That’s the thing, though: Removing that mercury filtration system is going to be expensive and require re-certification. There’s no point. The price has already been paid.

It’s like someone heard that mercury removal from coal power plants costs a lot of money and saves lives so they said to themselves, “saving lives‽ We can’t have that! The more people that die from pollution, the better!” And set policy based on that instead of examining the reality of the economics.

Of all the things… Do they have meetings where they’re like, “we’re not doing enough pointlessly evil things that have no benefit to anyone!” ‽

Within the browser, it’ll work to “protect” your traffic (including DNS) from prying eyes locally. As in, someone on the same network as you or your ISP or whatever networks your traffic passes through to its destination.

Instead, it sends it all to Microsoft Central Data Collection™! By passing all your traffic through Microsoft’s central servers, you can rest easy, knowing precisely who is inspecting everything you do (including the US government and the other countries in the Five Eyes network).

Let’s be honest: It’s yet another unfair transfer of power from local criminals to international ones, increasing the wealth of billionaire pedophiles. Give the locals a chance to rise up, would ya?

Spellmonger.

I wish the author would stop writing side stories about characters no one cares about and focus on the MC and progressing the main story forwards.

What’s so special about same-sex marriages? I say expand it to include all marriages!

Let us not recognize the unions of conservatives. Clearly, any woman in such a relationship is being held in such a position against her will. Or she’s mentally addled somehow and is being taken advantage of.

Yes! Because cyber bullying can only happen on platforms that are designed specifically for adults. By banning children from social networks, we will have completely eliminated the problem and totally not at all created much worse problems like potentially leaking the identities of millions of people and destroying the entire concept of privacy.

(Nods head vigorously)

https://theforestscout.com/40129/in-our-opinion/how-a-childrens-game-turned-into-an-outlet-for-bullying/

When my kids were young, but old enough that they may inadvertently stumble upon porn, I told them the truth. The truth that so few explain to their children. The truth that many adults don’t understand and many more completely forget.

Porn is fake.

It’s not real. The sounds? Acting. The breasts? Those are fake too. The perfect skin? Makeup (or airbrush).

Even “amateur” porn is fake! As soon as someone agrees to be filmed having sex it ceases to be real.

Also, let me get this straight: Your greatest fear from children being exposed to porn is they might begin to accept mysogyny‽ As in, you think porn is the most likely place kids will be exposed to it and somehow just nod their heads‽ “Oh wow, that’s totally sexist! But they’re having sex so it must be OK. I’ll try to be like that!” (Child nods head).

Or perhaps you think kids will be viewing so much porn—specifically, the mysogynistic kind—that it will somehow carve mysogyny into their minds?

This is so much like the beliefs of conservatives that try to ban books that mention LGBTQ people. Stop and think for a moment: How much porn did you view as a kid? How did that impact your life?

I seriously doubt it changed much. Unless, of course, you were reading Playboy for the articles.

Just think: Without legislation like this, kids will be able to see people having sex! Thus, ending their lives. Not so different from staring into the eyes of Medusa!

The amount of children exposed to sex that have died—or suffered worse consequences like early onset conservatism—may have been zero so far but the dangers are clear! We must skip right over parental involvement in child rearing and go straight to the source of the problem: Computers.

Computers have been giving everyone access to too much information for too long! We must restrict it! The first step is to get an implementation that actually works to censor information—to save the children (wink wink)—then later, we will have the tools necessary to censor whatever we want!

When glorious dictator decides that information about trans-genic mice must be erased from the Internet, we shall have the power to do so!

Not a damned thing in that article had anything at all to do with “chatbots”.

Articles like this are really just propaganda (wishful thinking) trying to soften the blow of Baumol’s Cost Disease:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

Industries that benefit heavily from automation reduce costs over time. Industries that rely heavily on services (that require people to perform them) increase costs over time.

If you can somehow convert a big chunk of your economy into services from automated production, you can smooth out the difference in that economic curve. In theory, that means the rich (capitalists) can continue to get richer while everyone else’s salaries flatten out.

It’s total bullshit. The only logical end result of such a situation is the rich getting eaten sooner rather than later.

Smart rich people are (right now) lobbying to get their taxes increased to pay for a better social safety net. Stupid rich people are lobbying for bullshit like converting everything into a subscription economy.

Folks here jest, but this business model is coming to PCs next. Bookmark my words!

(Literally, you can right-click the perma-link to this message and have quick access to it later so you can reply, “Damn, you were right!” And post the link to big PC vendors suddenly offering a similar services because DRAM and GPUs have become so expensive, normal people can’t afford to buy PCs anymore)

It’s also pig-headed!

Wow! BeOS mentioned. Hello, fellow old person. While you read this comment, imagine two towers of green LEDs, gently rising and falling, based on the complexity of each word while we just Be, together.

Now let’s remember why BeOS actually failed: Illegal contracts from Microsoft to prevent PC vendors from selling PCs preloaded with BeOS. Be, Inc sued Microsoft and settled out of court for $23 million and I remember that moment, thinking, “That’s not enough!”

Microsoft destroyed BeOS. Not any sort of market condition or natural state of economics. The whole, “let’s turn it into an appliance OS” thing was a last ditch pivot in an attempt to save the company. It was doomed from the start.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2003/sep/07/microsoftpays

Aside: Just like Palm’s WebOS which also tried to pivot into an appliance OS. Except in that case, that OS was destroyed by sheer incompetence on the part of HP’s brain dead CEO: Carly Fiorina. To this day, she’s still tarnishing her image by associating with the Trump administration. Very pro-Nazi.

If you ever want to point out an obvious example of how CEOs aren’t any smarter than anyone else and normally only get the job based on nepotism and industry incest, she’s the perfect go-to!

This is why web browsers like Firefox need their own AI. Local AI for not only creating summaries but for detecting bullshit like this.

Yes, creating summaries is kinda lame but without local AI you’re at the mercy of big corporations. It’s a new arms race. Not some bullshit feature that no one needs.

It’s called dogfooding and it’s what you’re supposed to do to improve your product.

Total market share is irrelevant. What matters more is total users.

If you make a product and there’s a million people on a platform who could buy it, the costs to port that product (and support it) need to be low for it to be worthwhile.

If the total number of people on that platform increases to 10 million, now the cost to port/support becomes more like a minuscule expense rather than a difficult decision.

When you reach 100 million there’s no excuse. There’s a lot of money to be made!

For reference, the current estimated amount of desktop Linux users globally is somewhere between 60-80 million. In English-speaking countries, the total is around 19-20 million.

It’s actually a lot more complicated than this, but you get the general idea: There’s a threshold where any given software company (including games) is throwing money away by not supporting Linux.

Also keep in mind that even if Linux had 50% market share, globally, Tim Sweeney would still not allow Epic to support it. I bet he’d rather start selling their own consoles that run Windows instead!

One thing for certain, Microsoft will not stop using Copilot to develop their software in house.

You’re wrong, but I think you’ll be OK with that because the reality of the situation is actually hilarious:

https://www.theverge.com/tech/865689/microsoft-claude-code-anthropic-partnership-notepad

“Turns out Copilot sucks so let’s just use our competitor’s superior product but that’s no reason we can’t keep foisting the inferior garbage on the masses!”

Comcast—in the top ten of the shittiest companies of all time that no one wants to have to deal with—is surprised that their “new” deal of, “be slightly less villainous, and expect all our problems to go away” isn’t working.

Quick! Someone throw a bucket of water on her!

Those both sound like solid reasons to let out an evil giggle.