> it still doesn't seem like a meaningful improvement over KDE 3.5.

Have you tried LXQt?

On Debian just install it and uninstall connman and it's pretty good for most tasks, especially low-spec devices.

Because none of that stuff ever existed in Hollywood before conservatives starting crying about woke stuff, right?

Not to the extreme extent we're seeing these days...no.

Have you considered what you call "left" is more a reflection upon your biases and environment and limitations

I speak of "the left" as how the general political divide is in the US, since that is where I live and am a citizen of....

I'm sure the problems have nothing to do with ruining beloved characters...race and gender swapping, and more interested in promotion of "the message" rather than true to the cannon story telling.

There are many issues with the movie industry at the moment...but I think that many of them can be addressed simply by making cheaper movies.

If a studio commits to spending half a billion dollars on a movie, they're going to enforce extremely rigid parameters. If Gunn wants to get half-billion dollar budgets, he's going to have to deal with the fact that he won't be the director - the Board of Directors will be.

The more practical approach is to pursue less expensive movies - $10M-$50M is a much better ground to work with, because the suits won't be as rigid on their direction. More creativity can flourish because there won't be as much pressure to be a paint-by-numbers film. There won't be expectations of making a billion dollars; if five $20M movies get made and one makes $200M and the other four only break even, the studio covered their costs and still doubled their money.

So, yeah, apparently James is discovering that big piles of money come with rules. News at 11.

There are only three resolutions to a constitutional crisis. The first is President becomes king. The second is Congress agrees with the president and changes the law. And the third is Congress impeaches the president. The Democrats aren't going to accept #1.

I wish I knew this for sure. I have seen many inklings that would lead me to believe they'd be perfectly content if it was their king. They've already pitched packing the courts, eliminating the filibuster, and rewriting the laws to favor their party (ala electoral college elimination). They've shown a sustained desire to work around Congress rather than with it.

If a popular Democratic president started doing illegal things broadly popular with their base, I'm not certain Congress would hold them to task with an impeachment. Say a president declared a national emergency, saying we can't have another fascist regime take over, so they start taking away everyone's guns, and they ban "misinformation and fake news" (meaning anything that doesn't support their dogma). Then they declare a climate emergency and start going wholesale destruction on the fossil fuel sector -- say they ban coal and natural gas nationwide. Can you legitimately tell me for certain that Democrats would rise up and impeach their leader? Again, I'd like to hope. But in today's day and age, I can't say that for certain.

But up until then Twitter was a great place for independent journalism without corporate propaganda

Hardly. It was just a different brand of censorship. Shadow banning was rampant, particularly on politically sensitive issues like COVID or the Biden laptop. The whole reason Musk bought it in the first place was in response to the fact it was a carefully groomed left-leaning stovepipe. In fact, I remember the common quip from the left when the right would complain about Twitter censorship was "then why don't you start your own social media platform? we don't have to give you a megaphone"

The massive tax cut going through the US Senate right now

What tax cut?

They are merely making permanent the current tax levels we have NOW...otherwise eveyrone's taxes are going to jump way up....

As for the rest of your rant...wow, you sounds like a nervous nelly, how are you able to sleep at night being so frighten the sky is falling and that climate change will send us to the Stone Age in the next year or so....

I'm still always confused at your worry about the US and how we conduct our business here, since you are not living here and not an American.....?

What makes you say that? How much PBS News Hour have you watched recently?

I tend to flip through all the news shows/channels I can on almost a daily basis....

I"ll admit tt's likely been a month or so, last time I tuned into the news programs on PBS, but I find they like NPR are usually quite leftist slanted much of the time.

Some neural nets have been good at solving sticky programming problems. Whether finding game cheats, doing voice recognition, modeling proteins, or other tasks humans haven't done well at.

But an LLM is more of an information retrieval tool, so tasking it with clever algorithm design is asking the wrong tool the wrong question.

Then there are the people who complete in programming challenges. In high school I would sometimes stay after to do the ACSL competition tests - no big deal, the school was a five minute walk, and it helped my buddies who wanted a high team score.

Then they implored me to go to DC on a trip for a national competition our score qualified us for. This seemed so bizzare to me as a fifteen year old kid - I could stay in a run-down motel and take tests this weekend or go camping in a state forest with friends. I let them down, in a way, but the ask was totally alien to me.

I have nothing at all against people who enjoy such things but it's a subset of the algorithm minds.

So we now have the results of some competitive coders vs. the wrong tool for the job.

OK, mildly interesting, but does it tell us much?

Candidate A: hardworking successful and respected prosecutor, Senator, and Vice President. Exemplary record of promoting health care, voting rights, and reducing gun violence and crime. Full understanding and adherence to the rule of law. Well educated. Articulate as a court officer should be.

LOL...good one,always start out with a joke.

Oh man...especially good is that "articulate" part at the end there..hehehe.

Thanks for the morning laugh my friend....

PBS News Hour is pretty solid

Pretty solid left leaning for sure...

Yup. And as the brain reduces receptors to compensate for the increased dopamine levels you get an increased craving for more drug hits. So just like opiates, nicotine, amphetamines, and cocaine, people just keeping coming back again and again for their next Fox hit. It is essentially a drug addiction, just with a different delivery mechanism.

I guess no different than those fans of MSNBC and to some extent CNN, eh?

The trustworthy news media train derailed when Walter Cronkite left.

Uncle "Walt" had a good bit of bias back in his day too.....

Zuck is a literal Nazi who banned people for posting links to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. Meta is a shit nazi company that needs to be killed off.