Kisai

Technically, outside the US, you don't. You've purchased the right to have it. If you deface it, the copyright holder could sue you. Moral rights exist in Canadian and Japanese law. Often though, the artists don't know this. You can not transfer the moral rights to a work. If and only if the work was "work for hire" , eg you commissioned someone to make a thing that is permanently attached to your house/garden/etc, then it gets into the weeds, since you have to transfer the rights to that work if you ever move and a new owner thinks it's junk and wants to dispose of it. It's the artists unless you negotiated otherwise. Again, you can not alter, or vandalize a work. They are within their right to not send you the PSD as the PSD is not the finished work. The Jpeg is. and that PSD won't be openable in 30 years but the JPEG still will. Given how complex images are, and stupid formats like webp require immensely complex decoders, there's a good possibility that artists will just save images as 99 compress JPEG to save having to figure out if someone's 1995 PC can open it. But this gets away from my argument. If you've commissioned an image, and your PC catches fire, and the artist hates you now for some reason and doesn't keep their original PSD's (many do not,) you can not demand they remake the image. It's gone. A real artist who is business savvy would know this is a possibility and keep all their clients works on at least a DVD, SD card or a USB stick in a safe somewhere, just in case. Sometimes that art can be sold again. Sometimes not. Maybe the Estate when the artist dies might find value in it. Who knows. But if the artist dies, you are not getting it back. Which is the point I've been making. If you're purposely destroying the game, then you should be required to de-facto open source/public-domain it. If you're not willing to sell it indefinitely, you have no excuse not to short of licences inside the game running out. You can still patch that out like we've seen with the GTA and Crazy Taxi games.

Realistically, Everything that is a big loss tends to be either a) bleeding edge (never buy high end parts like i9's or xx90 GPU's upon release), I've bought one xx90, and only when it was half the price it was a few weeks earlier. I refuse to buy the i9's because they essentially need liquid coolers. Don't liquid cool unless you are going all-out on high end parts. b) obscure (one of the reasons why I won't buy a VR HMD, they all universally suck at present, and will continue to do so because people just don't want VR until there is a must-have app, and all we keep getting are less capable ugly re-inventions of second life. I basically noped the hell out of VR. c) not capable of what's advertised. PDA's, I swear Microsoft abandoned this market instead of transforming it into a smartphone and basically ceded the entire smartphone development to Apple. I had three. I've less smart phones, primarily because of this burn and why I won't touch Android. Give me something that lasts 7 years, or I'll just hypermile whatever I use. So in terms of "lost money" every single laptop. Do not buy laptops if you want to play games. Do not buy laptops if you need a "Desktop replacement" they universally suck and are getting worse in every way. If you need a laptop for portability reasons that is one thing, but at home, and at work you should have a desktop tower, or even a SFF rather than a laptop. Why are laptops terrible: a) laptops used as desktop replacements last 18 months b) ultrabook designs have exceptionally low life spans, and are noisy as hell. c) They are typically twice as expensive as a desktop for the same performance. An overengineered desktop will last you 10 years if you want it to. A laptop's life is dictated by it's battery and it's cooling fans. Until we get to a point where batteries can be removed ad-hoc and the laptop remains usable off a USB-C power source/docking station, laptops are poor investments.

