Snowden, etc.
I miss CmdrTaco.

Hello,

Craigslist is still around, and serves as a viable outlet for people who don't want to use the various enshittified alternatives like eBay and Facebook Marketplace.

Last week I bought a couple of 8GB DDR5-5600 SO-DIMMs from a somewhat-local neighbor who felt the same way. Met at a local police station (they have a place for people to do this), exchanged cash for the goods, and also had a nice chat about keyboards (the synthesizer kind, not the typing kind), swapped a few local restaurant recommendations, and shared some info about the local DEF CON group.

Pretty nice experience, overall.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

For the Longest time, I thought the future was either going to be the Demolition Man Future or the Robocop Future. I'm now convinced that the Idiocracy future is the most likely future of mankind.

And this is why you give out cash instead of gift cards. It doesn't tie the receiver to a particular product and some scammer from halfway across the world won't rip them off.

The only time it had luster was when it was pinned against the SpikeTV VGA's

When your competition is Funkmaster Flex rapping about how Good Madden was after it won Game of the year, you win by default.

One of my ram sticks went bad in my computer after running for 7 years. Because of the way I bought them (1 kit of 4x8MB DDR4) I had to send all four back and decided to drive to Micro Center to upgrade to 4x16 DDR4 Sticks in the interim and use the RMA'd sticks for another build.

On November 10, that cost me $299.
A year ago I could have upgraded using the same sticks for $149.

On Black Friday, I went to the same Micro Center to see what deals they had and decided to check on the RAM prices since they were inflating.

On November 26. The same exact RAM sticks were $399.

They literally went up $100 in less than 30 days.
It's even crazier since those sticks are DDR4 and have less demand since most people are upgrading to DDR5 at this point and were probably there in stock when I bought some of them on the 10th. They just marked them up since it would cost that much to replenish the stock when (most likely if at this point) they get more DDR4 RAM.

I posted this over two years ago. it's still true today: K12 Does not teach kids to think. It teaches kids to react

Basically, kids today can't do math because they were taught to react to math from a game on an iPad while using a Ti-83 calculator to pass standardized tests.

So imagine giving a 7 year old Frog Fractions on an iPad that he plays between his Screaming Minecraft vtuber and AI Chinese generated Spiderman / Super Mario Bros. YouTube watching sessions and then wondering why he can't do fractional math and sounds like someone from Idiocracy.

The community college I'm attending a class in online uses Proctorio. The rules say that we shouldn't wear headphones during the tests because we could be getting answers through the headset.

I'm taking a foreign language class, and part of the tests involves listening to spoken words. I don't own computer speakers, so how am I supposed to follow that rule? I'd have to buy speakers for just Proctorio.

Did US Intelligence Agencies hack the national timekeeping agency to set their clocks back 10 minutes in order to make it seem like everything was running late?

They were not the only source of fossil fuel generated power being imported from Utah.

When I used to live in Glendale, California, I noted from reports from the Glendale DWP that most of the power used by the city--and by the state--was imported from places like Utah. Power would be generated in Utah, then shipped by power transmission lines to Glendale.

Will California also stop importing electricity from coal-fired plants outside of the state? Or is this simply virtue signaling by the state as they continue to export their pollution?

No. They probably don't want to hear the Roosters crowing in the background when employees are working from home on a Teams call and figure that since livestock isn't allowed in the office they can avoid that type of interruption.

And no. This isn't a joke. I've had at least three calls like this from Xerox Support over the past 5 years when their support site would crash and I had to call them for toner and parts support. To be fair I always got the parts and support on time so Kudos on Xerox but its definitely not something you expect to hear on a business support line.

AIs will become useless if they keep learning from other AIs

So we know when AI trains on data trained by AI, the LLMs become more and more unstable. (Source)

Meaning the problem is not just "Social Media will suck more." It also means that a large treasure trove of data used by AI companies to train their bots will become increasingly toxic. And this will hurt the value proposition of companies like Reddit (which depend on selling their data for training AI), as well as companies like OpenAI, who needs more and more data to train on.

Investing in what, exactly?

I mean, when you invest in a company, you're investing in the people, the processes, the products of that company, on the idea that the hard work of those folks will lead to gains in your portfolio. But if there area no jobs because they've all been replaced with AI, what is left? Some sort of weird gambling casino where we're betting on the next genius idea that AI then implements for us?

What sort of dystopian bullshit future is this?

Of course it's from a company which manages people's investments and makes money off their trades, so I can see how when all you are is a hammer manufacturer everything is a nail that needs to be pounded.