The process is broken. I just voted in the Texas primary, which is the only election that matters here. And the Republican primary is the only primary that matters, so I vote in that regardless of my personal alignment. It ran over 100 races. Yes really. For the important races, there were a handful of choices, which I researched in advanced. Invariably the incumbent was polling overwhelmingly, most of the challengers were even more extreme, and maybe one with no hope of success seemed like a reasonable person. Then there were dozens and dozens of unopposed judges (why do we vote judges anyway?). It's completely rigged from before the start. The only reasonable nonbinding resolution was for term limits, which I expect leadership will promptly ignore.

Teamspeak is attractive because you don't need to log into an official server. It still can function on an IRC-type model where anyone can run a private server and anyone else can log in directly without touching an official Teamspeak login.

The problem with studying drugs like these is that the effects are so profound that there's no way to achieve a proper double blind trial. It looks like they went through the motions but it would be staggeringly obvious to anyone in the room whether DMT or placebo was given.

I'm in the same boat with the same drives. I wish I had bought a couple more about a year ago. The only good thing this shortage has been good for is making it worthwhile to sell a bunch of old "too small to be useful' drives on eBay.

That will fly in the Southern US. It's right around average for my city actually. However, 70k is poverty wages in NYC.

I write technical reports for a living. I am very careful how I use the new tools, since AI language and formatting is easy to identify. It would erode trust in my work if it appeared a computer wrote it.

That said, I have found it very useful in other areas. It's good for playing "find the thing" in long documents when a straight text search might not cover all key words I'm potentially looking for. It's also excellent for recipes, especially since recipe websites became hot garbage in the last 15 years. Want a recipe for varenyky (Ukrainian dumplings) which might be served in a high end restaurant in Kyiv? Browsing recipes online would be slog (people are generally sharing home cook level recipes) but it's trivial for the generative ai.

A bad actor doesn't have to be competent at troublemaking to be dangerous. In addition, Russian electronic warfare systems are known to be generally decent unfortunately.

The people who watch sports will pay. My next door neighbor pays over $300 for their Internet, TV, and "landline" phone package. I have fiber through a local company but they don't offer TV; the only choices for sports fans are Comcast and ATT. ATT dragged their feet the longest in upgrading out neighborhood to fiber, so they have very low uptake.

Once we are at the point when there is plenty of compute to generate 4k (or VR equivalent) video or interactive content based on a user's unstructured input, what else is there? If Moore's law becomes dead soon does it matter?

With the state of gaming and overall software compatibility on Linux today, I would expect less demand for a close clone of any Windows version.

This is a problem in many industries- a newcomer thinks they understand it all and have identified a revolutionary new thing. It's an arrogance that they think they are better than all the experts who have spent decades working on the problem. Wind power generation is a very good example, every week there is a new "genius" pitching vertical axis turbines, a wall of small turbines, or even kites. The industry has settled on horizontal axis, 3-blade machines for good reasons, and companies across the world have found the same solution. Because it's the best. The only admiration I have for these "geniuses" is how they manage to get VC funding straight out of university for their dead-end ideas.

Each life has to be valued the same. Once you start saying that older people's lives are worth less, the next logical step is to say that less educated lives are worth less, handicapped people count as a fraction, and people with severe mental handicaps have negative value. That ain't right. The only way to measure the value of a human life is to treat all the same.

Unlimited corporate and billionaire money going to re-election funds is a significant factor as well. The ultra wealthy can avoid paying any taxes at all by borrowing money against their stock holdings until they die; the loan is then settled without much taxation on the heirs.

These people are all about balancing the budget until they get in charge, then it's just more spending on what THEY want. Same story with states rights / local authority.

Those older lines have to go somewhere. Often a Chinese company will buy them up and keep turning out chips on the older larger process.