We'll very likely see no more ICE passenger vehicles. It'll be things like muscle-car type designs (think race cars) and vehicles that don't make sense as EV's (eg small boats with outboard motors) that will continue to use gasoline. Diesel will likely just see a lot of bio-diesel conversion from waste oil products. Heavy machinery will likely continue to be diesel. But if you live in a major city, the actual gas stations are going bye-bye. The large truck-stops will stick around on the periphery, but there won't be any more "drive 5 minutes to find a shell station", it'll end up being "Park your gas fueled cars here and take the subway/light rail" https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-gas-stations-electric-vehicles/ https://www.cstoredive.com/news/shell-sell-1000-c-stores/710299/ https://calgaryherald.com/business/energy/parkland-convenience-store-gas-stations-sale Oil companies have been trying to get rid of gas stations because they see the writing on the wall. I disagree. What we keep being shown are cherry picked results from cherry-picked trained models. Two companies or people with the same dataset and same software, and same hardware, can end up with a completely different model just from the change in the GPU/NPU driver version. A lot of people are just downloading models they find for free on the internet, damn the consequences. Anyone seriously thinking that the output from something like ChatGPT, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion is "Good" and not heavily cherry picked first. The output from these things only impress people with no creative skill. Hence we get al these snake oil AI's being pushed by companies, and sometimes they literately ARE fake https://theticker.org/14111/business/amazons-ai-technology-mostly-relies-on-the-work-of-humans/#:~:text=However%2C in a recent report,could not determine a purchase. https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24133029/amazon-just-walk-out-cashierless-ai-india All they've done is pushed the work from workers in person to workers over seas being paid 1/20th of the wages. What did the AI actually do here? These present models, particularly the "LLM Prompt to output" understand nothing. These will not be replacing people, these will just contribute to the enshittening of all content types.

Check the PSU cables then, because if you didn't use the PSU's cables it came with, this might happen.

Check your front-panel-header wires. This sounds like you connected a LED to the reset switch

You can get hubs for fans or RGB controllers. Just make sure if you're using a fan hub, you use a PWM controller, because this will allow the fans to be spun down by software. Nothing wrong with this. RGB is a bit of a cluster****. Pretty much standards for this are relatively new. See the post above this one.

Wipe the machine. If you don't know what is causing it. Wipe it and start over. If you're not willing to do that, then your next option is a USB boot drive with Linux on it to scan the drive if it's unencrypted. If it's encrypted, then your best option is Wipe and start over.

If I pay $20/mo to play a MMORPG, and all that grants me is access. That's fine. The minute I spend $7 dollars to buy an asset in the game, Now you must refund me that $7. If that subscription fee also prevents the demolishment if my house in the game, now that subscription fee is like paying the bank a mortgage. $20/mo * 12 *10 years = $2400, now multiply that by the 10% of players who actually own houses. There is also the unlocking of additional storage, which are addtional fees. In the case of FFXIV, That's 2$/mo per retainer. Some people have like 15. https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/playguide/option_service/additional_retainer/ Note your data isn't destroyed when you stop paying for the service. You just lose access to it. If you stop paying for service, your house is destroyed, and the items in it "put in storage". But if they shut the game down, everything is gone. You don't want to accept the idea that a player's time and experiences have a cost. The company shouldn't be able to destroy your intangible property any more than they can destroy your real world property. Every game is built that way. If it's lobby-based, there is zero reason why a private server can't be run on someone's $200 desktop set aside to run it. MMORPG's have multiple software servers to operate the game, and the game client seamlessly switches between these connections to the same server. There is no requirement to those to be a separate machine from the game client if the player is playing solo. Which is another point you seem not to want to understand. If WoW, FFXI or FFXIV:ARR shutdown, a "Single player" option could be developed to run on the same computer as the game client, and the player could play all the story and dungeon content with NPC party members. That ensures the game still can be played. If you want to get your 8 friends to play that content with, they just connect to YOUR machine. No server infrastructure is required. All they have to do is in the final patch to the game client, allow the player to define what server to connect to. Presently these private servers just interdict the connection to the non-existent servers by manipulating the hard coded IP addresses in the launcher.

In practice it doesn't work that way. I can't encode a 4K stream and a 1080p stream on an RTX 3090. That number is just an undefined limit based on the underlying function block capacity. To encode a 4K HEVC video, will pull down 60-75% of the NVENC capacity. Where as a HD1080p video would pull down 24-35%. I found part of this problem is actually NVENC capacity is bottlenecked by rescaling. OBS spins up two separate encoders, and passes the non-resized video to 4K, but has to rescale the 4K to 1080p. When I started doing simultaneous twitch and youtube + disk, I actually had to use the HEVC encoder on Intel iGPU to send the video stream to youtube, because it otherwise it pushes NVENC over it's capacity. If you wanted to minmax a transcoding batch (eg Davinci Resolve, or command line FFMPEG), then that entire capacity is available to the software and could reasonably get 360fps, but I've NEVER seen that kind of performance from NVENC under any workload. I reasonably think that you would only get that kind of performance from a SIMO output (Single Input, Multiple Output) to make use of all the layers of caching.

