If it works for you, that’s great, for me it sits exactly where it makes zero sense to get. My PC is slightly more powerful so for gaming, it would be inferior. But it’s too expensive just for a HTPC. Something either much more powerful (that could also run local LLMs), or significantly cheaper, would make more sense for me. I’m now eyeing used miniPCs, but I’ll have to see if some of the cheap ones can handle 4k decoding.

Yeah, so the terminology used by the US right-wing media is so fucked that essentially liberal=communist= anyone to the left of Reagan, but ALSO, for fearmongering purposes, they’re all actually super left-wing extremists.

The only part of it that has taken hold outside of conservative bullshit circles is that the word “liberal” no longer means someone who loves the free market and now has more to do with social justice and even supporting universal healthcare is a “liberal” thing in the US because the socialism word is evil or whatever.

Parts of it have carried over to some EU countries too because at least here in Estonia, the far right looks to Trump and Fox News for their talking points these days (weird in a country with <30% religious people) and our liberals (actual liberals, the kind who want to cut services and reduce taxation) have been called socialists lmao

PRISM leak was 13 years ago if you want to feel old yet, but then that was just a revelation about how prevelant mass surveillance is, it was Vault 7 in 2017 that detailed how built-in microphones in Smart TVs are used for spying, so that part would indeed be less than 10 years ago

I’ve been terminally online for almost as long, but tbh the TV is good for background noise, or to watch something while you work, shitpost or play on your PC, situated so you can see the TV

I have a cheapo Samsung 4K TV from 2019 and it does have one in the mic for sure, not sure about the TV itself. I don’t let the TV connect to the internet though. I did initially because convenience, but now I have an Android TV thingy. Which itself is not perfect, but I don’t live alone, having an HTPC with a mouse and keyboard would be a hassle. Aaaand upon writing this I realized HDMI-CEC is a thing and googled it and Plasma Bigscreen can support it and… shit I need a miniPC now

And then you have the updates! That’s fun! They sell ERPs as SaaS, but it doesn’t work like any other SaaS. The major updates break tons of shit because your own customizations will be based on upstream fields and methods that no longer exist. Not as bad as migrating to another ERP entirely, but not exactly cheap. At work, we keep support for our custom modules for longer than the ERP company itself supports those old versions so our customers get an extra year or 2 out of it. It’s a pretty big deal for them and of course great for us, helps retention because they’d have to spend more for less if they go to the competitors (on even the same ERP that is - going to another ERP wouldn’t just be a migration cost, the annual cost itself would go up too).

Welllllll, bike lanes ARE DEI! They’re inclusive of people who don’t have cars.

I don’t think you could explain the ideas behind DEI to a conservative though.

Roundabouts suck ass at peak traffic times because you can get stuck behind an endless convoy if you’re coming from the wrong direction.

Green waves mean the people on the main road don’t all have to slow down and waste a bunch of fuel (and cause more emissions), but the people on adjoining streets still have a chance to get onto the road they need to get on.

And of course if you don’t do proper green wave planning, people get the choice of speeding or waiting at every red. The worst possible option. But if you already have the lights, it’s much cheaper to adjust the cycles properly than it is to install tons of roundabouts.

Estonians found a way to communicate without sex, future, articles or prepositions. Oh, sounds like a super easy language to learn with fewer things in it, right? Fuck you, we have 14 cases so we could tell foreigners from native speakers by how they confuse genitive and partitive, two of the most basic cases. And then most cities, towns, villages you’d go to use illative (“into”) to say “I’m going to X”, but some will be allative (“onto”) and there’s no rule for it, so people from other parts of the country might not know it and it’ll sound super weird.

And I still find English to be the weird language. Just look at the different words written as “lead”. Why are they pronounced so differently?! Nothing is pronounced as written.

Yeah still not going to happen tbh, everyone’s gonna chicken out when it comes to nuking a country that has its own nukes

Heavy disagree on that. Much bigger issue is trucks whose headlights are too high (in north america anyway, we don’t have many of those in Europe except for lorries that don’t drive at night that much). LEDs and HIDs, by law, are installed inside projectors that cut off the beam and low beams are pointed down… from the factory, anyway. There’s quite literally no reason they should blind you except for being installed too high (trucks) or pointed too high (idiots or people whose headlight leveling systems are not calibrated, but stuff like that actually gets checked at annual inspection where I come from).

Old headlights with no projectors are worse than correctly aimed factory HIDs or LEDs because the light is all scattered (and they’re so shit that the driver’s more tempted to just keep the high beams on as long as possible)

Yet driving is a privilege not a right so there are already fees on every exam you take, at least where I come from.

Personally I’m of the opinion that there’s no need to retest healthy working-age adults unless they have traffic violations… But traffic violations should trigger retesting more easily. Right now you gotta fuck up real bad to have your license taken away (after which you can get it back after a while if you pass tests again).

