>"I run a very small boutique hosting service and traffic has more than doubled since AI, all attributable to them. OpenAI in particular just seems to come along and hit like 30-60K links per day, no robots.txt rate limiting, just a "gimme all your data" scraping posture. Amazon is by far the worst, "

Oh, there is far worse now. Last week my club website was hit by a full-on distributed bot-net scraping our wiki. Up to a dozen hits per second from 250,000 unique IP addresses all over the world (but mostly Singapore and Brazil addresses). All of them ignoring robots.txt. All of them pretending to be people/browsers. It crippled the old/small server, so I took the content down and the traffic continued for 5 MORE DAYS still requesting various links into the content, until it finally started tricking to 2 or so per minute.

>"If something goes wrong and the child needs expensive lifelong medical care for an unanticipated problem, guess who will be first to shout "NOT IT!"

And much worse if the unintended issues go undiscovered and procreation happens and then those meddled genes get scattered throughout the population. Then what? Oh, we can fix that too?

I am surprised nobody has brought up GATTACA yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Even if there are no immediate physiological or psychological downsides for the "designer babies" (and that is a tall claim), what does it mean for those who are not?

All good points. All my machines are Linux and on low-end machines (not the Linux servers, which are beefy, but the Linux clients are all almost 10 year old I3's) and everything is super fast. But we are also talking about hundreds of users, not thousands. And almost all are local, not remote. And logins are mostly staggered across several timeframes. So my references and guesses are based on what I know.

I still think if it takes just a few minutes (which is way longer than I would expect), it is no big deal. But if it is a lot longer, they do have an issue that needs to be fixed. Yet I find it ironic the people whining are the stay-at-home's who don't have to spend perhaps 30 to 90 minutes a day *UNPAID* driving to work, and paying for gas and maintenance and sometimes parking and then walking to and from the building and office.

>"required her and fellow hourly workers to log into multiple security systems [...] all before the clock started ticking on their workday."

White collar working from home job. And I am sure all the time on the clock was spent glued to the computer/phone doing work, right? Or at least as much as would be, had that person been in "the office", right? But, anyway....

>Workers turned on their computers

Leave computer on or suspended. 0 sec

>waited for Windows to load

Leave computer on or suspended. 0 sec

>grabbed their cell phones

2 sec.

>to request a security token for the company's VPN, waited for that token to arrive

5 sec?

>logged into the network

10 sec?

>opened required web applications with separate passwords

have to guess on that, I do it every day and takes me about 20 seconds

>and downloaded the Excel files they needed for the day.

10 sec?

So that is maybe 47 seconds? Double or quadruple it, it is still much ado about nothing, unless their systems are DREADFULLY slow or problematic. If the workers do need to get on a tech support call to get logged in, due to issues, I agree that there should be some way to account for that time.

You are 100% correct.

And yes, often they were sold in buckets. And also there were some generally-generic sets that had tailored pieces, like roof, wheels, hinges, swivels, but they could be used to build anything. They weren't designed/patterned/colored for a specific model.

Call me old skool, but Legos were my favorite "toy" growing up and those sets were far more "generic". You build anything and everything, not just whatever a set was designed for... that kinda came later. Anyway, it is more fun and educational, using your imagination than it is just building a predetermined "model". I spent endless hours making stuff.

Don't get me wrong, I am a super STTNG fan and think this kit is awesome. I mean, it even has Spot! (But I also won't be forking out that much money for some plastic blocks).

>"I, for one, much prefer this kind of LEGO"

OMG, that is freaking fantastic :)

I think we all know nothing good ever came from that place.

Republicans end individual mandate.
Republicans let the subsidies expire.

"Why would the Democrats do this to the American people??"

OMG, remember when some cable broadcasters had some stations with PROGRESSIVELY SCALED stretching or SECTIONAL stretching? I kid you not. Some stations would keep the center 1/3 of the screen in correct aspect and then progressively stretch the 1/3 on either side to fill the 16:9 screen. I thought I was going to lose my mind. I could deal with just flat out [even] stretching 4:3 content to 16:9 because my equipment could force-horizontally scale it back most of the time. But that stupid trick, there was no undoing that.

Oh, and this still happens- take old 4:3 programs and ZOOM IN to fill the 16:9 width, cropping off the top and bottom! So things shot in 4:3 for 27" TV's now shown on a 60+" TV, ZOOMED so you see ONE FACE filling the ENTIRE screen back and forth.

One of my state's Republican senators is all-in on chemtrails and "Solar Radiation Modification" lunacy. It's curious how these are the same people who think humanity isn't capable of affecting the climate by burning fossil fuels and pumping tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.

>"Something that looks like real life is unnatural? "

I never said that. In fact, I said the EXACT OPPOSITE.

>"Stop being a Luddite."

Stop being someone that doesn't read and/or comprehend what is written, and then comments about it stupidly.

>"I agree that full control is the ideal, but I also don't really get the appeal of 24 fps film effect."

Honestly, I don't quite "get" it either. It should and objectively does look better at higher rates, but somehow it just ruins the mood. It is psychological, and probably just due to a lifetime of what is expected and many of us are contaminated with it.

They can improve the color, contrast, resolution, size, even add 3D and I love all of it. But as the frame rate is increased, either for real or simulated, it trashes it for me.

I wonder if, in the future, when movies finally do go to 48 or 60 or whatever framerate, if there will be device viewing options to actually CUT the framerate back down to 24 or 30? Seems crazy, but might be popular.

>"To bring back an old meme, "Ok boomer".

I am not old enough to be a "boomer". So you might have to change that to "OK X".

>"For the record the same was said about colour TV."

I was young during the transition to color. But I watched both B&W and color at the time and remember both well. Color did not have any such effect. HOWEVER, it is true, at least back then, that B&W was considerably sharper. But color was worth the decrease in sharpness. And HDTV was waaaay overdue by the time in came on the scene and I loved it. So, no, it is not the same thing.

>"So I don't think the high framerate "soap opera effect" is the issue, I think it's the crappy realtime conversion."

I think it is both. Remember The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was filmed at 48 frames per second (instead of 24). It looked artificial/fake/bad to me, even at the cinema, as well. And it was wildly and widely criticized as a major detraction. So it isn't just the fake smoothing processing that causes issues, there really is an important component to lower frame rates in the traditional feel and suspension of disbelief.

Now, young viewers who are much newer to video can probably get used to anything and not have as much problem with it. But we older people often find higher frame rates to be really horrible.