I know that, good luck getting physical die marked up . I wasn't saying put the encoder's IN the GPC, I was saying make a device that is nothing but NVENC. Because "twitch/youtube" competitors pop up all the time, and ultimately fail when they realize that the hardware cost is extortionate and no amount of advertising will make up for that. Releasing a 2 x 20, or a 4 x 40 model that 6 can be popped into a server, gives you 160 potential on-the-fly encoders (Eg Twitch) per server, and I'm sure it could even be made more dense if it was semi-programmable (eg function level blocks, eg iDCT, Huffmann, RLE, etrophy encoding, and so forth) so that an input allocates only the necessary number of function blocks to be transformed, rather than there being enough capacity to transform a 200MBit 8K Stereo/3D video at all times. And if a "peelback" transport layer was ever going to happen, this kind of functionality could effectively create deltas starting from the largest size, downwards. Anyways, I digress, Google clearly went and made their own hardware because they needed to. Twitch meanwhile has been waffling around and making themselves less useful and less usable over time because of "costs", something like this solves the problem of there not being enough encoder capacity to service everyone.

I assume you meant shredded. Data privacy mainly, but to tell you a short story, the engineering company I was doing work for sent stacks and stacks of laptops to be recyucled. These laptops still had mechanical drives in them. The company that sent me there didn't want me properly wiping the machines "That's the recycler's job" With the SSD's, its' actually a lot easier to ensure they are wiped, you just go to the BIOS and tell it to wipe the SSD and it's done in 4 seconds. Where as the mechanical drives it could take 6 hours to do. But if it came down to it, it took two minutes to just unscrew the back's off all but the Precision 5520's , pull the M2 drive out and snap it in half through the NAND chip, or push it into the paper shredder.

I have to wonder why nvidia didn't build anything like this. Considering how much die space the encoders take up: AD102. Those 3 NVENC's and 3 NVDEC's could all fit in one GPC. Consider there's 12 of those, one AD102 should be able to fit 75 NVEC's + 3 NVDEC's. If Google is spitting out 10 resolutions in two codecs, you could probably have 4 input streams and 20 output's at once in that die space. At any rate, I'd like to see an example of where Youtube actually is using AV1, because I've not run into any that I can think of.

Because they want to play it with their friends. Did you not understand anything in the thread? There are ENTIRE videos of people doing things on private servers of MMORPG's because they've either: - The RPG has stopped being available (eg FFXIV V1.0, Wizardry Online) - The people who played it got banned but still want their fix - The people want to play for RP/eRP and don't need the entire server infrastructure to do it. (GTAV) Less you dismiss this point, https://fivem.net/ is literately a private server system for GTAV for RP. The maximum it would cost you is $1000/mo if you wanted to run a massive RP server that supports 1024 players. If you only pay for 10 player slots, it's only 12$/mo. And before you go "isn't this illegal or something" no, the fiveM stuff is blessed by Rockstar for RP stuff. These costs are almost entirely for the software license.

