If this is the same startup I read about a while ago... Well the technology doesn't actually exist. There's a vague suggestion that maybe lucid dreams could be induced through techniques that are not properly understood yet, and that's about it.

In the UK we use metric and imperial so you can buy things in kilos but also measure your efficiency in MPG. Welcome to the island of the future/past.

Gamers lose when the store shuts down and you lose access to all of the games you got for free, or worse actually paid for.

Machine Learning is such a better name. It describes what is happening - a machine is learning to do some specific thing. In this case to take text and output pictures... It's limited by what it learned from. It learned from arrays of numbers representing colours of pixels, and from strings of text. It doesn't know what that text means, it just knows how to translate it into arrays of numbers... There is no intelligence, only limited learning.

Part of what's so funny about RPGs is being able to anticipate things that your character can't, and so they do stupid things for stupid reasons

They don't want to "kill Firefox" though. They want people to use Google products in all forms - using Google through Firefox is better than scattering users to other browsers without a Google default. By forcing users to Chromium they don't just kill Firefox, they direct users TO ever more Google products in the process.

I think that's a misunderstanding of how ADHD, and in fact mental illness in general, works. Perhaps for some people removing the distraction will work, but more often in my experience another will just fit in its place. The phone is not the problem, it is a symptom.

Science fiction presents a vision of the future - it is, I think, an effective mirror for the collective thoughts and beliefs about what is to come. For much of the 20th century people were strongly optimistic about the future - postwar and into the tech boom in the 80s and 90s it seemed like everything was only going to get better.

Nowadays though... we don't have that optimism anymore. We have climate change rapidly escalating, corporation's sucking us dry, states doing fuck all about it. This is reflected in those grim police robots and dark themes, just as the shiny space ships and friendly aliens of the past reflected the optimism of the time.

N.b. I do agree with the other commenter who said audience expectations of "realism" play a role - but I also think audiences have a pretty warped idea of what is realistic.

Fortunately there is no protagonist. Everyone is the centre of their own story and a participant in everyone else's.

Really thought from the picture that the mother roomba was deploying a swarm of cleaning bots to cover more ground.

It's shit like this that will eventually drive me away from windows. I was baffled when it appeared.

Well it was very much alive by 2008. Source: was a not straight teen in 2008.