I'm not in France, but I work for and have also previously worked for government. The specific document templates are all in PDF now. If a word document isn't exactly the right format it doesn't matter. We do use forms like that, but it's completely inconsequential if the formatting is a bit wrong as long as the data is on it. Where the formatting matters, it's always a PDF. More and more of our work is done via web, many of the PDFs are generated from software on the web. There is absolutely zero reason why most of us could not do our jobs completely on Linux with virtually no retraining because all the bits we interact with work almost the same by default, and can be configured to work exactly the same in practice.

Yeah, but that's stupid right? Because the USA has been Team America World Police ever since WWII. We delayed entry into that conflict even though we knew the holocaust was occurring with the excuse that it was politically untenable, with Americans still being fatigued over WWI. But "conveniently" it also meant our "allies" were getting bombed while we grew our manufacturing capacity. And that allowed the conflict to grow as well, because we weren't the only ones building factories, the Axis wasn't thumb-sitting. But that's just the tip of the dick, because we were also war profiteering, for example selling fuel and metals to the Nazis. We actually didn't just not help fight in a timely fashion, we grew the conflict and got rich from it! And besides the parties who profited from it, nobody knows this better than Germany! QED, all of Europe but especially Germany should have known better than to adopt Microsoft in the first place. No one else is in a better position to know exactly what we are — solely self-interested.

You buy the loot box, or buy points to get the loot box. The loot box contents are either transferable or not. If they are, then you can sell them (whether the platform "allows" this behavior or not) and they therefore have a cash value. Therefore the returns (potential or realized) are in the form of money. If you don't ignore these important facts, then you'll realize that loot boxes can be and often are gambling.

This isn't new, it's just slightly more transparent. Consider the tax rate for capital gains differing from the tax rate for wages.

And the article also includes this skeptical quote from the shop's first customer. "I want technology that helps humans flourish, not technology that bosses them around in this dystopian economic hellscape.

Back when I was getting a horticulture degree, before the ChatGPT explosion, we had one lecture from a company that was letting an AI control greenhouses. Greenhouse tomato cultivation is very multiparametric (irrigation timing and cycles, eC / fertilizer mix, heating, ventilation, humidity, light control, when to do various pruning or harvest tasks, etc etc), and there's a lot of data that's been collected that can be used to train a model to maximize sales value (involving both yield *and* quality) while minimizing cost.

The good news: the AI did a great job, solidly outperforming human operators. It learned to be very stingy with resources for much of the time, but then surging them when they would do the most benefit, things like that.

The bad news: it was an asshole boss. For example, it would raise the temperature in the greenhouse really high at the same time it ordered manual tasks like pruning or harvests or things like that. It was given no incentive to care about worker comfort.

To be fair, at least with a LLM manager, you have a vast and diverse training set, so a LLM would be far more likely to consider factors like employee well being than a simple DNN trained only on greenhouse data.

"I want to be straightforward..."

Why, hello Claude! ;)

Most of that money gone from angry young men who couldn't really afford to lose it. There is a damn good reason we heavily regulate gambling. It's known to be addictive. But sure let's have millions of young men with poor job prospects and in debt up to their ears from gambling. I'm sure that won't cause any problems for the rest of us.

Like I told the other guy, not the same thing. A loot box is not a known commodity. When I'm doing futures trading I am trading and known commodities and the only question is how much they will be worth in the future.

If I buy a loot box then that is literally random chance or it's supposed to be.

I'm assuming that you've picked up a bunch of nonsense propaganda from the gambling houses. It's also possible that they are so pervasive that they are starting to show up here. Either the way this is nonsense. We know what gambling is. It is putting up money with the goal of a specific outcome with the understanding that you have an agreement that if that outcome happens you will be paid back more than you put up.

Sometimes that outcome is completely random and sometimes it is predicated on a series of other outcomes but at the end of the day you aren't making a purchase of a commodity or good that you intend to resell you are making at Best in educated guess

Just because you are making a purchase based on an expectation does not mean you're gambling. At the end of the day when you purchase a future you're still purchasing something of tangible value. You might lose money because you overestimate the value of that thing but the amount of money you can lose is limited somewhat because there is still a tangible asset backing your purchase.

What makes gambling gambling is that you are putting up money with the expectation that given a certain outcome you will get paid more money than you put up if that outcome happens and you will lose all of your money if that outcome does not happen. There's no tangible asset whatsoever you're just making a guess on an outcome.

There is a reason why we have different words to describe gambling and futures trading instead of just using the same words. They are different things.

Of course after decades of right wing lunatics being put on the courts so that they will sign off on whatever the Epstein class wants the rule of law no longer applies.

There will be consequences for you personally. Even if you don't Gamble the tens of billions of dollars lost will drag down the overall economy and help take you with it.

There is a concept called at chesterton's fence. The idea is don't take offense down unless you know why it was put up. You are in the process of taking down a fence without realizing why it was put up

Trolls are people who say shit they don't believe just to piss you off.

