Garbage regulations like IP create these behemoths. If you want freedom, stop regulating monopolies into existence.

Statism creates billionaires.

That parts gonna happen anyway.

Even if battery energy density started getting close to that of liquid hydrocarbons, and thats a looong way off still, youd still need more batteries than you would fuel because batteries dont get lighter as they discharge like burned fuel does, rocket equation stuff. A 747 carries ~150k kilograms of fuel, if that didnt burn off thats an extra 37k kg the first quarter of the flight, an extra 75k kg the first half of the flight and so on...

Battery planes may never make widespread sense, if we ever start generating enough carbon free energy cheaply enough and even if all ground transport goes battery electric or whatever, at some point it might still be worth it to just make carbon neutral jet fuel with air fuel synthesis. That seems closer on the horizon than the battery tech needed for large planes to be feasible, hard to beat jet turbines for that application.

You'll end up with the worst employee you've ever had. A narcissist who sounds completely compelling but is completely wrong, or just wrong enough that it sounds right, but the load calculation is off by a small factor, no one else catches it and the bridge fails under a certain condition, someone dies.

There's no intelligence when it's just mindlessly trying to slot the right word in the next position. I realize specialized AIs are starting to have some particular skills, but it still seems so untrustworthy that you still need intensive design reviews by senior engineers, assuming the AI engineer is an idiot and needs double checking at every turn.

A steam gift card can be laundered entirely within the steam economy tho, a dunkin gift card doesnt let you buy and resell special donut skins.

Oh thats already happening. https://www.reddit.com/r/simps...

It's also the duty of every country to warn their citizens against the spying activities of adversaries. You should both be spying AND protecting against the spying of others.

It's nice that they are making an official statement to drive the point home though.

LinkedIn is basically a platform for asset recruitment by foreign state intelligence services, job fraud scammers, and companies keeping job listings open that they're not actually hiring for to make them look better to investors.

The alerts are so much worse too like "Hey, looks like you slept like shit, should probably take it easy today." thanks google but not really up to either of us. Already knew that and fitbit was a lot gentler about it...

Not sure if the windows version will have the same issue. But I have a bought and paid-for copy of office 2019. On a newer laptop I installed LibreOffice. My main worry is Word formatting errors or differences that LibreOffice can make that you don't know about until you open them in MS office. It becomes less of an issue as time goes on, as mostly these days I make Word Files that get turned into PDFs before anyone sees them.

I've had great luck not subscribing to any software as a service except Adobe Creative Cloud, which I use a lot. Would like to keep it to just that one and no others.

I can't understand the thought process behind them making everything public by default. Why on earth would anyone want personal financial transactions public?

That's the first setting I changed when I installed the app. I don't use it much, but some people prefer to be paid that way.

I just bought a used, reconditioned Surface Pro 7 for under $400 to have something small for international travel. It has 16 GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. This is more capacity than the base model of the Surface Pro 12, and it was released in 2021. If you don't need the very latest processor, there are a lot of good options on Amazon and Ebay for reconditioned units at budget prices. The only caveat is that the batteries are extremely difficult to replace, so they have a finite lifetime. They could be so much longer lasting if the battery could be accessed purely by miniature fasteners rather than having to un-glue the display and various other components with specialized tools, risking destruction of the unit at every step. Most people aren't going to try this. I believe it's possible to engineer for thin and light without compromising that much on repairability. I'm happy to live with a few extra ounces or an extra ten to thirty thousands of device thickness if it means I can swap the battery out.

A friend had a perfectly good, almost unused surface book 3 with dead batteries (it has two, one in the detachable screen / tablet and one in the base with the keyboard) and after looking up the replacement procedure I decided there was no way I was not going to fuck it up, and that it wasn't worth the trouble. We ended up sending it to the recycler and I kept the docking station and charger to use with my reconditioned Surface Pro. Planned obsolescence strikes again.

Other than the repairability issues, they are neat devices, well designed, and run full windows for those of us who need it. Probably the best hardware offering MS has ever churned out.

I know everybody turns off any new features immediately upon release, but with the new(ish) agent the way some of the various bits and pieces have come together has been pretty great.

Credits are global now, so youre watching something "why does he look familiar?", you click down to the actor now it shows you their whole filmography, you can watchlist stuff right there, and even a little category 'Youve seen them in' with anything with them in any of your libraries youve watched by recent. Not just other shows if youre watching a show or only other movies if youre watching movies. And since you can just search and browse through anything/anyone now, its actually replaced IMDB for me just because its sooo much cleaner. https://watch.plex.tv/person/n... vs https://www.imdb.com/name/nm00...

And speaking of the watchlist, thats universal now, you can search and add stuff you dont have, from any service, even stuff thats not on any service, and the watchlist can interface directly with the *arrs, so youre looking up that guy from that thing, watchlist another of his movies, radarr goes and does its thing. You can add upcoming stuff too and they even have trailers now, so i dont have to go to Youtube anymore cuz it doesnt make me wade through 20 fake AI trailers before finding the one on the actual studios channel and then it doesnt autoplay some assholes reaction or breakdown of the trailer i just watched right after.

AND if your users have their watchlists public, you can monitor theirs too, so friends and family can just watchlist stuff you dont have without leaving the plex app, so you dont need to try to convince them to use a third party app like Omni to request stuff.

All the other social features still suck tho, their own lack of features makes you abuse the rating system as a filter for other things instead of as a rating system, but replacing IMDB and youtube for at least my purposes has been pretty nice. Some of my users dont have their watchlists public either so i still have a facebook group chat for requests cuz who wants to use some third party app for requests. .

$750 is ridiculous tho, i paid $100 during a 50% off sale a couple of black fridays ago, but with all my collections and playlists and everything and especially all my users switching to Jellyfin wouldnt be as simple as everyone pretends, but if in the future they roll out Plex2 to loophole my lifetime or try to charge my users individually ill figure it out.

No one ever mentions that this is an option. The tech media just screams, "Your computer will be useless after they stop supporting Win10!" For a lot of people, sure, I wouldn't recommend using legacy OSs. For a small group of us, it's perfect. Once I got a substantial number of updates, I disabled automatic updates via the policy editor, before it started installing nags to upgrade to Win11 and trying to trick you into it. If it ain't broke...