EA and Blizzard aren't maintaining millions of dollars in equipment just to have activation-DRM servers. They are maintaining persistent worlds with thousands of players. Games that are expressly "lobby-based", do not have that kind of infrastructure. Even MMORPG's often have their maps bifucated along loading zones. One "server" does not operate the entire game of millions of players, one "server" is really a series of virtual servers, map servers, player servers, marketboard servers, etc. But if a company decided to shut the whole thing down, it's completely reasonable for someone to be able to take the source code to these services, spin them up on the same machine and still operate a private instance to play the game in a "single player" or maybe a 8-100 player "co-op/pvp" mode. Square Enix has even explained how their infrastructure works, with fixed instances spun up for every dungeon to save loading time rather than forking off new instances on demand. We've seen the consequences of this when certain instances get too busy during new patches and you see 100 people standing around a NPC. But to their credit they've also implemented dynamic server and data center travel so that means players stuck on a busy server can jump to a less busy server and pick up where they were. They don't need to wait for players on their own server to finish fumbling with the instance. But DRM servers? All these things are doing is going "yep, you bought the game, keep going". They can be completely patched out. Single-player microtransactions can be patched out. Any reason to keep servers online can be patched out, save for the multi-player component. There is implicitly a time limit. The SSL certificate expiry, of how long a game can last. Once that expires, nobody can buy the game new and patch to the current version. And I've seen this happen. I've seen it happen with IDV, a game that has a mixture of online play with players, but also single player experiences. If you download the game on too new certain PC's with too old a of game client, the game client can't update because the certificate in the client is expired, or the SSL library has a bug in it (in this case, I had to hunt down a command line work around to disable openSSL CPU optimizations to get the game to update, once it was update, I could turn it off.) That's at least TWO instances I can point directly to how non-multiplayer aspects of a game or software package are screwed, where saving the software's binaries doesn't help because old versions can not update and can't communicate with the server. If the company is unwilling to re-release the client builds every time the SSL certificates expire, eventually they will get a pile of support requests asking why they can't install the game. That's a great way to kill a game.

Kinda hard to do that when the ability to play the game is dependent on the publisher leaving the game up. The entire point of the original video. If you are perfectly fine with being robbed by game publishers putting out a game you put money into and then they shut it down a few months later. This is only going to keep happening, with shorter and shorter lifespans. It's the grocery shrink ray on crack. https://www.theverge.com/24094441/final-fantasy-opera-omnia-mobile-game-preservation-square-enix https://www.ign.com/articles/nier-mobile-game-shuts-down-in-april 3 years. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/square-enix-re-releases-i-chocobo-gp-i-without-microtransactions 9 months.

A commercial server costs money to run, and even then you can lease bare metal servers for $100/mo. If a game isn't pulling in $100/mo from ... oh two people buying the game every month, then maybe you need to re-evaluate why you're running a server and not letting the users host their own games. That's nearly 3 pages of games with "dedicated servers" the end user can host themselves. And searching for "dedicated server" gives some ambiguous results.

