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

I’m running a 10 year old ‘western stuff’ PC and I don’t run into any issues.

Planned obsolescence exists in single-manufacturer products (smartphones, white-goods), even moreso in vertically-integrated businesses (Apple, Samsung).

It doesn’t work at all in the PC industry where component suppliers compete for market dominance, because if their company puts out a shitty product that fails more rapidly than a competitor, they lose sales and brand reputation in a crowded market.

I hear you, but i disagree - at least based on what we know presently. If you look at US unemployment stats (which are a bit fucked from Covid), they jump in 2023 a little, but have since been decreasing each year since (employment is increasing). You can argue it’s because the Trump admin is cooking the books in hwo they report unemployment, but an almost identical trend is seen in the UK stats… Canada… Germany… Italy (barely even an AI blip in their stats)…

Are they all cooking the books?

If you believe the AI hype crew, AI is “improving in leaps and bounds weekly”, but that simply doesn’t align with reality.

Yeah, LLM AIs (the predominant AI tech in the AI© industry) have increased in quality as the sum total of all earth’s investor-class capital is poured into them… But that isn’t being translated in significant real world applications and job losses.

Companies tried (and are trying) AI©, and have mostly found it just isn’t any better or more reliable than a human in the vast majority of real world applications.

If you are a white collar worker and you only make a few minor mistakes now and then - boss doesn’t care, you’re human. On the other hand if you’re a white collar worker and you make only a couple mistakes now and then but wow they are batshit crazy ones that defy your coworkers attempts to understand them - you’re fired. That’s AI.

“AI for the first time can replace or exceed human cognition.” 🤣

No.

Maybe if you chose one tiny sliver of human cognition like memory and isolate it, but cognition overall? No chance. LLM tech is a database inference machine. Some uses? Yes. 1/3 of the worlds stock market wealth invested in it? Dumb.

Not many years ago, Bill Gates said that climate change was the most important issue facing the world.

I guess that’s solved now, because he now says how we handle AI use and access has taken the mantle as the most important issue the world’s facing.

This is just more AI cooker stuff from a billionaire octagonarian.

That’s crazy that LG installed adware by bundling it up with Windows drivers and delivering it through Windows Update.

If companies can send adware through Windows Update packaged simply as ‘drivers’ and Microsoft doesn’t even raise an eyebrow even once this is known, reported and questioned by media, then my already low opinion of their quality control drops precipitously.

“Why let someone else sabotage my future when I can do it myself”, essentially.

Escapism is OK when you need to de-stress, everyone needs that sometimes - (games, TV, mild drugs, etc). But fatalism is dumb, especially when it comes to decisions of health - just ask any ex-junkie; they have to deal with the health fallout of their past decisions for the rest of their lives.

In this scenario, smoking a pack of Marlboro’s directly funds the arseholes you’re pissed off at. The southern conservatives that own the tobacco and their finace-industry investors that directly fund the politicians fucking society and the planet to make selfish decisions on their part…

If you’re unhappy with the direction of the world, do something about it and you’ll improve your life and your emotional state. Teach, organize, volunteer, protest, find a job that has a positive impact on the future, serve poison to a far-right politician (in the videogame Hitman), the list of options are endless.

Calling it now…

“YouTube will now count views only when an ad has been played in full”.

Will come sooner than you think.

The NYT haven’t changed. They’ve been aligned with corporate greed and neo-conservative goals and attitudes for at least 40 years. Yes you can find individual articles that don’t, but editorially they always have.

Though they always presented their image as ‘social liberal progressive attitudes’ and ‘fiscal responsibility with social support’, if you look at their actual reporting track record they’ve helped manufacture consent for almost every US war of the last 30+ years, and have consistently sided with the desires of whatever government is currently in power and fiscal conservative attitudes throughout.