It definitely is. Every dollar a person makes on such a site comes from a dollar lost by another guy. And the numbers are staggering. Like a billion dollars. And they way they are set up, those who are already rich can set things up so that they make even more money from much poorer people. The more money you have to play with, the easier it is to win on the predictions gambling sites (not to mention cheat with insider knowledge). Fantastic video on this from a young lady named Dee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... Highly recommend for anyone who wants to know how this scam works. 70% of the takings go to 0.1% of the players (who also happen to be the ones with the most money to start with).

At least on the stock market, there is such thing as growth from companies making money, paying dividends, etc.

I'm not at all surprised to see Zuckerberg getting in on this. It's not enough to addict the world to social media and sell their privacy. He wants every last dollar they have. It's really quite evil.

Yes you absolutely can do it for some modules. For example, systemd-timesyncd can be removed and ntpd or chrony installed instead if you need more functionality than just simple client time syncing, such as when you need your own time source as well as syncing.

Likewise systemd-resolved is often left out and a caching local DNS server can be used instead, or left out entirely.

And I very well could remove systemd-networkd and systemd-container since I don't use containers, flatpak, or kvm.

Can I remove others? Possibly, but there's not a lot of reason to do so. These modules serve valid purposes and address actual technical shortcomings we had before, such as process cleanup which was often a problem before systemd-pam.

Shrug. It's not a boogeyman. No one's out to get you. It's not a government plot. There are many valid reasons why systemd has become a core Linux component. There are plenty of distros (and operating systems) that eschew systemd if you don't want or need features like containers and KDE or Gnome, etc.

that can run your old classic desktop environments like you always used to.

Yes I have done a timer file before, but it's been a long time.

Fortunately Cron still works fine, and will continue to do so. But I'd be hard pressed to remember all the cron parameters without a comment at the top of the crontab to remind me.

Shrug. It's sixes.

And the number of false convictions (roughly 25% of those convicted in the US) doesn't cause a problem for you?

Then you're part of the problem.

US: 66% (Wall Street's numbers aren't those found in official statistics)
UK: 28.9%
Holland: 23%
Norway: 16%
China: 6%

US' conclusion: The rate is a complete mystery, we've no idea how to decrease it, let's do more of what we're currently doing differently to everyone else.

There is a slight possibility this may be flawed.

Because Youtube is about half AI slop these days. At least given the kinds of video topics I might be interested in. It's kind of discouraging. Some of them actually are now marked as AI generated. I generally stop watching channels that I find or suspect are AI, even if the material appears to be accurate. I just can't support creators who don't actually create.

Further to that systemd is highly modular. Most of it does not run in PID 1. On my fedora system there are half a dozen individual systemd module packages that can be used or not as the system needs and is designed. systemd is not at all monolithic.

All this systemd hate is pretty infantile and entitled, frankly. You're free to build Linux to not use systemd if you want. There are distros that eschew systemd and you can use them and contribute to them. And if a project embraces systemd you are free to fork that and roll back the changes if it's that important to you.

Meanwhile systemd's plain config files are way nicer to work with than any sysv init script I've had the mispleasure of dealing with. I am ambivalent regarding the journal. I still use rsyslog a lot and for the most part it acts as it did before. When debugging individual services the journal definitely is a big help especially because it logs stderr and stdout, although I don't like having to type journalctl all the time. It doesn't exactly roll off the fingertips.

Go right ahead. This is Linux after all. You are free to build it however you want.

Why would you do that? If you're using it for non-strings, you'd never have used strncpy, you'd have used memcpy. Which is the same thing without the null termination rules of strncpy. You'd never use the str versions unless actually working on strings.

It has seemed to me, for a very long time, that modern AI systems would need to be integrated with standard RDBMS systems for reliable persistant storage of raw information, some sort of no-sql database (memcache or some variant) for persistant storage of associations, some sort of document database for blocks of textual information, a SPARQL system for searching semantically-marked information within the document database, and a more old-fashioned back-propogation NN to provide a store of understanding that the user can directly manipulate.

Probabalistic classifiers are all fine and good, but only for a subset of the tasks needed. The above structure is a very loose, wildly-speculative initial framework. It's almost certain that if you actually tried building an integrated multi-model system, that you'd end up making a lot of changes to this basic idea, but that you'd end up having to implement the same core concepts that are identified in it.

The British government, in a desperate bid to increase profitability, has trademarked Alan Turing himself.

How is ChatGPT supposed to know the difference? Both involve hands and mouths, so clearly it's the same context. :P

From their careful selection of text, they WANTED it to mean something else so badly that they couldn't handle putting in the full text. It's a common blight on today's Internet, where people want other people's writings to mean something other than what was meant by the writer, so carefully select the words they read.

That's the entire point. Trying to solve other people's problems NEVER WORKS. You CANNOT control others into responsible behaviour, but you CAN place them in a position where they will choose to be responsible of their own accord. It is the ONLY way that works. It is the only way that has ever worked. If you look at computer programming, you will see this repeated over and over - well-meaning "hard rules" are ignored, STANDARDS are kept.

You must give them parameters and force them to find their own solution within those.

So, "People With Disabilities Don't Exist" then?

My father was recently paralyzed by Guillain-Barré, so I'll let him know, thanks.