That's the secret to the Chinese government's success - they give a shit about the citizens

Good one. Most leaders, including Xi, don't have a flying fuck about their citizens and one should never assume they do. They care about personal glory and power. If helping citizens HAPPENS to help them reach their personal goals, that's great, but it doesn't always align.

Hereâ(TM)s the problem with that scenario: court rulings donâ(TM)t mean much in a state ruled by one party. China has plenty of progressive looking laws that donâ(TM)t get enforced if it is inconvenient to the party. There are emission standards for trucks and cars that should help with their pollution problems, but there are no enforcement mechanisms and officials have no interest in creating any if it would interfere with their economic targets or their private interests.

China is a country of strict rules and lax enforcement, which suits authoritarian rulers very well. It means laws are flouted routinely by virtually everyone, which gives the party leverage. Displease the party, and they have plenty of material to punish you, under color of enforcing laws. It sounds so benign, at least theyâ(TM)re enforcing the law part of the time, right? Wrong. Laws selectively enforced donâ(TM)t serve any public purpose; theyâ(TM)re just instruments of personal power.

Americans often donâ(TM)t seem to understand the difference between rule of law and rule *by* law. Itâ(TM)s ironic because the American Revolution and constitution were historically important in establishing the practicality of rule of law, in which political leaders were not only expected to obey the laws themselves, but had a duty to enforce the law impartially regardless of their personal opinions or interests.

Rule *by* law isnâ(TM)t a Chinese innovation, it was the operating principle for every government before 1789. A government that rules *by* law is only as good as the men wielding power, and since power corrupts, itâ(TM)s never very good for long.

I'm not surprised that Valve is dropping 32-bit support; the 'gaming on 32-bit windows' market cannot be all that large or all that lucrative; what does surprise me a little bit is that the announced end of support doesn't line up with anything I immediately recognize. End of 2025/beginning of 2026 actually puts them considerably later than most stuff using chromium for UI rendering(not sure if they've been doing a bunch of backporting or if they consider the fact that they are mostly rendering their own content a security control); but doesn't line up with the deprecation of any other 32-bit dependency I recognize offhand.

Anyone have a plausible speculation on whether there is something else getting deprecated that likely drove the decision; or if it's just a matter of having to pick a nice round number to pull the plug on something that could be continued but isn't really worth the hassle?

Ranting about Teams is our best social gathering.

The Clippy Army. Clippernators?

..."non bold" bets before this? HyperboleGPT?

They don't need AI for that. Teams - and pretty much all Microsoft products - are honeypots designed to collect data.

Well, no so much "honeypots" in the case of products that employees are forced to use at their workplace: they're no honey needed to attract them and get them to give Microsoft data. If you disagree with Microsoft's privacy invasion, you lose your job.

That's the genius of Microsoft's particular brand of invasiveness: instead of convincing individual people their products are good enough to relinquish their privacy for (Facebook), or convincing a large part of the internet to let them sneak in their trackers (Google), Microsoft convinced the bean counters at most companies to install their spyware and ram it down the throats of people who need to make a living. Disgusting...

Anyway, the AI thing is just the turd on top of the shit cake.

I bet it uses 4-5x the electricity of a modern one and is slowly leaking Freon too. Nice flex!

You probably could pay for a new basic fridge in a couple years with what you are wasting in electricity to run that old one.

Get a new one without an ice maker and just use ice trays and it'll be rock solid too. (The vast majority of the reliability issues across ALL brands are in the ice makers.)

To look rich to your shallow friends.

I thought that was Orangelini?

I trust bots somewhat more at that task.

What's your favorite Bible search engine?

Dude, gitta real girlfriend.

The Chinese gov't artificially keeps wages low and local consumer choice down for multiple reasons. If citizens had real power they'd remove such barriers so they could buy lots of stuff like Americans do.

Who is using AI for religion? A glorified E-Meter?