No, but on far too many occassions, strange cats have come up, jumped on my lap, and settled in, as if they KNOW I'm allergic to cats!

"But mom... I wanted bigger tits!"

"Shut up, honey, I made sure she could cook. Her dumplings are to die for!"

Can you have makeup sex with a chat bot? Not really the same then, is it?

How much do those mail order bridges cost now? (Asking for a friend!) With my luck, I'd get one of the Temu mail order brides,,,

My cat judges me. AI doesn't. /s

Can I still bring my emotional support bot on the plane with me? She just looks like a sex bot, she's not one, really!

I don't actually use Apple Store all that often. A fair portion of the software I have installed, like LibreOffice and Firefox is just installed via DMG images. It kicks up a window about unrecognized source, but then just works. iOS devices are definitely more locked down, but the Macs are really no different as far as installing software than Windows or Linux.

I imagine the Mac Neo is the real source of their panic. Right now RAM prices are probably saving them from even more losses, but the hegemony is coming to an end. If a credible useful, at least for average users, non-Windows platform using smart device level hardware can sell as well as the Neo has, I'd say Microsoft's reckoning is finally upon them.

At what point in this long and seemingly endless list of fixes to even the most basic usability features in Windows do its users finally admit it is really a shitty and badly maintained operating system. I use Gnome or MacOS, which are streamlined and uncluttered, and then I head over to Windows and it's like looking into the mind of someone with severe ADHD. It's a colossal mess where nothing particular makes sense, there's no coherent approach, everything is slow and inundated with advertising, context menus that worked for decades don't function right or at all, even the simplest tasks just seems to land you in the wrong place.

I suppose under the hood it's still a fairly decent operating system, although tools like Powershell, which can be achingly slow itself, demonstrate that there's a lot of layers of cruft.

I don't play video games, and frankly Office isn't that much better for my needs than LibreOffice, and Outlook is a bloated pile of crap, so I rarely even access the Windows desktop I have at work via RDP, save for two applications I rarely use. Windows is rapidly becoming irrelevant in my world.

They can work, but they have major issues.

1)For at least the first 6 months, if not the first several years, it will take more time and money to teach them than they generate. Why would any company do this?

2)As a hiring manager at company B, I see you apprenticed at company A. I have no idea if that means you're qualified. I can't trust company A to tell me, they're a competitor. Schools stand as a neutral 3rd party telling me that they've completed a set curriculum and should know that much. It's not perfect, but it's a start.

3)Some fields just have a huge amount of up front learning before you can be useful at all. Apprentice plumber? You can run and fetch tools and hold things in place while you watch and learn. Apprentice electrical engineer? You have no idea what inductance is on day one. There's literally nothing you can do. So basically at this point you're hoping the company sets up a school.

The fact that amino acids and other chemicals used by earth based biology can form fairly readily has been known since the Miller-Urey experiment in the 1950s, this isn't news. The problem is there's a big gap between biologically active chemicals and biology itself, specifically a molecule that can replicate, evolve will a surrounding framework of chemistry. We don't yet know if THAT can spontaniously evolve anywhere or needs to very particular conditions that happened to exist on earth after it formed.

I keep hearing things like "my grandmother got so confused, I set her up on Zorin/Mint and she couldn't tell the difference."

The more people just use their PC's to get on websites the less they seem to notice if they use Windows or Linux.

It doesn't matter if it's bad - if China and Russia agree it's bad you have to be for it.

You can never agree with China because they have a totalitarian AI Surveillance Police State there so you must support a totalitarian AI Surveillance Police State here.

If you are against techo-feudalism you must be one of them Putin Lovers.

- The New York Times / Langley, apparently.

I'm amazed to find your comment is an isolated example of reading comprehension and critical thinking.

Many others are 'accepting the premise' and 'entering the frame' of the LA Times weirdos.

Didn't expect that today.

I would say that any kind of substantial level of investment in a jurisdiction is a reasonable indicator of an expectation of a return on investment, and thus confidence in the economic growth of at least some industries in that jurisdiction. I'm not sure why people are trying to hand wave away that kind of an indicator, unless the fact of it creates some problem for some narrative they have bought into, creating a level of cognitive dissonance necessitating peculiar denials.