Better or cheaper than not putting it there in the first place. When you see stuff like this it's greenwashing. Like how recycling does basically fuck all but we all get told as kids to do it because the plastic industry pays to have you told that bullshit.

1. Extremely reliable. Figure high 90s.

2. Generally you do not need a measles shot again for your entire life but it is possible for the effects to decrease depending on the individual. So it's still a good idea to get tested.

Given the number of idiots skipping their measles shots it's probably not a bad idea to get tested for antibodies. And if you're at a high risk area where herd immunity is breaking down due to right-wing politics it's probably best to just get the shot and booster and call it a day.

Do Republican voters keep track of what the administration does? I'm not trolling. I really wonder if there is support for every executive order, or does no one read the news?

Your options are Google or Apple and Gemini is the only option on most phones. They have been disabling the old assistant. I literally use it for one thing it was nice to have speech recognition at a calendar entry so I didn't have to but Gemini really sucks at it.

There's a famous quote, there must be a in group which the law protects but does not bind and a out group which the law binds but does not protect.

That's the right wing in a nutshell. There's a hierarchy and how much protection you get depends on how high up you are on the totem pole. The right wing is all about hierarchy.

Incidentally this makes them extremely radical. They will do anything to preserve the hierarchy no matter how extreme. This is why they masquerade as conservatives borrowing The branding and the talking points.

I bring it up because the thread is vaccine adjacent and about maybe two or three years ago I got checked and found that I was completely without antibodies. This is most likely because my mother who was anti-vax found a doctor that would forge the paperwork indicating I have my vaccinations. I am definitely old enough that I couldn't have gone to school without that paperwork.

If you have the slightest doubt you should get checked now. Measles will fuck you up especially at our ages

We are on a deep deep recession that AI spending is masking. So the Republican party has absolutely nothing to offer their voters.

Because of that we get treated to a fishing expedition looking to find some excuse to arrest Anthony fauci and multiple anti-vax executive orders resulting in thousands of dead American children from measles and other preventable illnesses.

What I find frustrating is the number of right-wing Trump voters who still lurk here and our anti-vax. This is a science and technology forum so you would think they would know better. Maybe some of them do and it's just like a costly signal thing which is a variation on virtue signaling that the right wing just loves.

Basically you do something boneheaded and dangerous that hurts you and that's okay because it shows the group that you are trying to belong to that you can be trusted because you are willing to expend resources and take risks for the sake of group cohesion.

It is extraordinarily irrational but we've been doing it for millennia. Even the left wing has a tendency to do stuff like that but we do it with performative rationality. Meaning we are too rational to the point that we ignore real danger because we want to make sure everybody sees we aren't panicking. Stiff upper lip and all that rot...

So yeah get the fuck out. There are plenty of higher paying jobs available it'll be happy to bring themselves into California because that's where people live and that's where money gets made.

California is a nice place to live with a really good economy. You can't just threaten to leave and have anyone give a shit.

On the other hand if a company is leaving California it's generally because they want to either break the law and get away with it or do terrible things to their employees both of which are going to result in a much worse product. So when you hear about a company moving their California headquarters that's a good time to find another company to do business with. Not for any political reasons just because the quality of their product is about to go to shit and they're looking at you like a money pinata they can just hammer with a baseball bat

Everything is tracked these days. Big data and all that. So they would know how much shoplifting was going on and they would know whether it reduced when the robots were added. And for more obvious incidents like people fighting obviously they would know that because somebody would have had to come to break up the fight.

It's basically just a camera on Wheels and there's not really a lot of value to that. It's just kind of a scary dystopia thing.

Now when we start putting weapons on them yeah and that's coming but that's a little later after Trump gets his third term

The steam deck runs Windows just fine. Lots of people dual boot for games that don't play under Linux because of DRM or anti-cheat.

The reason there isn't a barrier to entry is because Microsoft is still a little afraid of antitrust law enforcement. With Windows 8 they were very clearly trying to create a apple style walled garden where they could get 30% of all software sales in exchange for doing basically fuck all.

