lengthy prompts to draft

Just use AI to help generate prompts!

That's not what I'm comparing. Based on GP, the price comparison is closer to a single RTX Pro 6000 vs a single Mac Studio. Alternatively, a cluster of 4-5 Mac Studios vs 4-5 RTX Pro 6000's. Can you point to some numbers on those? The Mac has the edge on memory, but I'm quite confident the RTX has a huge lead on GPU performance (and the memory is no slouch - just less of it per dollar).

The trick has been around since industrial spies noticed the first liar got away with it.

I wonder if stock-holders can successfully sue for lying about the cause of a sales slump?

Make the AI bubble pop already. I'll stop wanking off for a year if you pop it, I swear on my rosie palm.

There is a nicotine source that isn't at all age locked. I guess the teens will move on to these "cigarettes" you hear about from time to time.

They even come in cool Menthol.

The laws are a joke by people who apparently flunked "Hello World".

They demand a mechanism, but don't even offer guidance on what mechanism it should be. You can technically comply while having no 2 Linux installs following the same API, making it effectively useless.

A better approach would be a purely optional userspace package (perhaps call it "Californication") that returns 1 dword with the age information encoded in it. Each person installing it gets to decide what that encoding will be.

Yes, it returned 0x0BADF00D, that's the code for 18+.

Someone else might decide 0x0B00B1E5 means 18+.

Some early adopters of "Here's a complaint one, pretty please use it" included small operations like PGP. Others were small companies then, later to become large.

Not too long after, there was the whole flap around DeCSS for DVDs. The medium itself is nearly dead now, but it was individual efforts that rendered region coding largely a joke. The Chinese vendors whose DVD players didn't give a damn about region codes came second.

Bell Labs invented the transistor because the low hanging fruit of vacuum tubes had dried up. Some low hanging fruit is always dried up. That never stopped progress.

While true, the pace of the Next Big Thing is not necessarily constant.

into place to protect their oligopoly. Some blame it on "socialism" when it's really crony capitalism.

I can buy alcohol because I don't live in Saudi Arabia. I can have an OS that doesn't know or care how old I am because I don't live in California. That law literally doesn't apply to me. If I make a distro where I am, why should I bother with age verification at all? It's none of my business if a friend of a friend or a complete stranger decides to download it and install it on a machine in California. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

You can get fired at the drop of a hat for no reason at all. Bosses blow their top over being 1 minute late. Fill out these forms you just filled out last week and again online before you can see the doctor. IRS knows exactly what you made and what you paid in witholding, and what you owe but YOU need to compute it, better not be wrong! Don't be late! Rent and mortgage take up an ever increasing portion of your monthly income (if any). 23 calls a day, mostly scams. You have health insurance even though it was damned expensive, but somehow you still owe a heap of money you don't have after a single visit to the ER.

Meanwhile, you're getting badgered about your "credit score". If you let it get bad everything gets more expensive and it gets harder to get a job (for some reason).

Yeah, you're less likely to actually die today than years ago, but your place in life is far more precarious than it was even 20 years ago. More things demand your attention.

Maybe the legal experts could sit down and work out how to modify licenses (including the GPL/LGPL) to be for non-commercial use only? As long as an entity wasn't making money using FOSS, it could use it just like now. Individuals and non-commercial projects wouldn't be affected. But if you're a business making money using FOSS? Not without paying for it you're not. Yes, this would go against the free-software principles. But principles don't pay the bills every month, and none of these changes would prevent anyone from staying with the existing licenses if they wanted to.

The first thing I think of as a problem would be a company setting up a separate entity that wouldn't make money, just make services available to the company using FOSS to get around the fees. The trick to preventing this would be to phrase the terms so that that entity truly had to pay it's own bills without having the company using it's services pay anything either directly or indirectly. Not even by doing things like providing hosting "free". I'd have to sit down with a bunch of rules lawyers and game out all the ways to funnel money into that entity and how to block them, but what's life without a little challenge?

Zork the Cockroach: "What the fuck is 'rick-rolling'?"

Don't care. If your shit shows me ads, it's not getting into my kitchen. Note to self: Don't buy appliances from Samsung anymore.

Yes, I am vocal in how much I hate ads. I believe the CEOs of advertising companies should get one hit with a stick for every time their ad bothered someone even in the slightest.

Exactly what I'm saying.

The fact that users and enterprise customers are not demanding better software from Microsoft with the same fervor their ancestors demanded that the witch be burnt speaks volumes.

And I'm specifically talking about operating systems here. Software can crash for all I care. I'm fine software quality being all over the place, the market can sort that out. But operating systems are natural monopolies and the foundation for everything else. We should not accept shoddy quality there.