Microsoft’s mission isn’t to improve the public good. Microsoft’s mission is wealth extraction for its shareholders.

Windows is worse for you as an individual consumer. But I would argue Windows is a better product for advertisers and other interests that go beyond you. Those interests are at odds with your interests. You need to look at the bigger picture.

Instead of regulating people, how about we regulate big tech and their predatory business practices instead.

It’s not the cameras that are tracking you, it’s the machine vision that reads licence plates, and that has not been around longer than you’ve been alive.

All these loops can detect is if a massive chunk of metal moves over them, no PII. Knowing how many cars use a road is critical in knowing if a road is congested or not, and that helps make roads better for everyone. It’s not part of the surveillance machine. This kind of sensor is no more nefarious than the 100 year old sensor in your toilet that stops filling the tank when it is full.

Take your tinfoil hat off.

If nobody wanted them, including you, then you have your answer, no? Or maybe you are undecided? It sounds like you can’t decide if you want to keep them or not. Nobody here can make that decision for you.

Personally I don’t think an art project or a donation amounts to much more than avoiding the question of whether you want to keep them or not.

Gonna go out on a limb and say, I don’t have any issues with the power of modern ceiling fans.

The bigger, the quieter, the better. I’m surprised he didn’t instead comment on this trend of small, ultra fast ceiling fans that sound and look like a drone on the ceiling of the bedroom.

Either this is highly exaggerated, or whoever is doing your taxes hasn’t explained to you the various deductions you should be claiming or enjoying, from standard/basic deductions, to tax credits and programs, not to mention tax brackets.

That being said, is there a massive discrepancy in how little tax corporations and the rich pay compared to the little guy? He’ll yeah there is.

A hobby is pretty much anything you do other than what you do for your own or someone else’s sustenance. Getting paid to barbecue for customers paying you? Not a hobby. Grilling some burgers at dinner time because you or your family are hungry? Not a hobby. Spending hours and weekends on end slow cooking a particularly challenging piece of meat? Hobby. Eating an expensive piece of meat (as a treat)? Also a hobby.

Checked luggage… so that they can get at the bag carousel faster and wait even longer? I think you mean let people with no carry-ons off first.

Remember clipart and wordart? It was colourful and flashy and easy, and everywhere in PowerPoint presentations and word documents and even online. For a few years. Then it vanished.

Turns out, easy and flashy doesn’t have a lot of staying power because when something is easy, it is ubiquitous, and when it is ubiquitous it stops being impressive.

AI slop is easy and flashy, and will probably run its course as people become tired of it.

There will still exist AI content, but it will not resemble the slop we see today.

Nothing is stopping programmers from inventing and using new words. Getting people to use those words is another matter. You are hand waving the ability for programmers to dictate to non-programmers how language is used, but I think that hand waving also hand waves the idea of language to begin with. So I don’t think any answer you get will be meaningful.

Similarly, everyone benefits from roads, even if they don’t drive, even if they are a house hermit. What you thought you amazon package was just teleporting? Your life saving medicine? Your food?

Depending on where you are in the world, and how much of this is coming out of pocket, this is either really good or pretty bad.

If my laptop is offline can I just not use it because it can’t confirm my id?

Yes. The powers at be will stop at nothing to take more, and more, and more power away from you. This is human nature.

In a way, science is just a formal way of recording things, obvious or not, in a way that the crap can be vetted out. Would you prefer podcasts to be our recorded history?

I think it is safe to say that OP’s question was lay speak for “what is the mean time to get to a result”. Other than that I don’t think you actually addressed the question.

Let me try to get it started:

Randomly generating music might be akin to password cracking. Cracking short or simple passwords can be very fast, while cracking long or complex passwords can be very long. The rate of password guessing also affects the time to get a result.

To calculate an answer, we need the following information:

• Guessing speed (how fast is each “song” generated and checked?)
• Minimum “song” length that needs to be generated
• Complexity of “song”: how many instruments (“voices”), resolution (are whole notes only ok, or do we need. Half or quarter notes?)
• Settle on some subjective definition of “song”. Is S.O.S. in morse code a “song”

You might be able to take a genre of music, and decompose the songs within to get some answers… I don’t have the time for that. Anyone want to take a stab at estimating the calculation?

Do nothing about school shootings. Destroy hobbies and manufacturing instead. America is rotting from the inside.

There are two ways to make a game that leads the industry in a genre: invent a new genre, or be the preeminent example of the genre. The GTA franchise has a reputation of consistently being in the latter category.

I’d rather these jobs be automated than the ones AI is gunning for.

Did they haul out a nativity scene? Go to church? No? Then it was a cultural celebration, not a religious one. Nothing hypocritical about that.

Might be a good time to remember that Christmas has adopted many pagan traditions.

The dead give away is the warm smile. Trump never smiles, at least not in a phoney way.