And once you’re in your 60s or 70s, we should start retesting and it should be mandatory. We do have mandatory health exams that go from 10 years to 5 years when you age, but they mostly test the sharpness of your vision and such. They don’t test how you actually react to things in traffic, or how good your peripheral vision is. There’s other stuff they test too, but I’ve forgotten it, been a few years since my last one.

Oh for sure, Trump would love to nuke Iran. I hope it doesn’t happen, but there’s no guarantees with him.

I’m just saying that the potential for fallback on Americans on US soil is… minimal.

9/11: never forget… that Trump’s building got bumped up in the height ranking, yay!

Well the part of the article that quotes the actual job listing:

Part of that role, compensated at between $180,000 and $230,000, will be to “identify, assess, track, and investigate global threats including geopolitical instability, terrorism, crime, activism, nation-state targeting of the AI sector, and emerging security trends, including deep-dive research and OSINT collection on specific threats, actors, and events” (emphasis added).

But yeah, not a good look especially if you consider who decides what “terrorism” and “crime” mean in the US right now.

And now for a tangent I wrote that you can just skip if you’re not interested:

The part about specifically tracking AI activists was that they watch for anti-AI protests anywhere where their executives go so they know to stay out of the way, but… How do they not realize that they’ve brought this upon themselves? Market AI as “doing everyone’s job” and “super dangerous” and of course people will be pissed at you. Dario himself is the one constantly parroting how the next Claude model is so dangerous it needs to be kept in adamantium chains and whatnot. Like your industry is already pissing people off with the data centers and the cost of computer parts, why you gotta tell everyone you’re working to put us all out of jobs?

Jfc I’m a software engineer with no marketing or PR experience and I think even I could do better PR than all these companies supposedly worth billions. If OpenAI is already farming outrage, just position yourself as the more responsible alternative and you’ll still get sales without your execs needing to fear for your lives… Occasionally release a smaller, less capable version of Claude as open weight to win mindshare among developers, the people actually burning tons of tokens right now. Like Alibaba does with Qwen, just don’t release the full size model like Alibaba does if you’re afraid people are going to run it in competition with you.

The local ‘OF stardom’ is currently technically breaking the law. This would legalize what they’re doing and tax it as legal income. Worst case scenario, nobody registers their income, nothing happens. Best case scenario, a bunch of them will register their income because that means they can do their business 100% legally whereas before it was illegal anyway so why bother reporting it for taxes.

There’s very little, if any, potential downside for making porn legal if it’s already being produced and already available… like it is in most other countries. There’s some potential upside, even though it remains to be seen how much will actually be realized. It’s a nobrainer to do this IMO.

Most countries tax income regardless of source so moving abroad won’t make your OF account untaxed magically. And hiding your income is always a risk in most countries, unless you have a day job or something to explain your ability to pay for your expenses.

I have no idea how it is these days, but in the 90s there was a lot of trafficking going on in eastern Europe. Curtailing sex work in general might’ve been seen as a necessary evil to reduce that. Make your country as boring as possible to predators.

But yes, true on the conservative Orthodox folks too.

You would care, I suspect the person you replied to would care and naturally millions of others would, but I think your country at large is capable of forgetting atrocities really quickly if they didn’t happen on your soil.

Will they though? Israel certainly wants us to think Iran is 2 weeks away from developing nuclear weapons… But does Iran actually have nukes? I suspect the CIA and/or Mossad might know if anyone outside of Iran’s leadership does. But given that there was a treaty between the US and Iran till Trump decided to break it and neither Obama nor Biden had any issue with Iran (after said deal by Obama), I suspect that Iran might even have been upholding its end of the deal until Trump’s shenanigans.

Neither Russia nor China will nuke the US on Iran’s behalf. China would never do a nuclear first strike against US and Putin would likely only do it (and potentially be overridden by officers with consciences) if he sees he’s going to be deposed for fucking up with the war in Ukraine in which case he might decide to just destroy the entire world. Or he might not, who the fuck knows. But I doubt he’d do it just for Iran’s sake.

Even Microsoft knows Windows is dead. That’s part of the reason for the push for office365 over locally installed applications. It’s not dead as in everyone will stop using it next year, but it’s dead as in it might only have 10 years left as THE dominant desktop OS, maybe more, maybe less.

What they’re really ingrained in business with is their ERP bullshit. Migrating a bunch of users from Windows to Linux is cheap and easy compared to migrating all your data AND users from Dynamics to SAP or Odoo or something. It’s such a headache, you basically never do it in-house, you contract that out to a company that specializes in the ERP you’re moving to. Because it’s not just data you’re migrating, it’s business processes too. Bunch of custom modules usually need to be created, yay!