To be fair Israelis don't rape little kids, they just blow them up. I suppose that's slightly more civilized.

Oh I dont know. I somewhat enjoyed Oblivion, and with the recent remaster/UE5 port they did , it actually holds up quite well, although the face animations are as horrifying as ever.

My concern is Betheda appear unable to learn. Starfield had the same janky faces doing creepy staring that Oblivion had, just with much higher quality assets. Its like... theres something about the facial animation rigs that arent hitting right. Compare with Baldurs Gate, which is actually packed with face to face cut scenes but no real uncanny valley and we learn this CAN be done right, but it requires keeping up to date with modern animation techniques. I'm more just using that as an example, though, to say that starfield felt like a 15 year old game with a modern-ish coat of paint, but not a good 15 year old game. For that we have Oblivions remaster which WAS a good 15yo game, but in a modern-ish coat of paint.

I dont know. I'm not gonna set my expectations high. And if I'm wrong , and its excellent, well that'll be a delight.

Yeah exactly. I think any guess as to whether AI is truly inextricable from their search product would be ill informed - I'm willing to believe it is and it isn't, but Google may get turned down (or their bluff called) by enough schools such that a sizable number of kids grow up with the muscle memory of typing in or configuring their own browsers to a different search engine.

The problem is you are legally, and morally, correct. But you are economically completely wrong. He can't forbid you from owning RAM. But he can buy all the ram so theres none left for you to have. And thats precisely what he, and all his fellow travellers in silicon valley have been doing. They aren't even sticking it in machines, half of its just being warehoused for datacenters that arent built yet.

Meanwhile RAM continues to be absurdly expensive because retailers are struggling to find supplies. Prebuilt computers are rising in prices to astronomical levels. Barely more than 6 months ago Apple put out a computer for $600 , cue forward 6 months, and the Ram crisis has forced them to release their latest computer at substantially more than the equivelent model in the last generation. Apple famously had one of the most locked down supply chains in the industry, yet even THEY couldnt get around it.

Nobody is coming to take your RAM away. But they sure as fuck are making it hard as possible to let you affford any more of it.

But then what do you expect from customers too stupid for a right click?

Macs have had a context right click for 25 years.

I used EMACS pretty consistently until about 10 years ago (So... 1992 to about 2025 thereabouts) until the repo with all the configs I had got nuked by atlassian. Last time I tried to use Emacs I discovered to my horror I had forgotten almost all the chords I used to know so intuitively.

Emacs was the one text mode IDE that can hold its own with the visual studios, eclipses and jetbrains of the world. Its a *full* IDE. Whereas vim can hold its own handily against the VS-Codes of the world, Emacs is more aligned with the full Vis Studios or Jetbrains IDEAs.

The problem for me is, its just easier to use Jetbrains now. The computers are fast enough to handle that tiny bit of extra load. And going from zero to hero on a new machine is as quick as downloading the ide and starting it.

There will always be a space in my heart for emacs, but I just dont know if I have the patience for it anymore.

But hey, the old girl is the same age as me. I should ask if she's single.

Not that filthy EMACS users are any better. Both should be purged. Nano master race raise up!

Theres an editor I'm somewhat fond of thats replaced Nano for me called, conveniently enough, Micro. Its basically a Nano style no-nonsense basic editor. More for modifying config files than as an IDE, but its got mouse support that just works like its supposed to (Assuming your term config + ssh has mouse setup right, these days thats true mot of the time) , uses wordstar keys (ctrl-c/v/x , ctrl-s to save, ctrl-q to quit etc) and has a nice plugin system and lua scripting for adding in missing features and so on.

"Meanwhile even questioning if the earth is flat will have you downmodded to (-1) Troll."

What you might as well have said.