Nothing could be more like drinking the piss of the ghost of Steve Jobs than believing people criticizing Apple are doing to make you mad.

Your wokephobia is hilarious

Except that was already done, and done brilliantly by Deep Space Nine. In reality, the Star Fleet Academy idea had a very old lineage, to the smoking shambles that was Star Trek V, when the idea was posited of having a prequel with the TOS characters, or at least the main ones, portrayed by younger actors, during their Academy days. It was pretty quickly rejected because at the time they didn't think audiences would buy the idea of new actors playing Kirk, Spock and Bones.

Of course, in the end, that was effectively what the first part of the 2009 Star Trek, which, for me at least, proved that the guys who rejected the idea in 1989-90 were spot on. But other people like the Kelvinverse films, so to each their own.

The real problem isn't writing per se. There were no lack of justifiable complaints against Voyager and Enterprise. The real problem is that no one really knows where to take it. The whole 32nd century gambit is because no one really knows how to portray the technology of the intervening period. The Enterprise temporal war rubbish demonstrated just how incredibly problematic it can be for an established sci-fi franchise to push itself across a broad timeline when you start with ships that go multiples of the speed of light, create holodecks and replicators and have computers so intelligent they can create conscious beings, and that's just by the 24th century.

With James Bond they can just keep resetting the character over and over again, and updating the gadgets along the way. Star Trek, for all its faults, has established a sort of permanent 70s-ish technology vibe, and because it's more fantasy then science fiction, the controls for the super planet buster never have to change! That franchise fell on its sword more because of a lack of imagination, lazy writing and an obvious desire not to pay Extended Universe authors some royalties for a cache of rather interesting ideas, and ultimately having to go there anyways.

In all cases, I think the fan base is the worst enemy. No franchise like Star Trek is ever going to measure up to the mythology of the older series. TOS really has entered the realm of cultural myth, and TNG, though everyone forgets how much the first season was disliked (and on rewatch a few years ago, I have to say it feels like a wonder that it ever got a season 2), isn't far behind. Even DS9's critics have finally stopped talking, and for my money, it is the most consistently well-written and well-acted of all the Star Treks. But that kind of legacy is absolutely toxic, because if you try to be too different everyone screams "It isn't Star Trek", and if you try to be similar in tone, then everyone complains "We've seen it all before!"

"Strange New Worlds was a nice partial deviation from this - they still made sure to pander to all the current 'sensitivities', but if the writers of the show didn't love the original series and its fundamental qualities, I don't know who does."

Have you even seen the original series? Racism, bigotry, classism, human rights, ethics, not to mention nationalism, were all dealt with. TNG went further, particularly with Riker's penchant for rather open sexual interests, and of course DS9 dealt with everything from war crimes to the undermining of civil society. Voyager and Enterprise in their turn covered similar issues, though perhaps not always as ably as the first three series did.

While I would agree the way Nutrek at times has tried to do social commentary has perhaps suffered from a lack of metaphor and allegory, which the older series' writers at times had to work through since things like interracial kisses and non-binary identity would have, at the time, caused stations to go apoplectic (and indeed some did, with the Kirk-Uhura kiss). But I suspect more than just some iffy writing is at play here. Everyone accepts, well almost everyone that is, that mixed-race couples can kiss in public, and most people accept gay couples and class and racial equality. But if you try to push further into social liberalism, past what many conservative elements in society have been forced (kicking and screaming the whole way mind you), well suddenly it's all evil woke trash trying to reprogram our brains.

In other words, many have not progressed very far at all, and because TOS and TNG in particular had to hide the underlying message beneath makeup and latex, the less progressive fans can watch it and, well, almost willfully miss the point of The Outcast (TNG) or Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (TOS), assuming, I suppose, that the metaphor is buried so deeply they don't have to challenge their prejudices.

Erases 2,000 years of human civilization.

Is you have a bunch of alien races that aren't peaceful and create conflict but the core federation and the core of humanity has moved beyond conflict. Even for the handful of things where you have a federation special forces they don't exist to act against or on members of the federation they exist to deal with the less advanced alien races and still engage in conflict.

And that's the core thing. Engaging in conflict is a sign that your race is less advanced. It's why the Q are always fucking with the federation but not so much with the Klingons. They're more interested in advanced races that are close to taking the next step towards what they are.

It's a core part of the theme of the show. If you start mixing in right wing politics it's not a shortcut to introduce conflict, you already have an easy way to do that, it's just the people at the top forcing it on the writers or firing any writer that doesn't tow the line.

When you do that you eliminate everything that makes Star Trek Star Trek and frankly everything that makes anything interesting. Right wing media is never interesting or fun or cool. It's something you use to deal with being afraid of the world and the things in it. It's A coping mechanism and its propaganda for billionaires. That's never fun.

"Firefox vs. Chrome: Which Performs Better on a Linux Laptop?"

Some people care about battery life.

Yeah this, load Firefox up with the usual goodies like UO and run this test again, I guarantee different results. Blocking all that garbage improves performance.