get a chat bot with better prompt responses than Siri. Only plain text but it worked well.

Getting my entire life spied on so it can be later sold to the NSA is not really something t I'm looking forward to, especially now that Tim Apple is leaving... privacy might become a lesser priority than increased profits for Apple.

We are seeing this issue in California where illegal migrants can get a driver license but now the citizenship status is going to be shared with other states, and as such ICE will be able to target non citizens. My wife was legally in the US for a while and got a driver license without a SSN (again legally), but her driver license would likely get her flagged by ICE.

Being innocent does not mean you won't get in trouble with an overreaching government unfortunately.

Typing this in an iPhone 16 pro max.

I had a strong dislike for VMWare, stack was buggy, support tools were left unmaintained and a lot of features just did not work as advertised by marketing. I'm not sorry to see the VMWare platform go away. Having more open alternatives being worked on is a good thing.

Now we need more of that with consumer OS. I'm very glad Microsoft lost, and lost big time, with the handheld devices market. Maybe we'll be able to get rid of Windows and Outlook/Exchange in the next 20y.

Nope, but very close machines.

Thomson T07-70 then Atari 520ST. It was in France where these computers were popular at the time.

I learned some 68k assembly on the Atari. When I later attempted to code on x86 which swaps the bytes orders of integers over 8bits and had to deal with memory pagination ... I found it horrendous and completely backwards. On the other hand it was hard to argue with the raw floating point performance of the 486 cpu when doing ray tracing. One 320x200 image could render in minutes vs hours.