The beginning of your sentence - "I can’t believe how few choices we have..." - can be applied equally sadly to other areas here in the U.S....such as but not limited to lack of choice of residential ISPs, or lack of choice (or generally mis-incentivized) healthcare providers, or lack of choice of mobile service providers, or, etc., or etc. And, of course, your last part of your comment asking where the innovation is? Well, innovation often is pocketed in those who control the capital, and only released little by little at the whims of releasing more capital. Sorry, i have to step away, cuz felt sad instantly just citing my own comments here. :-(

Look at them up there, just plotting with each other! :-)

Well, actually i guess you can guess what happens next! lol :-D

1. Establish domain names and relevant cloudflare account including the monetization gateway (associated rules, etc.).

2. Then host a ton of crap content across a wide swath of topics...not even decent quality...merely a step above old school style SEO keywords...just enough low quality "honey" to attract the AI flies, and their high volumes of traffic.

3. Charge very low amounts to ensure the AI "visitors" won't balk programmatically at the cost.

4. Then wait for lots of AI traffic (attracted by the "honey")...and then profit!

Obviously lots of holes in the above...but, unless I'm missing something, it feels like more spam headed our way (because the AI agents will swallow up all the crap content created only for triggering usage costs)...which is a shame. Because while I'm not sure about this overall approach of this gateway, I certainly would welcome web authors to get paid something for their efforts! If cloudflare can help achieve this for web authors, then I'm in favor! Of course, the cynic in me also recognizes that by being the middleman, cloudflare does stand to gain whether the volume of traffic is for good content or spam crap. Is cloudflare a new type of bank now?

Must think happy thoughts! The internet feels darker every day, but, must think happy thoughts!

I was about to reply that hey, i like novelty...but, then thought about it, and agree with you! I think you're totally right! What i *really* like is the impact that novelty might have. So, novelty might merely be one of several vehicles to convey impact/value!

Otherwise, that chip tech sounds really awesome - at least for the future!

Your point about folks perhaps framing it as generational as opposed to class is quite interesting. I wonder if maybe in the past both of these dimensions (generation and class) overlapped alot more...and now, maybe things skew more towards one generation being more of one class, and so maybe data either getsd hidden, or in many cases the folks in one generation happen to be members of a specific class level? I ask this as a rhetorical question, and not a statement, because i have no idea on a wide scale. For example, if maybe a few generations ago, there were class conflicts across the different generational categories...but nowadays, most (but not all) older folks might identify more with only one side of the class aspect? Anyway, all questions that can't be answered without tons of data and evidence gathering! Good discussion!!!

As to your point about likely being more due to material conditions rather than age, perhaps you're right....but, then again, on average I'd say the older generation tends to have better material conditions/positions, tends to have at least some savings (maybe retirement, or at least will have more solvent social security, etc.?)...than say young folks who started graduating college from around the great recession to about now? So, maybe we're both right???

Another part of my nostalgia with those old workstations (besides the core OS) was the desktop environment, i think CDE or motif or something like that. Something about the look and feel of that DE i always thought was cool!