I'm writing as a hobby. Nothing big yet, but 2 published books to my name. I'm writing one right now that I publish chapter-by-chapter on my Patreon. I also make computer games as a second hobby and tried AI voice acting for the dialogs on the one I have on Steam currently.

I wish there were any reasonable AI voice stuff. I'd love to make it an audio book, but my voice acting talents are minimal and of course I'd want different voices for different characters. But all the AI voices I've tried so far are very much lacking. Most of the interfaces don't even give you an option to set markings, you know "a bit louder here", "sound angry", "stress this word". That kind of stuff.

I can't imagine how low-quality all those audiobooks must be.

We're not yet at the point where AI can replace voice acting.

That might be a real risk for things like cryptocurrency mining, where being able to do something faster than others determines whether the money spent on electricity is less than the value you get out of it, but it probably isn't realistic for generative AI. Either the hardware is big enough to run your model or it isn't. If it is, then it won't just suddenly become worthless unless you decide that you absolutely have to have a larger model for some reason.

And if that does happen, then it becomes a resource allocation question, deciding whether to spend developer resources to find ways to tune smaller models more so that you get good enough results or spend money to replace the hardware and sell or rent the old hardware to someone who can still use it. After all, it isn't as though hardware becomes worthless just because it no longer meets your needs.

You'll always be able to get bigger, faster hardware in five years. That's not a good reason not to own the means of production. You either own the means of production and you're in the owner class or you don't and you're in the worker class, and having a bunch of companies in the worker class really isn't sustainable.

An A100 40GB costs $8,399.00. Renting it ranges from $1200 to $2682 per month.

How bad does the failure rate and/or power consumption have to be for it to make sense to spend 1/7 to 2/7 of the purchase price to rent it for a month? Yikes. That makes rental car rates look downright reasonable, and you don't have to worry about people totalling a GPU on the 405.

That's not really an accurate way to describe it. As people get older, they become less able to adapt to change. Becoming more conservative is a natural part of the brain aging process.

Conservatives always say this, but that doesn't make it true. There are plenty of very wealthy people who earn real money and still pay lots of money in taxes. To them it is about responsibility — from those to whom much is given, much is expected. And while being wealthy does make some people more fiscally conservative, the wealthy also tend to be more socially liberal, i.e. their politics are not aligned with the U.S. right wing at all.

People become more socially conservative with age only because they become less able to adapt to change, not because of wealth or because they're "becoming wiser".

SF is no different than any other city other than having a climate that makes it easier for the homeless to not die of exposure. Cities are dirty, cramped places. I don't understand why people willingly choose to live in them, but they do. They vote liberal because they lean young, and young people lean liberal.

Their politics have almost zero to do with cities being s**tholes. Republicans manage to turn beautiful places into s**tholes just as quickly. They just ruin things in different ways — Democrats by not mandating psychological treatment for people who are wandering the streets because of severe mental health problems and by allowing them to ignore the rules of society without consequence, Republicans by cutting funding for the mental health services that they need to keep them off the streets and by throwing people into jails where they don't get adequate mental health treatment and end up coming out even more screwed up than they were when they went in.

Both parties absolutely suck, and people who claim otherwise are kidding themselves.

Hoover. Dyson is a sphere, and you can't have a spherical cow in a spherical vacuum.

If by "about to", you mean September of next year, then maybe it might, but I suspect you're thinking of the Boeing Starliner crewed test in a couple of days. Completely unrelated.

• Soyuz: Russian capsule (and service module and orbital module, but the capsule is the interesting part) used for getting people back from ISS (capacity 3).
• SpaceX Dragon: U.S. capsule used for getting people back from ISS since April 2021 (capacity 4).
• Boeing Starliner: U.S. capsule intended to have a second alternative to Dragon for ISS flights (capacity 7).
• Orion: Combination of a capsule (Lockheed Martin) and crew module (Airbus) for Artemis missions (capacity 4).

They're all capsules, but Dragon is basically intended as a replacement for Soyuz, Orion has the ESM (European Service Module) attached, which lets it be useful as a habitat for longer missions, and Starliner has more crew and cargo capacity, I think.

The other key difference is that Orion is designed for reentry from higher altitudes (more heat shielding) than Dragon or Starliner, which are both designed only for LEO (e.g. ISS). A version of Soyuz (Zond 5) did fly past the moon, but I have no idea if the current versions are built to withstand high-altitude reentry.

The hard part is finding a spherical cow that can survive in a vacuum.

What would you say about my case? I open tabs when there's some news item or search result I want to know more about. I close them when I have reviewed the thing, even if it's just to decide I am no longer interested. For example, I've opened six tabs from the /. front page today. I'll read the ones that are of the highest interest immediately (there were three this time) and leave the others for possible consumption in the future, if I have time, at which point they'll either be closed or left open as a bookmark of interesting information (if there's some follow-up I think I might do). The tab for this article, for example, will remain open for a day or so as a reminder to check for any replies. I don't have a problem going back to open tabs, but there is more information in the world than time so I accept that I may never get back to some of them.

I certainly exhibit some signs of ADHD, but I don't think my approach to tab management is one of them. I don't think thousands of open tabs is necessarily an indicator.

That said, thanks for bringing it up as a possibility.

