I just bought like new copies of Gardian of the Galaxy and Farcry 6 for just $10 each from a guy a few miles from me. The next day I got Mario Odyssey, Zelda Echoes of Wisdom for $25 each for my son's Switch from an other guy on Craigslist. I love the second hand market that is possible with physical media.

I do not care about getting the latest and greatest game, I just want games with a solo campaign I can play at my convenience when I have nothing better to do, including when the internets tubes might be down. As far as me and my son are concerned these games are new to us and costed us a fraction of what the 'digital' versions would cost and these games will continue working once the publisher decide to sunset the servers.

I know other games have servers locks, for example Grand Tourismo only lets you play a handful of tracks with no server connection, and so do many microtransaction games, but many games with solo campaigns are still awesome to play offline.

Of course I get it that Sony and Nintendo are not benefiting from my use of their consoles, but they do remove the ability for their direct customers to resell their old games library.

I do not know if that's the case but it feels like the first answer is trying to save compute cost and gives you a shortcut answer, then if you challenge the bad answer it then goes deeper, with a higher compute cost, and with more data being processed you then are more likely to have a correct answer.

The current models are probably not adequate for the current compute costs. So even if the models are capable of good results, it will take a few more years for the models to be more efficient and the hardware cost to go down. At some point we will get to a sweeter spot but that's for the future, it could be years or even decades away.

I used to like LG appliances, they do work well ... until they don't.

My final LG purchase was a double oven, which does cook very well. Unfortunately a very small plastic trim piece was broken, and it took me weeks of pinging LG support and social media teams to get them to replace it under warranty. I only wanted them to comply with the California right to repair law so I could just fix it myself, but they told me their corporate policies did not allow for that. When a tech finally showed up he did replace the piece by promptly braking the new one when installing it.

Shortly after that my LG dishwasher, previously kinda fixed under warranty, had the replacement controller board finally fry. I just got a Chinese brand dishwasher which works just as well but for several hundred $ less than the equivalent LG model. I like the looks better since there is no outside logo visible.

And yes, none of my smart appliances are connected to my home WiFi. Being able to program the oven more accurately would be nice, but not worth the risks.

BTW the prior GE ovens came with the house, they worked from 1968 until 2021, try to get 50+ years of use out of modern appliances.

Never again LG, never.

BNP Paribas, a large French Bank, paid a $8.9 billion fine in 2014. Not a small thing, even for a world class bank.

https://www.justice.gov/archiv...

In the USA there is no legal protection for age discrimination under 40.

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?...