I don't need a sim for money transfers, all I need is a network connection, even via wifi.

... I really liked the first Superman they did.

So you managed to find and watch the Superman serial that Columbia put out in 1948. And if you liked that so much, did you hunt down its sequel, Atom Man vs. Superman that came out in 1950? If not, you really should as they used footage of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsing as part of the first chapter's cliffhanger.

I find it depressing that the US is so much behind

Ballots? No. Just do it.

These can be published or accessed, but never both at the same time.

It has been my experience, sad to say, that online stores aren't above selling consumer credit card information either, and I've grounds to think Amazon is one that does this.

I have an industrial air conditioner for my home. (It's a small home, but summers are increasingly severe.)

I don't recall being asked a damn thing.

My suspicion is that this is scaremongering.

If you do, it isn't harm. It's curating the gene pool.

When the tsar fell, everyone lost their jobs except the prison guards.

Europe never understood freedom, egalitarianism, meritocracy, or government by consent of the governed. They aped it. Imperfectly.

I have been stress-testing AIs with increasingly complex projects for some time. The Chinese AIs struggle, but actually do a FAR better job of handling massively complex tasks than Grok, and Gemini just rolls over and whimpers at anything above a very low level of complexity.

What I've found is that the Chinese AIs tend to be sycophant but do "understand" complex projects properly in that you can ask specific technical questions and the answers will be generally very accurate. Any sort of critical analysis is beyond them, though. (Ether that, or I'm a mega-genius. Which....doesn't sound terribly likely.)

Of the "Top AIs", ChatGPT is good on basics but is incapable of any kind of detailed generation. Claude is brilliant at detailed generation, but overloads with anything but a tiny data set.

I've been putting up the projects on Gitlab for a while, so anyone who wants to see an AI break down and cry in despair is able to do so.

The secret tools don't bother me - they'll have long understood how to use Big Data and Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. AI isn't going to find out any more than combinations of those tools will, because that's basically all AI is - a Big Data classification system.

No no no. You need six years of environmental impact statements (per foot if pipeline) while tanker trucks keep driving the stuff on local roadways. Think of the children!

So you're telling Claude something vague and washy, then Claude invents a prompt that might vaguely possibly be somehow related to what you want along with a drink that is almost but not entirely quite unlike tea. Claude then recurses through this until it has a Celtic knot so intricate that it has its own Hausdorff dimension. What burps out is a product that is completely useless and patented to the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

I do wonder how much of the bloatware needs to be disabled to actually realize that, though.

There's a very simple way to find out. Just type this one command into a terminal:
systemd-analyze blame

I bought a laptop for grad school 10 years ago. It replaced a then-10 year old laptop I bought at the end of college. I'm still using the 10 yo laptop as my daily driver for the little I need a full keyboard for. Recently maxed out the ram on. Might put in a new ssd at some point. Unless something physically breaks I expect I'll be using it for another half a decade with some kind of Linux and a win10 vm for tax filing sw.

Ewaste is just wastefulness. That is to say a personal choice.

Throw out your socks or patch them if possible.

Buy a new car when the blue book value drops below some arbitrary threshold or keep it until something actually breaks that's both important and not worth fixing in context.

Order door dash or cook your own food.

You have the power to decide.