My copy I lost the key that came with my disc ~15 years ago so it thinks it's a pirated copy. Thanks microsoft. I only have windows installed to play steam games.
 
Luckily Valve has their own branch of Wine, Proton:
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(software)
 
And apparently many/most games support running on Proton these days. I'm sorely tempted to just yeet windows once and for all.
 
I will upgrade my computer when I feel like it, thanks. On my "gaming pc" I visit like, 6 websites (gmail, steam, slashdot and a handful of others) and use Steam, security updates are nice but I'm not at enormous risk, and if anything happens to the PC I'll just wipe it and reinstall anyways. This is my only windows PC at this point, there's nothing to back up.

Home assistants to do things like, set a timer, set an alarm, check the weather, turn "smart" lights on/off, adjust "smart" thermostat can be handled by an open source LLM running on a raspberry pi class device. I suspect offline "home assistants" will start hitting shelves soon enough. Weather or news API is the only tricky thing as there's some cost associated with it; the device might come with a 1 or 2 year free subscription to those services.
 
As soon as those devices become available/reliable, I plan on ditching our google home setup.

It also restricts the voice of the youth on political issues. Youth can't vote*, but they can express their opinions, and youth are overwhelmingly liberal until at least age 16
 
*In a handful of cities, including, yes, you guessed it, SF, youth citizens can vote at 16 in local elections, and public high schools are polling stations, so most youth in those areas have already been voting for 2 years before they leave public schools

Why not sanction 500, or even 1000 at a time? 15,000? Let's cast a wide net, and then redact as necessary. This is one of those rare cases where "shoot first, ask questions later" is probably a valid solution.

BBC is worlds better than Fox News and all other cable news. Stop complaining.

I read a bunch and I also really struggled with the first book. I would start a new chapter and it would take me a page to realize we'd skipped forward/back in time, and that the characters were somehow related. I'm american born with no asian heritage, and I found all the names really difficult to follow as well. I thought the plot was good but the translation was awful. I did not bother with books 2 or 3

Exactly this. Unless you have some bespoke high end media production or engineering apps, the platform is mostly irrelevant now. it's almost all web.

Some of the more tech knowledgeable are relying on smartphones and tablets too, if they fit their needs. The days of needing a desktop or laptop for general purpose tasks are pretty much over. Unless you're an IT guy, gamer or need some high end engineering or media production apps - you could probably get by with a tablet with far less PC janitor work.

Have you lived in a cave the last 25 years? They have this thing now, it's called "social media"

...Did you mean "Taylor Swift Concert Tickets"?

I don't know why this got downvoted. In my very-extended "friends group" several husbands died of "suffocation". My grandmother died of covid (otherwise healthy before she caught it) but the official cause was listed as heart failure or whatever.
 
The best way to look at the data is to look at "excess deaths" data, it was significantly above the norm in 2020-21-22 and a big portion of the delta between excess deaths and covid deaths those years, a large part of that is likely covid.

Bard/Gemini has been demonstrated to edit user prompts to include "diversity" language in the prompt before the AI engine receives the prompt.

For example, wrote a prompt for "draw a picture of a fantasy medieval festival with people dancing and celebrating", the response was "Sure, here's a picture of a fantasy medieval festival with people of various genders and ethnicities dancing and celebrating."

There are other examples of Bard rewriting prompts to inject specific races and genders. That isn't training data, that's Google intentionally adding a pre-parser and rewrite engine to steer the results away from the customer's prompt.

Average shot length for most movies is between 6 and 12 seconds, for more modern movies it's on the shorter end. Even for long shots, they used to use wind up cameras and could only shoot 15 seconds at a time. You could totally do a "into the spiderverse" style movie with this today. You'll struggle with the neccessary long shots, but really almost all shots are pretty short.
 
If you're looking for a movie with really long shots, "children of men" has a continious ~12 minute shot near the middle of it which is pretty impressive, and The West Wing is famous for it's "walk and talk" scenes that follows several conversations through the hallways of the whitehouse

Burger flippers make $25/hr in california. Most 18 year olds who aren't getting shot at don't care about health care. So what you're saying is that for the last two years of enrollment in the army you'd be making marginally more than the buger flipper in year one. And if you don't like your boss, you can't quit. Kind of splitting hairs. I doubt the mortality rate of burger flippers even approaches that of infantry, which is a major consideration for a lot of people.

Nobody was dragging religion in to this, thanks for participating.