Yup. It’s a bit of a question of how paranoid are you/you feel you need to be but it may be worth keeping in mind that the baseband modem of any phone is proprietary and runs its own unaudited software the end user has no control over or insight into.

I would be very surprised if it wasn’t, at best it’s stuff no one bothered with and somehow I expect that won’t get torrented much either.

Yeah it’s one of the classics. In reality, the rich liquidate stocks all the time, particularly large amounts might not always be able to be dumped on the market immediately in one go but well, then it’s simply done over a certain timespan, but generally speaking it takes quite a lot before the market “cares”.

I am genuinely curious, this whole thing is most likely an effort to sell more TVs, but does that actually work? Is there a significant segment of customers which buys TVs based on whether or not it has a (link to a) chatbot in it? Or did some exec just decide “our products need to have AI now” with 0 research done.

I would really like to see data on this.

For coke I imagine it’s the desire to remain continuously culturally relevant so it remains - the - fizzy sugar water in everyone’s minds. (How effective that actually is I have no idea and I suspect, neither do they).

McDs meanwhile has lost revenue (in part attributed to their price hikes amongst other factors ) and is probably hoping to drive up sales.

Yet another product for the “yeah this would be interesting if smartphones didn’t exist” pile (and funnily enough this one even requires one to even do anything)

Nothing, most software has supported webp for 15 years, the last few stragglers have caught up two years ago or so, people on the internet are just very incapable of letting go of an opinion.

Up until very recently, the cult of rust was going - very - strong on lemmy. Things have somewhat normalized by now, but for a long time, any programming related topic was full off, often ill informed, takes why “rust should have been used for this” and similar things. The Rust community has generally been extremely toxic as well, not helping its reputation. Now that we are a few years in and various major Rust projects have had numerous embarrassing bugs reality has sunk in, but as these things go, the backlash will last longer on the internet than the hype ever has.

Can’t, whenever Stallman comes up I have to think back to the time where he while on stage, pulled something off his foot and ate it.

Yeah like, holy shit the pseudo religious bullshit here is getting annoying. I like Linux, I am supremely unlikely to ever even touch a windows system again (minus the occasional time where I might have to for work when accessing client systems) but this weird cult behavior is aggravating.

Oh, no, no, feudalism. With the present techbro billionaires as the new aristocracy. Money will be useless because the serfs can’t afford anything anyway and work will be optional yes, you always have the option to starve.

Yup, and modern webservers are - very - good at handling a ton of requests, if your backend is solid, it takes quite a lot of traffic before it’ll buckle.

Thiel killed the outlet that outed him.

I get to set up a system precisely how I want it to work, when an update releases for something, I get that update and I am not at the behest of a maintainer to decide for me if I need that feature or bugfix at the moment. There’s no preconfigured “opinions” on how stuff should work that differ from the defaults in most cases, which means everything usually actually just works, vs some distros where the maintainers felt they were smarter than upstream and consequently broke shit.

So they are -that - desperate now.

The AI stuff might genuinely factor into it, I largely don’t use it myself but from what I understand from some colleagues it’s churning out decent react and co, while other languages can have mixed results.

Not a mint user myself, but I have helped a friend install it. The install script at the time would silently crash if it had issues with the network card name. Researching it I found that this had been reported 8 months before my friend ran into it, and a PR submitted, but was not even looked at for a month after. Sure, these are all (largely) unpaid volunteers, but if your objective is to be beginner friendly, stuff like that really shouldn’t be left sitting for so long.

I presume it’s a mix of things, there are near daily changes making services worse for consumers in one way or another, which fuels the relevancy of Doctorows writing on the one hand and the desire of people to be agreed with on the other.

Yup, the baseband modem does what it’s firmware tells it to, and that’s entirely independent from the phone’s software. And open baseband modems to my knowledge don’t exist.

Yup, the fediverse has a lot of things still to solve and figure out before it goes anywhere. I have little faith that present moderation would scale well if there was a massive growth in the userbase. And then there’s the other issue. There’s a discussion on the peertube github for two years now on how to keep instances from dying.