I think the big irony is, "abandonware" or "pirated/cracked copies preserved because the developer is defunct, or incompetent". Certain games have a lot of fans (eg SIERRA, LUCASFILM, ORIGIN(Ultima)) that it resulted in reverse engineering the entire game engine (SCUMMVM) over decades. If the developer would just dump the source code to the game engine in the public, and yet still sell the game asset package" to use with it, that's an OK compromise too. If there is really an interest in the game, the community can recompile it themselves. That's what I'm saying. If a game is "killed", no ability to be played (online, offline, etc.) Then it should be refunded, entirely. Among my arguments in the thread, is refunding all "property" tied purchases, because the developer or publisher has ultimately destroyed the customers property. We don't tolerate this with physical property, and right-to-repair is pushing back against "killing hardware by making it unable to be repaired through proprietary tools, software or instructions" Ultimately, "always on DRM" needs to die, and "always on connection to sell you microtransactions" should not be a thing in a single player game, at all. Games-as-a-service is exploitive. It makes people see games not as stories or entertainment, but as slot machines. I think the real enemy in all of this is the "you will own nothing and be happy" with the renting of games via xbox games pass Nintendo Online. You don't own the game, and if the service operator decides they are losing too much money having that game they shut down access to it, taking your saves games and progress with it. Want to play it again? Buy it, somewhere else, start over. There's only a handful of games I ever bought more than once. Because the media shifted. You can't use a 1991 5.25" floppy in a 2022 PC. You can't even use the 1996 ODD version in a 2022 PC unless you went out of your way to keep a BD drive in your system. I eventually bought it off GOG, but between the time of the floppy disk and the CD ROM, I had to source other versions that people had the balls to copy the disks as images and figure out the copy protection for. I continue to have a PC from 1998 in my closet, just in case I need to read a floppy disk. But the disks often die from just being magnetic media. It's incredibly annoying to want to play something, or show someone a game that has some kind of online component, and it just doesn't work anymore. There was like this golden time during the early internet when everyone had network cards, that LAN parties were a thing, and all you needed was one copy of the game installed on everyone's computers. (see Warcraft 2) and as long as one person had the CD, you could play it this way. But many games wound up being pirated or cracked to play on the LAN because ONLY one person had a retail copy of the game, and the 2-8 friends who wanted to play it , didn't want to buy it just to play the LAN part with you. Good luck even sourcing 8 copies in a small city that has one computer store. Steam changed everything for the better, and then publishers got greedy. EA, Ubisoft, Square-Enix, all started putting out games that they then kill completely, taking the service and any ability to play with it. The excuse "servers cost money to maintain" is quite frankly, a lie. really big MMORPG's like WoW or Final Fantasy XIV have a lot of "server overhead" because they have millions of players. A private server is never going to have more than 100 people, and can be managed with one desktop PC running Linux in the host's home if we're being honest. FFXIV, version 1's fan-made private server requires a PC capable of running one copy of MySQL. That's a super low barrier of entry just to have something you can still use. Private servers for other MMO games, either still operating or defunct, are much in the same boat. We've seen this in games like Among Us, and Lethal Company, that the primary limitation to how many people can be hosted, is not host's computer processing power, but their geographic location. If your host is in Perth and you're in London, then you're going to have a bad time with it. Underlying infrastructure needed for things like proximity voice chat so it doesn't result in echos is harder to address with latency, but it's not an excuse to shut down a game and go "oh, it's too expensive to operate" If people can have massive lobbies for games that rely on being hosted by a player, clearly that's not a problem. So any excuse alluding to "it's too expensive to maintain a server" is a lie.

Basically anything that can run Windows 2000 and 98 is useful for the "games released in 1996-2004" era, but without a high end era-accurate GPU, you're likely not going to find a good use for them. Many Pentium 4 era computers only use is running a PCI (not PCIe) card for a vintage piece of software, and you'll probably find that these are going to be Firewire cards for camcorders of that era, and not a lot else.

Nope, you're not getting it. Apple wants to ensure that only Apple parts that Apple made to go into Apple devices. Did the recycler test all these parts? No. What if some of those parts contained customer data, or was damaged in being removed and caused customer devices to catch fire? You're not getting it. The correct answer here is "Apple must buy back devices, take them apart themselves and reuse parts that are qualified to be reused." Clearly sending the parts to a third party results in diversion and no quality checks, otherwise they would not end up in the supply chain at all. Having the recycler steal parts under the guise of "saving the environment" is not the right answer. They were paid to do a thing, and didn't do a thing. If they were not willing to do the thing, then they should not have bid on the contract to do the thing. The right thing here would have been for NOBODY to bid on destroying iPhones, only dismantling, testing and refurbishing phones from parts they are permitted to use. That should be in the contract signed with Apple. But this may require government arm-twisting of Apple to do this. Alas it's cheaper to send things to the landfill than it is to recycle, and many "recycling" is little more than sending an item to Asia to be be burned in their incinerators.

AI does not belong here. AI does not belong anywhere where a safety issue may arise. Conventional algorithms work just fine here, they are well tested, and aren't subject to black boxes or hallucinations. Since AI can't "real time" deal with changing data, it has to be trained on things, the only place I see AI being used in Air travel is replacing the actual gate manager with an AI that scans passenger faces and passport photos, do not fly lists, and so forth, to pass those passengers off to actual humans to check discrepancy. This will basically stop passengers on interpol's "red notice", and fake passports from being useful, because these fake passports won't be in the database of "flying passengers" for that day. Secondary screening will use different data sources. Like I don't see why you'd do this in the first place except in a countries that have no presumption of innocence. They want to keep the drug mules from being able to board a flight.

