Fascinating. Definitely still prefer the Go for retro futurism, though.

He’s mentally impaired. A malignant and grandiose narcissist wants more money, attention, fame, and so on for themselves no matter what they have.

Beautiful! Love those billboards. Also reminds me to check out a PSP Go, I bet the slide-out design is cool in person.

PSP is peak retro tech. The disk drive mechanism is so satisfying to open and close, popping out the UMD cartridge…

But yes, Japan preserves their old tech, books and games by default. Used items are almost always immaculately kept and sent cleaned up. It’s pretty reliable to buy used in Japan.

I’m sorry. Recently laid off myself and management avoided directly saying AI was the reason, but other statements (C-suite talking about whether AI can do other work months before the layoffs, in front of me) convince me that was the reasoning.

The alternative prediction is that this is in fact sustainable and AI companies will in fact have revenue to keep the bubble inflated for a lot longer, just in the worst way - by extracting the value of human-created reliability and trust from the market:

CEOs have also bought into AI almost to a person, and are using it to replace workers, results be damned. AI can’t do the things they believe it can, but to them, if they can fake satisfying a need with AI for $5, that is preferable to actually satisfying a need with a real employee for $10.

The CEO is happy because his company saved $5 and he’s met his stock option incentive target, the AI companies are happy to pocket that $5 instead of the employee getting $10. Maybe they even raise the customer’s price to $12 as AI rent-seeking starts rising, and both companies get $6 each. Win-win, life will go on, just worse for everyone else.

PC costs certainly aren’t helping, but there’s an entire cross-section of income and age demographics whose only computing device is and has always only been their phones.

I was curious so I looked it up. This site suggests 1 in 7 households in the US “either lack a computer at home or rely solely on a smartphone for internet access”, heavily weighted to lower-income states like Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas and Louisiana: https://www.benton.org/blog/computer-ownership-and-digital-divide