Steam at least gives you a lot of useful apis for multiplayer and streaming games and social Media stuff and a dozen other things I'm not thinking of right now plus they have a complex system for promoting your game to the sort of person that would be likely to buy it. So the 30% doesn't sting as much. There are Indies who will flat out tell you that they don't need a marketing budget because they just put their game on steam and valve puts their game in front of their players eyes. That 30% is their market budget which is not bad since most companies will spend 100% of the cost of development on marketing or more.

Microsoft wanted to build none of that they just wanted a dumb download site and to get paid 30%. Because they are Microsoft and you will damn well pay them and if you don't like it fuck you. The industry saw that coming and refused to put their software on the Microsoft app store which is why you never see it or think about it.

The ones that weren't completely esoteric we're already being found by people. All this is doing is saving them a little bit of time and companies aren't going to repurpose those programmers they're going to fire their asses and pocket the savings.

So in exchange for a ridiculous amounts of water and electricity we're getting something that has no value to speak of. Not that anyone around here wants to hear that because hey cool new tech right? The idea of an antisocial technology is something that nerds don't like to think about even though we have read plenty of science fiction with plenty of antisocial technology...

It's not just that there isn't an obvious path it's that there isn't any practical path. That's why nobody is finding these bugs. And what I'm saying is is we need to think about how much water and electricity we're pissing through and how much damage all this nonsense is going to do to our lives and our economy in exchange for finding a handful of bugs that could have sat there till the end of time without anybody giving a shit.

This is not a free endeavor. We are in the middle of a massive drought and the current political administration is preventing new wind and solar installations from coming online and suddenly we have data centers popping up with diesel generators making up for any power shortfalls they run into spraying poison into the air while drinking all of our water because it's slightly cheaper to use the water you and I need to live than to spend money desalinating.

We can't keep doing this eventually we're going to put too much pressure on the lower caste and a demagogue is going to come along and give them a bunch of weapons and point them at us and then we're going to have world War III and death camps.

This is not an exaggeration. The current president has threatened to invade Canada and Greenland and they tried to build concentration camp down in Florida and it was only their own staggering incompetence that shut it down. The next president if it's JD Vance won't have that problem and those death camps will get built.

People do not understand how close we are to disaster. Nobody wants to think about it because it's too far outside our daily lives. We have to start making trade-offs and a handful of bugs that nobody was bothering to look for is a pretty no-brainer for me

Okay Boomer

This will be moved off of Google's balance sheets onto a variety of sub companies and when they collapse you will either bail out those companies or they will crash the entire economy because they will be too big to fail.

You will very likely not have the stomach and the fortitude to simply seize control of the banking system like some of the Nordic countries did during the 2008 meltdown. That would be too socialismy for most people. The only reason why we got anything back from the 2008 collapse is Obama threatened to enforce the letter of the bailout terms and exert control over the company's involved and as soon as he did all the sudden they were flush with cash and easily paid back their obligations, without interest of course, but you won't see that happen this time we've let our government become far too corrupt for that.

Given that the current president is directly responsible for about 1/3 of the national debt and it's going to be all the next president can do to deal with the aftermath of all the nonsense and wars and tariffs and economic devastation from the current president when the crash finally does come you're going to be paying for it so you better start putting some money away for it right now.

You could get your neighbors to stop voting Republican but good luck with that. I have had zero luck. Even if they start to agree with me sooner or later they go home and they turn on Fox news or something and then they're gone again. I can't compete with hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate propaganda

He works for Microsoft and he saw firsthand just how terrible they can be and how the complete lack of antitrust law enforcement means Microsoft can get away with it.

Steamos is and always has been a hedge against Microsoft finally tightening the screws. They tried with Windows 8 but every single software publisher on the planet saw that coming and refused to publish their software on the Microsoft store. It was a wasteland and fortunately for the few games Microsoft just bought they were eventually forced to put them on steam because people just plain didn't buy them otherwise.

I still prefer GOG because I buy a game there and it's mine with the only caveat that I'm responsible for backing up the data myself and I worry what's going to happen when Gabe finally dies unless he literally has an heir. But the best chance we have to break Microsoft's Monopoly besides people actually voting to enforce antitrust law is going to be back door market share from people switching over.

Like I do wonder what's going to happen with all these old computers that are perfectly usable and can't run Windows 11. Right now Microsoft is just letting them run Windows 10 but that's not going to last forever.