Disorganized?! Quite the reverse. Linear tab lists are how I organize things. One window per desktop, each window a different type of browsing (e.g. news/research/productivity) and then open tabs in each window. Disorganized would be somehow trying to track all of those URLs some *other* way. What, do you have thousands of bookmarks? How would you manage to relate them back to the type of task they're related to, and the time they were bookmarked?

Untrue. I run Firefox with a dozen windows each of which has hundreds of tabs. All it takes is enough RAM, but I make sure I have plenty. If RAM pressure is a problem for you then look up the BarTab extension (it's defunct, but I believe there are some active forks). Firefox absolutely can do this.

Now Chrome, that's where you'll have trouble. IT was really not designed for a large number of open tabs. Its minimum tab width is ~48px and once you have enough of those to fill the horizontal bar new tabs open on the right *hidden*. Unlikely Firefox there is no window into a current set. The only way to interact with them extra tabs is via the "Search tabs" menu, which is highly inconvenient. Chrome's UI assumes no more than about 75 tabs open at a time.

It's not laziness. I typically run at least low hundreds of tabs open, frequently up into the low thousands. I know I've cleared 5,000 before, but I'm not in the business of tracking too closely--I'm just not interested in how many there are.

Bookmarks are not the same thing as open tabs; a site can vanish but still be available in browser cache/memory. A bookmark may help you find a page you were on earlier, but it's hard to know *why* you bookmarked it, to organize them linearly, and to distinguish between an ephemeral interest and a permanent reference. Really, bookmarks are a vestigial feature of the pre-Google web. Do you remember when we all had "home page"s that given over to collections of links to commonly-used sites? That, too, has gone. In my case these have been replaced by tabs.

It's all part of an efficient workflow. I see people do something like: Google search, click a result, read some of it, click back, click the next result. This pattern is inefficient and drives me nuts; when I do a search I scan through the results and open anything that seems helpful new tabs--I may even refine my search a few times and open some tabs for each variation--, then I C-tab and begin to review. I can go from zero to 20 tabs in moments without even noticing it, then I read through them and close tabs that are irrelevant. When I get to the end of the subject I am researching I'll close most or all; I may leave open a tab with an answer or something I need to refer back to as I go back to what I was doing. With news it's the same: I open in a new tab each story that I want to read more about. I may not read them all the same day, but I leave the tabs open as a linear queue of interest and get to them eventually. It often happens that the queue grows faster than it shrinks, and that's fine. I come back through later and close out unread tabs that no longer seem interesting.

I can't imagine *not* doing this. It's not lack of window management; I currently have 11 browser windows open and they *each* have dozens or hundreds or thousands of tabs. It's *not* laziness. This is simply a way to organize information that maps well to the way my brain works.

The day that Firefox removed tab groups was a sad day indeed. There have been few tab management features which actually improved my ability to organize, but that was one of therm.

And that's a fair concern. Of course, that's really just one of many reasons to use real doors instead of those craptastic panel abominations that are so common in U.S. restrooms. (Another good reason is that normal doors are more likely to still be on the hinges and have functioning locks after a decade or two, which was a big problem in my high school with those cubicle restroom doors.)

One very left-leaning university I know of solved the problem in a different way, by putting in plastic strips that sealed the gaps. That works, too.

Either way, it's nothing that can't be solved. You just have to convince the owners that it is important enough to solve it. It's still way easier than trying to guarantee that you can correctly determine everyone's biological sex just by looking at them. :-)

There's a lot wrong with that, so it's hard to even know where to begin.

First, they're lumping together bad behavior in shared restrooms with bad behavior in "unsafe, isolated locations". The fact that unsafe, isolated locations even exist is solid evidence of inadequate staffing, so we can start from the assumption that these schools aren't otherwise safe to begin with. No bathroom policy will change those, and lumping them together disguises the signal that they're complaining about (women being abused in shared restrooms) with a giant pile of noise.

Second, it goes without saying that in a school situation, a shared restroom has to be monitored. Even if you didn't have people getting raped, you'd still have people sneaking in to have sex, smoke, drink, do drugs, and so on. The real problem is not the shared nature of the restroom, but rather the lack of monitoring.

Also, you can bet that there are incidents in those same schools where people have been beaten up in the restroom, but nobody is complaining about those, because that doesn't give them an easily defined group of people to hate. Yet the same fix — proper staff supervision — would fix both problems, whereas a non-shared restroom only fixes one of those problems, and potentially doubles the number of staff needed to fix the other one.

Finally, the "or are forced to go to the bathroom outside" part is the point where most rational people would simply write off the entire argument as nonsensical in the context of any rational discussion of the United States unless you go back a hundred years or more.

If you lump in enough unrelated signals, you can absolutely create something that *looks* like a signal. I can do that, too. In Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, and San Francisco, people with hunting rifles kill [insert number of people] every year. Therefore, we need to ban hunting rifles in San Francisco. See how absurd that sounds when it is used to defend something the left would be more likely to support? It sounds just as stupid coming from the right.

You tell the difference based on whether they are keeping to themselves and just using the restroom or walking around with their genitalia out or peeping on women in the next stall over — same as if those things happened in an alley somewhere.

Flashing or raping or molesting or peeping is a crime, and those people should be arrested, and will be arrested even without laws to close the "loophole" as you put it. In cases where such behavior isn't happening, then your only reason for making their bathroom use illegal is that it makes you feel icky, and that's just not a good enough reason to put someone in jail or subject people to harassment or other mistreatment.