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pink-ming

Re:Dots: Always-on agents on Friday October 02, 2026 @12:48PM (#49935689)
I was already thinking of the people in my life who aren't tech workers. They have at least a laptop because it does exactly what you want, you don't have to talk to it (which again, is clunky and only works in a quiet place, which is why adoption of existing voice to text features is already spotty), it has a sizeable screen (video streaming, photo editing, gaming, lots more things), it doesn't have a subscription fee, and it doesn't have to be jailbroken if what you want to do is deemed harmful or otherwise unsupported by the platform. It's (mostly) free to use as you wish. That's the P in PC, it's yours and people value that.

That's not to say that agents won't be a popular product, but as I see it there's a near 0 chance that they kill PCs.

Re:Dots: Always-on agents on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @03:03AM (#49905415)
Via what interface would people use the agents? Voice to text on a smartphone? That's clunky and slow and only works in quiet areas where you can talk freely. And mouse and keyboard is really not that hard. If anything was going to kill PCs, smartphones & tablets would have done it, but everyone I know still has at least a laptop. Overall I think getting people to trade in the freedom of having their own personalized devices for a remote agent is a much harder sell then you're making it out to be.
Re:ChatGPT Pro 500 on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @02:42AM (#49905253)
We used to break up companies (standard oil, american tobacco, both over 100 years ago) for predatory pricing, because it's illegal monopolization. The supreme court raised the standard of proof in '93 (Brooke Group v. Brown & Williamson), you have to prove that the defendant sold below cost and that they stand a reasonable chance of recouping those losses, a test which most attempted predatory pricing suits fail these days. So it's pretty much the dominant strategy now- American Airlines got away with it, Walmart got away with it, Amazon got away with it, Uber got away with it many times, and now OpenAI will get away with it.