Arts and Humanities are fine....as pursuits of the leisure class who don't need to make living from them, or for people who work for a living to enjoy as hobbies.

Everyone is free to enjoy arts and humanities, but it's cruel to encourage expectations of gainful employment and silly to expect to
make a living from them. Confusing jobs and careers with hobbies can be financially deadly, so I didn't.

Careers fund hobbies so you can enjoy both. For example I can afford to collect and restore classic motorcycles because I did not try to make it a business. In consequence I easily afforded a well equipped personal workshop instead of starving for years to establish a financially vulnerable business. Fixing fighters paid much better.

...April...One year ago

I think April Fools was ten days ago. Dear eds, your AI is sleeping.

A few years back, I went to a local community college...paid a few dollars to "apply" to take some grad courses.....sent transcripts, etc....I think a total of maybe $50 to apply.

For that I got a student ID with picture...and NO DATEs on it.

I also got an .edu email address. I've not used that in ages, but likely could reactivate it with some phone calls.

But that ID alone has saved me a TON of money over the years getting educational rates and prices.

Check to see what your local colleges put on their IDs and you might find it worth it to do the same.

It's going to get substantially higher than $4. I think it could end up pushing 7 bucks. Historically, the US has tolerated recessions more lightly than it has gas above 5 bucks. So this is a really really big deal, not least because demand destruction through mode shifting is much less tenable than in the 70s due to greater car dependency, and the SPR is already extensively drawn down ahead of winter. A whacking great recession may well be on the way.

Maybe that high in the "weird" states that overtax and have massive regulations on formulation, etc.....but here in the New Orleans...TX area, I don't see it getting that expensive.....

I don't get from you response one thing clearly...are you saying we had greater car dependency in the 70's or we have it now?

Also, what is "SPR" please?

I just don't see an electric bike/motorcycle holding any interest whatsoever to me...I LOVE my regular motorcycle....the sounds, smells, mechanical vibrations and with all the controls, clutches, going through gears, etc....it's all part of a visceral feel that you only get from a real motorcycle.....

Just pulling a throttle on a silent EV "motorcycle"....even though it might launch you into the future....will not have the same appeal...

I wonder how many people on this site can ride a motorcycle. They have lots of opinions about the clutch, though.

I do. Just about a year ago, I bought a 2023 Indian Chief Bobber (dark horse edition)....just shy of 1900 CC of pure fun.

I could not imagine buying an electric motorcycle....even with all the things they may try to emulate.

There's now way they can simulate how a big V-Twin rumbles at idle or roars with gas......no way an electric can simulate that zen as you become one with the road and a mechanical beast.

Why go to all the trouble with fake clutches and sound effects and shaker motors....to simulate what is already simple there with an ICE motorcycle.

Without even going into real range anxiety (bikes cannot carry large batteries)....it's just the experiences.

The sounds and smells and feel of a real bike....every time I jump on mine, it's an adventure.

I had mine a couple months and removed the slip on exhaust parts and replaced with some "shorties"....now it sound just right....I can't imagine changing the mp3 recording on an EV bike would be quite so rewarding.

Around here you have your summer car and your winter beater. Sure you drive the winter beater all year round to pickup landscaping materials and such, but your summer car never hits those pot holes and salt.

Where do you live where you have "winter" and "summer" cars...??

I've never even heard of such a thing......

Hello from New Orleans....

Hell...still better than an Iran with nuke.....

We can wait them out....$4 gas isn't that big a deal....

I suspect that it depends on how strongly or weakly the 'bloat' is connected to other things; and what supporting them involves.

Something like not having TSC (which itself comes in several variants depending on whether it's from the era where you actually had 'a' CPU that just ran at a speed, or if it's one of the ones that tries to compensate for the complications of variable clocks and multiple cores) presumably comes up in a variety of nasty places related to the bad things that happen when things are not done in the expected order.

Just some random PCI device that nobody developing actually owns anymore is presumably at risk of unnoticed regressions; but (especially with the amount of PCI DNA that got carried over into PCIe or was used for the software-visible interface of some system on chip that skipped the cost of actually implementing a 32 bit parallel multidrop bus out to the PCB but either specifically sought compatibility or couldn't justify cooking up something custom when the peripherals they were integrating were all derivatives of PCI designs) it's not necessarily much maintenance overhead for it to just exist on a 'cool if it works for you' basis as a module that you probably don't need.

There's also the secondary matter of the fact that 'the kernel' has a limited number of people directly focused on its interests in the abstract; rather than some hardware vendor, distro, enthusiast, or hyperscaler's interests. If preserving hardware compatibility is directly contrary to the interests of supporting the major contemporary use case of fairly large 64 bit x86 servers and embedded ARM widgets (as 486 and pre-TSC 685-ish likely was) it's going to have relatively few friends among the people actually doing the work. If someone wants to maintain some weirdo HAM radio interface card that merely assumes the existence of PCI it's not clear anyone will go out of their way to help if they need to update something to cope with a change elsewhere; but it's not like the Ministry of Kernel is going to order them to go find bugs in the implementation of CXL memory because that's where the money is.

All entries are stationary at St. Hormuz

St. Hormuz? WTF is that?!

If these guys are actually treating a user agent string as an authentication mechanism I'm honestly surprised that being on the public internet hasn't already eaten them alive purely because of the supply of malicious opportunists; and I'll be even more surprised if it continues to work out for them now that they've drawn a fair amount of attention to it.

The program is still deterministic - the output is determined *entirely* and deterministically by the input. (Where the input is the set of the prompt, the sequence of numbers returned by the calls for random(), and the LLM data model itself.)

Your "mistake", if we want to call it that, is treating the random() function as an innate quality of the LLM. It isn't it is simply part of the input.

Provide the the system with the same model, the same prompt, and the same sequence of numbers, and you WILL get the same answer, regardless of how complex the question is, or who asks it.

This is about getting wholesalers to pay them to take the data about where they source their stuff and who they sell it to at what rates so Amazon can replace their step in the chain as well.

"Sounds like they're trying to make a ladies bike"
Wow, that's some 1pth century anti women on bike BS right there.

Ys, for a kid. an adult wants a pretend part because they can't get with the times is pathetic.