Then it's doomed. Which is also my opinion, I don't disagree at all with you.

I would have maybe added a mention of the extremely cheap watches (like an Amazfit I got for 49 EUR before I received an AW Ultra as a gift - but Xiaomi/Redmi, Huawei, even Samsung have stuff in that range) as they fit the described "What a Smartwatch Actually Does" use case perfectly at an amazing bargain price. If I really don't need much beyond telling time, showing notifications and maybe counting my steps, anything above 30EUR is going to be a really hard sell. We can add 20 EUR extra budget for a decent tracking of sports and fitness functionality. And the point is that, despite not admitting it even to themselves, really few people actually truly need something beyond these core functions which have stayed the same for a decade. As others observed in the past, the target user of an Apple Watch is someone who imagines themselves active and needing all the fancy stuff, but in reality doesn't.

I really do like my Ultra, and actually use the payment and scuba diving (as a backup) which go beyond the bare basics and set it aside from most competitors, whether cheap or not, but the reality is that I'd never have bought it myself. And I have no idea how the battery life is found acceptable by anyone - it's a joke. I can't leave 3 days without bringing its dedicated charger. One night out of every 3, my sleep quality isn't tracked as it's charging on the nightstand. Anything with less than 10 days (and I'm being generous) is - or should be - ashaming IMHO. Especially as a charging cycle every max 3 days means the nonremovable battery will turn them into e-waste within 6 years. Disgraceful.

There. 4 scenarios. I could make more.

They need more Italians helping draft these laws, we have a... cultural/genetic knack for figuring ways around regulations :) and I don't even think I'm particularly good at this. But maybe LLMs will make our devious disposition finally obsolete.

The law is naive, but well intended. Maybe with 20-30 patches it will achieve enough of its purpose.

I entirely agree with you, and profoundly dislike them, but it's clearly working for them if their financials don't lie. While most other manufacturers bleed money, Samsung had healthy profits on smartphones last time I checked. It still puzzles me that anyone would buy them at all, but I've long accepted that I'm not a representative sample.

So given that, I don't see why they would bother coming up with a vision after all this time.

I use them to run wireguard to evade geoblocks when I'm travelling, a few redundant monitoring scripts alerting me of reachability issues of more critical stuff I care about, they serve as contingency access channels to my home (and home assistant) if my primary channels are down.

I get no support, no updates, it's all on me - which is fine, it allows me to stay current and not lose hands-on practice on skills which I anyway need for my job (and which are anyway my passion). I don't even get an entire IPv4 - I get.... 1/3000th of it? (21 ports, the rest are forwarded to other customers). Suits me fine.

It's also ridiculously easy to cache (download a book in 9 seconds, board a transoceanic flight - no problem)

It also doesn't require the right sound and lighting conditions to see and understand a video (either those conditions, or good noise cancelling headphones - and now you're unaware of your surroundings)

It's also the only viable option on insanely low power devices which get months of battery life per charge.

It's also something you can read at an incredibly speedy pace if you are good at it and practice - though occasionally a decent audio/video player will be of use with this.

It's also something you can fall asleep while consuming, and tomorrow you won't have much trouble finding exactly where you left off.

I could continue..

1: Yes, let's stick with ICE cars and die of preventable illnesses because EVs are only a massive improvement, rather than absolute perfection

2: Hey let's take this massive improvement and enjoy enormously cleaner air

I meet way too many people from group 1 unfortunately.

Thanks for capturing my feeling very precisely! I was indeed thinking what they could have done better with the same approximate number of transistor and the benefit of a time traveler :) And yes the constraints you mention (8080 compatibility, etc) indeed limit their leeway so maybe we'd have to point the time machine at a few years earlier and influence the 8080 first

Out of curiosity: Is there anything you feel they could have done better in hindsight? Useless instructions, or inefficient ones, or "missing" ones? Either down at the transistor level, or in high level design/philosophy (the segment/offset mechanism creating 20 bit addresses out of 2 16-bit registers with thousands of overlaps sure comes to mind - if not a flat model, but that's asking too much to 1979 design and transistor limitations I guess) ?

Thanks!

I'll show myself out..

And a lot of chargers don't have a cable built-in, they just have a USB-A or -C port - so it's just a matter of replacing the cable. But - again, if you'd rather not do even that, you're welcome to keep using your old cable with a USB-C converter

Sticking to pure zigbee devices with zigbee2mqtt and slae.sh's excellent USB coordinator. A couple weeks ago I bought a bunch of spare IKEA zigbee devices before they go out of stock. Around 2030 I'll take a look if thread/matter is anywhere near mature and has settled.

It absolutely isn't. I set up a blog for a friend where she shows her art and publishes an appearances itinerary/schedule. It doesn't collect ANY info from visitors, therefore requires no cookie banner at all. Simple as that.

HTTP logs are retained for 7 days for security analysis and then wiped. No analytics available, although my understanding is that a self-hosted Matomo instance set to anonymize the last 2 IP bytes of every logline it ingests would still be considered exempt from a banner.

This could well be true. Unless targeted ads are just flat out banned, at which point the profitability of untargeted ones will rise, as the air (user attention, available space in web pages) is no longer being sucked out of the room by targeted ones.

Also - if by untargeted you mean completely randomly chosen ones, there absolutely is a happy medium - choose them based on the content of the page (I'm browsing for baby wipes and formula? Show me ads for strollers and child car seats, and maybe earplugs and some gift ideas for infants, not for motor oil or landscaping or circular saws). I don't buy the excuse that they are so much less effective - especially if the personally targeted ones are out of the picture.

As a huge bonus, they are comparatively trivial to implement and would provide a way out of the current monopoly were only Google, Facebook and a handful of other "know" what to show you and everyone must make these few greedy incumbents even richer by advertising through them. This would also help fragment what information exists about your habits, so even actors determined to break the law would get less advantages by doing so.

Not necessarily. Many protocols can survive being NATed if they don't carry IP/port related information inside their payload. FTP is a famous counterexample - it uses a control channel (TCP21) which contains commands to open data channels (TCP20), and those commands specify IP:port pairs, so, depending on the protocol, a NAT router has to rewrite them and/or open ports dynamically and/or create NAT entries on the fly. A lot of other stuff has no need for that and will happily go through without any rewriting.

A bunch of multicast stuff (IGMP, PIM)

A few routing protocols (OSPF, but notably not BGP which just uses TCP, and (usually) not MPLS which just goes over the wire - it sits at the same layer as IP and not above it)

A few VPN/encapsulation solutions like GRE, IP-in-IP, L2TP and probably others I can't remember

As usual, Wikipedia has got you covered, much better than my own recollection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IP_protocol_numbers