Yes, but probably illadvised. A drone is a LOT less stealthier than a squad of dudes crawling between bushes. That said, for getting restocked logistics to the front line, it could definitely be a winner idea. If you have a group behind enemy lines running low on ammo and food, then a drone dropping a bunch of ammo and ration packs to a dead drop is probably a lot safer than sending in Oleg the 18yo runner (who has knowledge of where those guys needing the re-up are and would fold under 5 minutes of car batteries attached to the nipples).

When I was a kid, my dad had a friend who was used as a runner in the vietnam war for sending intel back and forth from the front line. He had a nearly photographic memory but was completely illiterate. They liked sending him because they knew he'd never write the information down, and because he was a complete hard case they trusted not to fold under torture. The dude was completely mental though, lots of PTSD but was hilariously illiterate. They ran a chicken farm and would often put up signs advertising "mandurah $5Kg". Mandurah was the town we lived in, we all presumed he was selling mannure.

So they should prefer the Google Monopoly instead of the Microsoft monopoly? WTF?

No. They should prefer to have a choice. They don't because microsoft actively makes it diffiicult for non technical people to have that choice.

Also, I'm tired of hearing about poor old grandma and grandpa and their computer problems.

I don't understand how this is an argument. We aren't discussing your preferences.

Or better yet, fight with a pen instead of a sword.

Unless your proposing they get a guy in close enough to jam a ballpoint between Putin's ribs, I'm not sure angry words are going to be sufficient defence when an enemy is trying to murder your entire country.

From what i gather about the ideological leanings of anthropics founders, I do believe them that they want to do good. The problem is their definition of good is hopelessly entwined with the "Effective Altruism" movement that seems to be more Sam Bankman Fried than mother teresa.

less "Lets donate a billion dollars to distribute aids medicine to central afraica" and more "Lets donate a billion dollars to prevent Rokkos Basilisk" (if you dont know what that is, pour yourself a beer and google it and be prepared for a very funny read)

This, by the way, as an australian, is why I think the teenage social media ban, while poorly implemented, had its heart in the right place. Social media is doing *terrible* things to boys sense of moral judgement and girls sense of self esteem. At least back in the fashion mag days, the teen girl magazines used to at least have articles on why girls should resist the hormonal advances of teenage boys and why they shouldnt judge themselves on unrealistic fashion standards (the slogan was usually some variation of "there are only 10 women in the world that look like supermodels". Theres not a lot on instagram telling them that now.

I'm not really in favor of locking up children forever, so I think this probably warrants a more nuanced rehabilitation effort than you're suggesting.

When I worked in the courts, the judges never threw teenagers on the sex offenders registry, but would happily give them a few weeks in juvie to understand the world that awaits them if they keep that shit up. That seemed reasonable to me. Give them a good scare, but keep their name off the registry (Also, in australia the press cant name teenage offenders unless its serious enough a judge authorizes it).

But from what I observed, teenage victims of teenagers where just as messed up by it as teenage victims of adults.

Still, your right, rehabilitation ought be the first priority until their brains developed enough that adult sentencing makes sense.

The problem is, Microsoft addresses the Edge concerns by saying "But Edge isn't in a monopoly position. Chrome is still more popular". But when it does that it wants you to ignore what got in trouble the first time around.

Back in the 90s/early 2000s , Microsoft didn't get so badly busted that it almost got split apart by the regulators because IE was a monopoly. Microsoft got in trouble because it abused its windows monopoly to illegally obtain its browser monopoly at the expense of Netscape.

Its doing the *exact* same thing again. I am seeing countless, mostly elderly, folks using Edge because they dont know how to convince windows to let them use chrome by default. Its actually harder to find those defaults than it was back in the 90s/early 2000s.

Its just they are brazen about it now, becuase they know the current admin wont go after them, for the same reason George Bush ordered the justice department to stop going after microsoft back in the day.

Which won't make a lick of difference to the EU, if it decides it wants to impose silly-money fines again. But the EU can only regulate EU business, so microsoft is playing different rules.

So we should ask ourselves, why do europeans get a choice and not us.