If a purchase of a digital product looks like a sale, it is a sale,

Its how most of the western world sees it, and with natural-lifetime warranties for fitness of purpose, Its highly likely that they legally are supposed to refund purchases of these older products if they render them unfit for purpose.

The US are special snowflakes however and seem to have a different way of doing things however. But don't be suriprised of the europeans or australians get diabolical on microsofts ass if they try and impose this in the EU or Australia.

Being that its a mac, Apples Pages and Numbers apps are surprisingly functional software and I havent found many Doc or XLS files it cant open and work with.

Obv not going to be great for folks who use the more powerful features of office. But I *believe* they are free.

And yeah Libreoffice is reasonably functional too, even if it does feel a little arcane at times.

The problem with better DNA error checking is you risk choking off evolutions necessary source of entropy, and if that life can't evolve, it wont do well protecting against OTHER threats.

The conclusion would be that while too much radiation precludes evolution, (as it requires too heavy "error checking"), too little radiation also precludes evolution (no errors means no changes) and therefore there has to be a 'just the right amount', making that yet another constraint , in this case magnetic, on what sort of environment qualifies as the "goldilocks zone" for life.

Most of those complaints are from people too lazy or too stubborn to just type in the word into google and see what comes out. Worse, there is also a variant of people who say "I dont know what is", in a transparently bizzare attempt at trying to sound knowleagable, by feigning ignorance.

Don't this just make them chase never-ending profit to the detriment of all?

Anthropic where always a for-profit company, meaning that chasing a profit is a fiduciary legal requirement.

Tbh, of all the AI bro companies, Anthropic are the least obnoxious, and I do wonder how their stance against weaponization survives when board is stacked with venture capitalists instead of TESCRAL doomers.

Mindyou Nvidia may well be skewing young with its headcount. Prior to the AI boom NVIDIA had a very generous vested share program for its engineers, and suffered a rather unique problem when the AI boom shot their shares through the stratosphere when suddenly all their senior engineers where sitting on, in some cases, upwards of 20 million USD worth of shares each. And like normal people instead of wall street suits, they pretty much collectively said "Well, fuck this working shit" and cashed their chips and retired with their millions, gutting their ranks of senior engineers.

We probably would do well to shake the conception that Intelligence agencies are all-seeing/all-knowing fountains of competence. In reality they are filled with paranoid people of various levels of competence with a whole range of dispositions, including occasionally criminal.Intelligence agencies need to be a little criminal at times to get the job done. The idea that one of them might have been doing shady shit, in an agency that specializes in shady shit shouldn't surprise anyone. Hell, it was probably why they hired him.

Honestly, its almost a good thing.

A friend recently asked me to look into their kids laptop who had gotten around some age restriction stuff, and I was mystified. I asked the kid how they did it, and they laid out all the registry keys and the line of reasoning they followed to find them, and all I could think was this 10yo kid was as good a security professional as I am (he's not, but well, it was absolutely impressive work. ). I see this as a positive. The world of computers I grew in involved 10yos teaching themselves assembly to make C64 and Amstrad (I'm australian, so we got the same computers the UK folks did. BBCs, Sinclairs, and eventually C64s and Amstrads. Tandys where esoteric american imports) games. We started with basic, supplemented it with assembly we learned from library books and magazines (no internet in the 1980s!) and taught each other at school, then when we got to highschool and the fancy new IBMs we then learned Turbo pascal and got hooked on the possibilities. 40 years later I'm still at it.

But kids now, its internet slop, fortnight, and computers that dont require you to learn to LOAD "*",8,1 and tempt you with a manual promising infinite games if you learn to code.

But kids are resourceful, and if hacking their way around idiot-boomer designed age locks force them to actually learn how their computers work, then great.

I told my friend to download for their kid a copy of the Godot game engine, and look up the GDQuest lessons, because clearly this kids got a future, if he can be inspired to chase it.

Also, fuck AI, let kids learn.

I saw a pretty funny video on youtube (something like "creating the worst AI music") and they are just pumping more and more absurd prompts into it, and getting some pretty funny (and occasionally disturbing) results

He could easily have been a billionare with Jobs. Jobs wanted him by his side the whole way, but Woz is built different. He doesn't really care about doing the billionare thing , he made enough from his apple shares that he'll never want for anything. Hell, I doubt apple would even let him go broke, he was the left hand of their god-king Jobs.

He just wants to do cool tech and make the world around him better.

I dont expect that 2025 ruling to last forever. Other than flying in the face of a couple of hundred years of precedent it effectively leaves the supreme court as the only court able to rule against the government in countless cases reducing lower courts to only being able to say 'This unconstitutional law is bad but we can only block it for the person who made the suit" which in turn has absolutely flooded the lower courts with backlogged cases.

Needless to say, outside of a badly corrupted supreme court, pretty much every judge below that court thinks the ruling is bullshit.

Sure, you can use them for that.

But just go click on Kalshi's homepage and tell me what you see. Its sports betting.

So while sure you can bet.... er I mean trade... on market outcomes, you can also bet on sports. How is this different to what DraftKing or BetUS or whatever do?

These are gambling websites walking around in the mask of financial instruments.

And if the difference is the people betting have a stake in the outcome beyond that any other gambler would have, well we have a term for that, and that term is "rigged".

Again, your asserting something in the absense of a justification. Then pointing back at it to justify it. Its tautological.

More to the point, your making the descartian fallacy by assuming that body and mind are separate things. The human consciousness is not necessarily some aetheric essence that sits on top of the brain, its perfectly capable of being a *state* of the brain. Translated to computer, consciousness COULD be simply a specific arangement of software states. Trying to separate it out and say its something different without asserting why is fallicious.

Instead of taking this into account and putting more effort into single player games that were actually making them more money than they expected, they chased the fleeting extractor shooter market (which anyone could tell them is severely limited because its player base have to be cool with the risk of losing everything every time they play... that's a pretty acquired taste eh) on the premise that they might catch the next fortnite.

Theres always a flavor of the month. What the kids now call Boomer shooters, Doom, Quake, etc, where that flavor for years, Team shooters, ie counterstrike where that flavor for the longest time. Team shooters with classes, ie Team Fortress and later Overwatch, that was popular for a while. Battle Royale, ie Fortnite and PUBG , yeah that was huge. Now its Extraction shooters. These genres have *always* had the money because the finance dudes notice a certain game is making silly money and decide they want in. Meanwhile the lesser well known but still loved genres (I'm a big fan of survival games) just keep on keeping on getting ignored by the AAAs and.... I'm OK with that. Too much potential for micro-transaction hell, so the longer they fail to notice the genre, the happier I am.

A proper government or a government who pays the gangs/warlords to stay out of their city?

Its Kenya. There are no warlords, and gangs are kept out the same way they are in any western country, by the police arresting them.

What country is stable without being run by a white man? For that matter, which stable one is run by a white man?

Well, for one theres Kenya.