Stop right there. That's exactly the kinds of games they are making, and instead of supporting the game like you would like physical products, it's equal to to being sold a Car with a 10 year warranty, but then having the car explode in a ball of fire after 9 months and the company going "what car?" You're not thinking about the big picture. There are games out there, ones with PHYSICAL media, that can't be played simply because the online DRM componet died, all because an SSL certificate expired. That is pretty much why Nintendo shut down the 3DS, WiiU and Wii stores, because they would need to send firmware/operating system updates in perpetuity just to update the SSL root store. Don't believe me? I can name one software product that does exactly this. Adobe Creative Suite 4. If you want to reinstall it, you have to set your clock back to 2011. https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat-discussions/acrobat-8-unable-to-update-windows-installer-errorcode-1642/td-p/3728766 The updaters stop working because the certificate on the update server is expired. They can't update the certificate, because the software doesn't understand newer certificates. THAT is why. You paid for a product, and now you can't even use it because the online mechanism is damaged. An initial install of said product can't speak to an "updated" update server. Yet leaving that server in a potentially unpatched state forever just so it can talk to the retail version, also not a tenable solution. Do you understand the problem? It would make more sense to release a final patch/build of a product, or open source the thing so the community can fix it if they're not going to maintain it. With software, you can easily go "well there is a newer version, use that", but that rarely happens for games, and sometimes those "newer versions" are half assed, like Square Enix's "mobile" ports of Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger before they released the pixel remasters, and had their arm twisted to fix the chrono trigger port. Again, stop right there. That comes from a time before games started selling property for real world money. https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/asperreview/index.php/asperreview/article/download/25/25/25 This document is circa 2011 And this is from 2017 https://psmag.com/magazine/the-end-of-ownership Saying "the EULA says you don't own it" is like saying "your bank owns your money and you only have a license to spend it". Clearly the bank does not own your money, and contrary to how some banks operate, they do not have the right to spend your money. You are paid interest so they can use your money to back loans of other customers. They do not have more money than the culminative assets the bank branch has. The bank can't create money, despite it just being numbers in the computer. A game can create assets at will, so if you were not paying real money for it, then there would be nothing to be pissed off about, but you are paying real money for an asset inside the game, thus you should be entitled to be able to use or destroy that asset as you please, and if the game developers destroy it first by shutting the game down, you should be entitled to a refund of all cash purchases made in that game. Period. To say otherwise is to say the company that owns your house or car can come repossess it at any time, even after you paid it off. Or can send a kill code to destroy the product. All this right to repair stuff is trying to prevent that. These are equal things. A company should no more be able to destroy your physical property than they can destroy intangible property. If we apply that same logic to it, then if a game developer or publisher destroys the game from working, then they should have no recourse against those who keep the game alive. That can be piracy, that can be cracks, that can be private servers. Heck many of the games on GOG are cracked versions of the game because the developer is long defunct, and the publisher neither has the source code or the original gold masters. They are in fact selling you pirate/cracked copies of their own games because they originally destroyed the game and then they saw another source of revenue after the fact. The argument here is not "The second the publisher withdraws the game, it should be free", the argument is "the developer should never with draw the game in the first place, and any excuse they use to do so should result in the developer losing the right to claim damages." Eg no copyright infringement can be claimed if they are not selling the software in the first place. The software should be de-facto public domain if withdrawn from sale.

