My 2019 mbp is my work daily driver doing fairly heavy design , video, and blender work no problem. Runs well. Probably gets 6-10 hours a day of use. Video rendering a little slow but not egregiously so. It was upgraded to the max though. Its late 2019 intel. Not sure if its on latest OS but shouldn’t be too far behind.

Stick close to her and trusted family and friends. Though cash must be accepted legally , its hardly used. Getting a simcard requires registering with your passport now. If you're okay with that, a cheap burner phone with wechat for payments and comms and standard phone number yo get hold of your family back home. Needless to say you wont be anonymous so my attitude when visiting there was kind of just accept that, and don't do/say anything stupid. i.e assimilate temporarily with that way of life. All of these concerns are only a small part of life and of course a billion or so people are living with it. You are totally right that the place is full of interesting and amazing history, culture, food and really friendly and hospitable people despite the bs they have to put up with.

Then Hire cheap human intelligence to correct the AIs hallucinatory trash, trained from actual human generated content in the first place which the original intended audience did understand the nuanced context and meaning of in the first place. Wow more like theyve shovelled a bucket of horse manure on the pizza as well as the glue. Added value to the advertisers. AI my arse. I think calling these things language models is being generous. More like energy and data hungry vomitrons.

Why would we believe the promises of the ones who ruined the primary utility of their core product in the first place, and convinced or blackmailed the rest of the internet to take part in the ruination ? An advertising corporation will tell us to put cyanide on our pizza if it makes them an extra buck this quarter, and google is worse than that. Profit despite the social costs is doing no evil /s

Politicising climate change was yet another distraction from dealing with it in a cohesive and unified manner. Divide and conquer.

News sites also need to stop going on about it. Its like feeding the troll. I’ve never used the thing other than looking at it briefly in its early days, and yet I’m constantly hearing about it. And here I am commenting about this apparently (Western) globally important website which has served no purpose in my life. What a waste of energy all around. Self perpetuating negative feedback loop tech wank. Digital town square my arse. The little I know about it is from bad headlines which I wish I could unsee as its of zero consequence.

Non American here, and also not a lawyer, but I’m curious what the correlation is between consumer rights (or lack of) and the relative cost of the product. This is somewhat different to buying a cheaply manufactured product and it unsurprisingly falling to bits - though in many jurisdictions there are even basic rights for that situation, the price is irrelevent. Someone elsewhere in chat has suggested suing in small claims for the cost of the product, due to Roku intentionally bricking their own product unless the rightful owner (is the purchaser even the owner?) agrees to certain terms, even though OP purchased it in good faith. If a straight up refund is not available during a straight forward opt OUT option, we have a very unfair situation for the rightful owner of this product. Needless to say opting out should be as straight forward as opting in. Your suggestions is that if a product is of or below a certain price you must bend over and gratefully accept the corporation you paid money to, then inserting anything they like up your rear end. In my opinion your thesis is not price based as this is a common practice unfortunately in the consumer (and enterprise for that matter) tech industry where we have had shiny brand even expensive products initially sensitively torpedoed up our various orifices, only for brand HQ weeks later to press a button which flicks open hidden blades in the torpedo. No one wants or deserves this. The question is what recourse is there in OP’s jurisdiction.

I may be misunderstanding you if actually you mean that any tech corp can do such a thing at any time that you have paid for. In which case we agree. But it’s far from ideal and shouldn't be accepted.

Well this was a strange way to find out Fisk died. And in 2020. I’ve ended up in a bubble I don't like.

All three authors have criticised the CCP in the past. The awards were held in Chengdu, land ot pandas , spicy food , and snowflake leadership. Two of the authors are from international Chinese diaspora . The snowflakes running the country are incredibly sensitive to what ethnic han Chinese outside China - especially in public spheres - say about them. They threw Gaiman in for good measure ( atleast theyre consistent which is kind of surprising). This is just another small measure of softpower being exerted. Any author with reliance on that market is either self censoring or prepared to not have access to it. So clearly its what Hugo did in order to leave in one piece. Mustve been some interesting conversations go on.

Destructive. The intention being to return to a perceived ‘status quo’ which was effectively a policy(more like ideology) of cultural annihilation. The behaviour of an authoritarian occupying force, rather than one of partnership. Stirring up the worst in our backwater colony while they prepare to fleece their credulous voters while dangling plastic carrots (oooh tax cuts).

This is some self imposed (not you) dystopian stupidity. Good on you for giving them warning, telling them straight, and then following through. Hope you went on to better and brighter things.

Its not just embarrassment we should feel. Arbitrary constructs are still capable of creating massive unneccessary human tragedy, repeatedly.