deliriousdreams

I’m assuming you mean that phone software will be free, because phones (while they can be heavily subsidized) aren’t free and are getting up to ridiculous prices. I own a phone that retails for $1000. That’s a ridiculous price for a phone. Except that phones now are just very tiny personal computers.

Aren’t we already seeing that though?

The vast majority of people who surf the web don’t use a computer to do it. People who do belong to niches. People over a certain age grew up with and still buy computers. People who game still buy computers or consoles. People who stream/create content still use computers and other electronics for that purpose, same with like. Engineers and hobbyists using CAD and other software in creative spaces.

But the smart phone has overtaken the computer as a personal computing device by quite a large margin now. And at every turn companies are trying to make cell phones a den of ad service, slop, and addictive content while stealing any user data that’s not nailed down to increase their revenue and continue the circle.

Would you like to see the picture of how I found it?

I like this idea for a lot of reasons. The inclement weather one I see in the comments is definitely one of them.

But it also puts me in mind of some of the clever ways I’ve seen posts and reflectors used to give the impression (when say you’re driving at night and only see them out of the corner of your eye) of a person standing there, until you look at them properly and then they look exactly like what they are.

There’s one in particular in a neighborhood where I used to live that to this day if I drive by it, my hindbrain says “HUMAN” and I really don’t understand why because the post looks nothing like a human when I look at it properly. It’s magic.

Yeah. I wasn’t sure it would work for your use case necessarily, but I did remember seeing that a version of the Walmart onn box was available in Europe, so I didn’t want to discount it altogether.

Either way I do hope you find what you’re looking for and if I come across suggestions that might work I’ll try to post them here.

Possibly? I don’t know for sure because I can’t find a store front selling it, but it does appear that these devices are region locked and that there are people in Asian countries sharing ways to end around the region lock.

No. It looks like it has a different name.

https://tv.mythomson.com/en/Thomson-Streaming-Box-Plus/270

To be fair, I believe that’s the “Walmart” one op talks about in the post. I believe they do sell a version of this same set top box in the UK and possibly other parts of Europe. So it may be a viable option still.

This is a threat. They know that they’re using the stock market to fund their greed and that anyone with savings tied up there (Retirement funds that are invested in the market) will be on the hook. Plus the tax payer money they’re going to ask for because they’re “too big to fail”.

Probably.

Your vacuum doesn’t go under furniture more than likely so to clean under there you quit being a janitor to become a furniture mover?

I guess it’s turtles all the way down.

A fair assesment. Except that you have to (and should be) cleaning the upright vacuum as well. Vacuum fires are no joke.

Yeah. I’ve got an 870 that’s still cleaning. It gets stuck under furniture and needs to be rescued at least once a week, and last week it lost its ass dustbin somehow mid clean, but it’s still kicking.

Sigh. This article is all over the place.

The headline suggests that payment processors/AI companies/retailers are fighting about the collection of shopper data.

AI obviously doesn’t collect the kind of data that would be useful to the retailers or even the payment processors. So it does stand to reason that the retailers would be a little miffed about “agentic AI” insinuating itself as the middle man between them and shoppers, effectively cutting them off from that data flow.

But that’s not actually what’s happening. It seems like (potentially), the AI companies want to sell “agentic AI shopping” to the retailers and possibly payment processors? But these entities want information about the shoppers that the AI doesn’t collect and the quibble is over whether the AI can be made to collect that data?

On the other hand I own 3 different raspberry pi’s. One for Home Assistant, one for Pihole, one for booting the server computer when I’m not home if I want to stream a movie from my library.

Here’s the thing. Since November 2022 Valve’s Steam OS has carved out almost a 5% share of the market for Linux (if we include Linux users who don’t use Steam OS). Windows has something like a 25-30 year head start on steam in this respect.

Something like 35% of PC gamers are still using Windows 10 after the EOL BS MS pulled in October. There is something to be said for those users being more willing to jump ship to steam than there is for them to buy exhorbitantly priced hardware to stay on windows when their hardware inevitably begins to show its age.

I think it’s fairly likely that Steam OS will continue to take chunks of user base out of MS for the foreseeable future.

It may not be the year of the Linux desktop, but it’s not nothing either. Valve’s devices are more hamstrung (as someone else in one of these threads said) by where you can source their hardware than they are by the MS dominated market share.

It can’t hurt to support this, despite the popular games it /may/ not be compatible with over time, because users are also becoming increasingly disillusioned with MS in general.

Lots of things remain to be seen but nobody (MS included) was expecting Steam to be successful as a platform for game sales, nor were they expecting them to be successful with physical hardware and yet here we are. Is that success limited? Sure. But it has become less limited over time.

I was just talking to a friend of mine last night over beers about how he’d pay to not have all these companies foist AI on him, and my response then was what it is now. Don’t give them any ideas.

There was a point where tires were expensive but they lasted a long time because so few people had cars and they didn’t drive them often. So two brothers who owned a tire company were trying to figure out how to sell more tires to the few people who owned cars.

The answer was to get them to wear their tires out faster by providing a list of places they could visit that would warrant the expense of wearing down their tires.

So the stat rating was more of a "this place is worth a visit/road trip system. And they published this list and it caught on and then restaurants wanted to get Michelin stars for the notariety and the essentially free press.