I mean they have added a chatbot to their website and I’m sure they have replaced overseas first line support in many products with chatbots as well to encourage their customers to give up on getting support (and ensure that the customers that prevails and get sent to a human coworker are sufficiently pissed off).

“They ruthlessly cut costs, R&D, and employee benefits and then replace existing employees with overseas contractors. Innovation and growth take a back seat to sheer profitability.”

This is the operating manual that explains why IgniteTech’s much-publicized AI purge feels more like a familiar private-equity play.
[…]
IgniteTech is owned by ESW. For anyone who’s watched the ESW orbit, that vagueness is not accidental. ESW’s playbook, summarized in a long explanatory dossier that has circulated inside the industry, is blunt: buy distressed software, strip costs, move work to an hourly contractor model through a unit like Crossover (which has been described in Forbes as a “global software sweatshop”), and squeeze recurring revenue out of an existing customer base rather than invest in new products.

• https://aimmediahouse.com/market-industry/ignitetech-didnt-fire-80-for-ai-it-fired-them-for-profits

While my first reaction was the same - “how would they react in male avatars?”, that doesn’t seem to be the point at all of this study but rather the potential of VR to change the subjects behaviour in real life by helping empathy along.

Introduction
[…]
Peck et al.13 found that White participants, after embodying a Black avatar, showed a reduction in implicit racial bias.
This principle has been extended to the context of gender-based violence.
Seinfeld et al.14 had male offenders embody a female victim of domestic violence, finding that the VR experience significantly improved their ability to recognize fear in female facial expressions—a deficit common in violent offenders15.
Similarly, other studies using 360° videos and immersive scenarios of sexual harassment have reported marked increases in empathy and changes in violent attitudes among participants16.
[…]
These findings collectively affirm the potential of VR as a rehabilitative tool for enhancing emotional understanding and mitigating harmful behaviors.

Building on this foundation, the present study utilizes immersive VR to provide male participants with a firsthand experience of catcalling.
While previous research has often focused on overt violence, our goal is to investigate the affective response to a more commonplace form of street harassment. We hypothesize that this embodied experience will elicit morally salient emotions like disgust and anger19,20,21.
By inducing this moral discomfort, the intervention aims to foster self-awareness and encourage a reconsideration of the behavior’s impact22, serving as a potential strategy to promote behavioral change.

• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-19418-4

Meanwhile I’m hoping for the technology to get more efficient and require less compute to achieve worthwhile results.
I’d rather have a small specialised local language model that knows everything about a small field, f.e. vegetarian cooking recipes or maintenance and repair of <specific car model>, but nothing about anything else.
I’m just not comfortable with giving all my data to a generalised large language model running on someone else’s computer.

Most of the old settings are at least easily reached if you can remember their names such as ncpa.cpl for the settings you mention but when you write “control printers” you get sent into the new Settings view now. Instead you gotta go to the control panel and change view from category to small or large icons to finally right click Devices and Printers and choose “open in a new window” to get there. If you left click it you get sent to the new Settings view.

Now I want an explanation of wildlife rescue and the stuff in the image.

And even if you don’t simplify it to y the end result is the same
2+x(y-z) = 2+xy-xz

How many are enough?

https://allinmap.app/en/map/toilets/hamburg?visible_marker=toilet
https://www.stadtreinigung.hamburg/stadtsauberkeit/oeffentliche-toiletten/