This caught my eye:

stream eligible games they own on supported devices'

"They own?" So we're back from the ever-perverse purchasing-a-license to the more classical and intuitive purchasing-an-authorized-copy again?

I don't believe it. Things are supposed to "enshittify," not improve or return to earlier common sense.

30, maybe even 20, years ago, some people might have believe this. I think they would be wrong, but it would nevertheless be a widespread opinion.

Today? You've gotta be fucking kidding. Libertarians are the polar opposite of today's Republicans.

"A kid growing up today will never be smarter than AI, but he or she will also never have understood a world where every product and service that they interact with is not really smart and really capable and really helpful,"

OK, so show us these really smart AI things. When I have to describe in 3 different ways to the AI bot that the Amazon order is wrong, and something a human would have picked up instantly....that does not sound 'really smart' to me.

For me, price is not the killer. Even if it were $50, I wouldn't. Or even free.
AI + camera toothbrush? No thanks. Far too many ways for data to go awry.

a smart toothbrush that uses a tiny camera and on-device AI

How about no? Does no work for you?

"Hi, BYD, set the temperature to 21 degrees."
"Hi, BYD, turn off the air conditioning."
"Hi, BYD, volume down/up."
"Hi, BYD, next song."

Saw this on an Atto3, and it worked surprisingly well. Not perfect, but just about all the controls you might need to adjust while driving that are not on the wheel or stalks are covered. I also prefer physical controls that I can operate through muscle memory for everything, but voice control seems like a good move to address the obvious safety concern that moving to many controls to a touch screen brings. Fact is, this kind of UI is what Millennials and later have grown up on, so barring some safety edict from a major market, like China's ban on retracting door handles, it's not going away. That leaves those of us that prefer physical controls to either get used to it, find a car that keeps the balance sane (VAG group seems to be moving in this direction), or squabbling over the declining supply of roadworthy cars that predate the screens taking over.

I think there may be a bit of back-and-forth while marques work out which controls are adjusted while driving and probably ought to have a tactile control and how best to present the UI to minimise eyes-on time by the driver if they do try and adjust things while moving, but the battle to retain fully tactile controls is probably already lost. Either way, any controls are almost certainly all going to be linked into the same car management / data capture system, and any physical controls will be no more independent that those specialist control keyboard add-ons you can get for PCs. That data can be monetized, and there's no way any marque is going to pass up on that - ultimately, as BMW has demonstrated, they want as much control over their car (what, you thought it was yours just because you paid for it?) as Microsoft has over a Windows PC.

Joking aside, there's a much more subtle change too. Look at the quoted wording from the astronauts: "*our* nation", "inspire *this* nation". Even at the height of the US-Soviet cold war it was still "for *all* mankind".

I get Trump's order is very much aimed at the NASA and the US (and probably getting his name onto it somehow), so can give that a pass, but the astronauts had an opportunity to rise above all that partisanship and slip in a message of much needed global unity, yet failed to do so. There are precious few institutions left in the world that can at least try and claim to be at least somewhat above / outside the direct influence of politics, and it looks like we're about to lose another one. Quite possibly for good once the ISS is finally decommissioned.

As seen in replies to articles in various tech sites. Almost word for word.

It looks like Comrade Trump just now chose the "no more datacenters!" team. His punitive taxes are one of the best tools we have to sanction the US economy, keeping growth down and inflation up.

I used to think Comrade Trump's Greenpeace membership was a sham, but over the last year he's proven himself to be a true believer that American industries all need to be shut down. First America, then The World! It's time humanity went back to hunting and gathering. FUCK FARMERS!

Task Manager's expanded view does include GPU monitoring and has done for quite some time now, but it wasn't added until they achieved a certain level of market ubiquity (and, presumably, the relevant APIs were in place). I'm guessing that Microsoft now feels that NPUs have reached a similar state and will be adding the extra "NPU" sub-tab to the existing Performance tab where other hardware resources are monitored, and adding some additional AI-related monitoring functionality to the existing GPU one.

You don't have to use it (SysInternal's tools are much more comprehensive), but if you just need an overview level of insight into what is going on when your system's fans start to sound like a jet turbine, it's still a pretty good starting point into what's up.

Unfortunately, refundable tickets are more expensive.

In Soviet Russia, Amazon sell book to you!

I suspect the Pareto Principle is very much at play here, in that 80% of customer issues can totally be answered by the scripts that human front-line call centre staff typically worked from (that's why the scripts exist in the first place, afterall), and therefore 80% of the calls can be dealt with perfectly well by an AI bot following the same script. It's only the other 20% that are the unique problems that KB articles and scripted/automated agents cannot handle, and - usually after a lot of pointless tick-boxing to get off-script - those are usually the ones that get escalated to a second line support peon that can actually take some initiative, and ultimately the few real corner cases to third-line support.

If AI can let you cull 80% of your support / call centre staff with no practical loss of service (according to the AI agent salesperson, anyway), then who isn't going to jump at that? Of course, they'll probably go for 90% or more and take extra hit on service levels, then have to wind things back a bit when they realise that the AI agents are not quite as good as promised and some people will get really stroppy about being forced to talk a bot, but at that point they'll have been paid their bonus and who cares, right? They're only customers, and you've got think of the shareholders!

Brain and brain, what is brain?! By 17 years old you're expected to have seen The Empire Strikes Back and have committed "R2-D2, you know better than to trust a strange computer" to your memory.

...requires age verification on traffic coming from known VPN addresses

A state enacting such a law should be required to publish their official list of The Known VPN Addresses.

People running websites should not be required to make up that data, or have to pay to subscribe to someone else who makes it up. If the gummint wants to force something that ridiculous on us, the gummint should make the taxpayers, not the webmasters or their users, pay for it.