Or from the other angle, when there are better forms for working in a factory. We don't make cars giant mechanical humans you sit atop of, why do the same for robots?
It's a different tool, but for much the same end. I want to say it's more because the device is cheaper than a typical stenography machine would cost, but I don't know that for sure.
Social media has also done its hardest to try and push people away from using it. Between the culture being awful, and there being an increasing number of roadblocks to using it, that ironically ruins discoverability for anyone who might want to use social media.
For example, if you want to use Reddit, and see a link, there's a lot of posts that you can't see without having an account and logging in. That's a big ask for something that you're not even sure that you want to sign up for, which would only be worse since you couldn't sidestep that using the old reddit interface.
Meanwhile, Twitter not only makes it so that you can't see much of anything without being logged in, but they're trying some new scheme where if you have an account, you need to download the app and give them your biometrics to confirm that you're human before you can use your account.
If you've scarcely used either site, why would you start now? Everything wants you to jump through more and more hoops to verify that you're actually a human, and if you don't have an account, the content that you can see doesn't seem to much of anything interesting. When not logged in, some subreddit and posts are completely inaccessible, and on Twitter, you can only see the tweet, but not the replies, or recent user posts.
Both of those were the main draws for each site. Why would any new user want to use them now? The only thing that they have is their reputation, and that will slowly go away with time.
Once upon a time, for example, Twitter was once the haven for beginner programmers, because they had a nice, free easy-to-use API that anyone could use to make bots and learn how to use APIs in general. Reddit was not far behind that. But that's mostly gone now. Reddit no longer approves API keys for the most part, and is working to shut down the public APIs that it has left, and Twitter has locked theirs behind a paywall.
It's also arguably the only thing propping up the American economy right now. They don't have anything to bail with, if the AI bubbles goes on fire. Their economy may well come tumbling down in short order.
Maybe the idea was that he could end his life, without risking crashing the plane? Why he chose this method specifically will, unfortunately, never be answered.
They also just push new things at viewers. It's inevitable that someone waiting for a Season 2 of a show they like might end up in a warren of other shows, and watch those instead, since they're available.
Discoverability is also in the toilet. You can't just turn on the television and find Star Trek. You have to be subscribed to the right streaming services in this landscape, and to do that, you have to want to watch it in the first place. It's not like when Discovery was new, and there was more or less just Netflix that people either had or didn't have.
Star Trek's now in the unenviable position of trying to attract a new causal audience, but being set up in places where more dedicated viewers will be the ones that can find and watch it.
On top of that, you don't have to stay bleeding-edge. Computers have mostly reached a steady-state these days. A decade old computer now is still a fairly usable machine. It won't be fast, but it also won't be a slug.
Not the screen, but it would be nice if I could replace the keyboard on my laptop, since it doesn't work properly any more.
But since it's built into the lower body, it costs about as much to replace as the device is worth, since I'd be replacing a big piece of the casing, so I just make do with also carrying a Bluetooth keyboard.
Conservation of mass-energy only really applies if you rely on the old 21st century idea that the universe's fundamentals consist of time, space, matter, and energy.
Anyone who's had a secondary school education knows that that's an outmoded view of the universe. They didn't realise that subspace existed, in much the same way that they did not realise that surviving records show that 21st century humans did not know the Earth was round until Cochrane took to orbit in the late 2000s, and proved it.
I was thinking more along the lines of the big evaporative cooling towers you see with a lot of reactors, since they rely on vaporisation to cool off, most of that water can't be reused, short of getting picked up in the water cycle again.
Or from the other angle, when there are better forms for working in a factory. We don't make cars giant mechanical humans you sit atop of, why do the same for robots?