VP9 is only offered once on that h.265 stream. Meanwhile, if I UPLOAD a video straight from Davinci Resolve: Conclusion: Youtube presently transcodes to VP9 only for 2160p/1440p, VP9+AVC for 1080p and 720p but also 480p, 360p, 240p and 144p. VP9 is not used at all for videos from streams. However if you look carefully, you see each of those codecs have a suffix. My guess here is that each suffix is a specific encoding profile. Well let's find out. 4K is "3.20GB" , 1440p+1080p+720p+480p+360p+144p = 3.4GB. That's just off the estimate. I could download all of them if I wanted an exact number.

Still waiting for that promise of "peelback" codecs which build a stream from multiple delta streams eg 144-320-480-720-1080-1440-2160. I have a feeling patents probably are involved. The idea was that you transcode once (in real time) but you only subscribe to the streams necessary to build the final resolution you need. How this would even work probably makes more sense if you think of interlaced video. Each stream adds "even" rows. (and I'm going to say rows, but its' rows and columns) So 144->320 adds a 176 row second stream, 320->480 adds a 160 row stream 480->720p adds a 240 row stream, 720p->1080p adds 360 rows, 1080p->1440 adds 360 rows, 2160p adds 720 rows

There's been plenty of evidence to the contrary, even links in this thread. Louis Rossman literately bought counterfeit parts. Where did they come from? the OEM? Stolen Phones? Both? We don't have that information because quite frankly nobody selling counterfeit parts is going to say they are anything but legit. Usually counterfeit products meant to fool customers into paying premium prices for literately unsafe garbage, are cast from molds used to make the real thing. But they don't have the ability to replicate the markings, and if it actually contains Apple marks, Apple didn't make or sell it, thus it's counterfeit. EVEN if it was stuff sent to be recycled by the actual OEM. On the flip side, there are products marketed as "OEM" versions of "fits Apple device" which are also counterfeit, but they aren't pretending to be Apple parts, which again, might be produced by same OEM as Apple, but without having Apple markings and serial numbers, they would be considered counterfeit. BUT you can still buy them if they don't say they are apple parts at all. Again, there are people who steal phones. New ones. https://www.portageonline.com/articles/70000-iphone-theft-has-portage-rcmp-asking-for-publics-assistance https://www.the-gazette.co.uk/news/24265635.man-distracted-staff-stealing-iphone/ And there are phones being stolen from the recycling pipeline https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/18/24134314/apples-iphone-recycling-program-is-riddled-with-theft-and-waste https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-04-18/apple-iphone-recycling-program-has-secrets https://www.barrietoday.com/local-news/ex-geep-employee-denies-involvement-in-iphone-selling-scheme-3315985 If a "new" device is stolen and can't be activated, where do you think it's going? If a device is traded in, where do you think it's going? I no doubt suspect that substantial amounts of parts you see on eBay are from stolen devices. That's not small potatoes, that's 18% of the phones sent to be recycled being diverted.

HFC is extremely doubtful since most of the Hydrogen is coming from natural gas. We'll probably see HFC for some high-range vehicles, but EV's are just in their teething stage where we have yet to design safe enough batteries. (Good gawd, like 40 EV's catch fire a day in PRC.) Where as in the West, people are brainwashed into a lot of silly ideas about EV's that they will continue to use ICE until they're not available. The writing is on the wall for Gasoline/Petrol though. Large cities gas stations are being redeveloped and will soon end up as EV-only zones. They're not being replaced with superchargers either. Most new buildings are being designed to have destination changing. No more massive parking lots either. No AGI will be seen in 5 years, or 25. The current stuff, Generative AI, is just autocomplete. It doesn't understand anything, and unfortunately the people running or investing in AI fail to understand this, or maybe they perfectly understand this and are all showing off their best paper AI tigers. There are cases where, yes, generative AI might result in some job losses along the lines of the "nobody actually wants to do this", but at present we keep seeing a lot of cherry picked paper tigers. Something "wow" inducing comes out, and then a few months later another company has one-upped that one. Yet, can any of these AI's actually write, draw or sing from experience? No, because it has none. It's like the old addage of "book smarts" and "street smarts", Generative AI is "book smarts" without a single drop of "street smarts". INT 30, WIS 0.