I mean, you train your LLM on search engines that inject ads into everything you look up, it’s going to learn to inject ads into everything it vomits out too.

Well gee, that doesn’t sound like a nightmare of a Ponzi scheme at all

Ahh, I remember the first time I heard the intro music to Star Control through my Sound Blaster instead of through my motherboard’s piezo speaker. Like the audio version of The Wizard Of Oz switching to colour.

The Chipmunks Movie, not the live action one but the animated one from the mid-80s. I had nightmares for years about a scene where their hot air balloon gets blown around by a hurricane, which I watched I guess around the same time as Hurricane Hugo.

It’s also very possible that my brain invented the whole thing.

Why not set up a Polymarket bet for how Polymarket is going to handle this? Or whether they face any kind of legal repercussions at all.

Definitely not a waste to keep your skills sharp. You will be needed when the inevitable crash comes and nobody knows how to even troubleshoot, let alone code a fix.

If you enjoy the original Civilization, be sure to try out Freeciv. Basically the original game but with expanded gameplay and updated for compatibility. It’s OpenTTD to Transport Tycoon, if you’re familiar with those games. It also has multiplayer features, and there are sites that run turn-per-day MMO events.

There is obviously something bad that has already been identified by an FOI request that they don’t want to be made public. There’s no other conceivable reason to do this at all, and there is no possible way this can be of any benefit to taxpayers or residents of Ontario at all.

“in four words: No to war.”

Before anyone jumps on the translation error, there are four words in the original. “en cuatro palabras: No a la guerra.”

The same EA that was recently sold to and is now part-owned by an investment firm owned by Jared Kushner and with ties to Donald Trump? Yeah, that’s not getting kernel access to any of my systems.

Many drivers won’t stop unless they’re forced to by a physical barrier, and some still won’t stop. Ever seen those videos from Europe of bus lane bollards that retract when a bus approaches and pop back up again after the bus passes, and the cars wrecked on them? Those are much more solid barriers than these plastic things.

We have those where I live. Crosswalk compliance is decent here, but these don’t get anyone to stop who wasn’t going to stop anyway, and they get stolen all the time.

They won’t last long enough to be damaged by ice before someone drives into them.

In my extensive experience with Canadian GST, I can say with some authority that Americans just fundamentally cannot comprehend a value-added tax, and also refuse to try. Bonkers insane to use an American company for this.

These memes remind me of my high school religion teacher (I went to Catholic school in Canada, “religion” was what you would call Civics) who introduced the political spectrum. He wrote the usual line across the chalkboard with left/center/right labels, and explained what they were. Then, he extended the chalk line to the right, off the board and onto the wall, and continued past the corner onto the next wall. He was about half way to the back of the room before he started writing down names of any of our political leaders at the time. I don’t remember most of the names from 30 years ago, but Conrad Black was on the back wall.

I’ve read the same argument in the other direction: that repeated thermal cycling of electronic components degrades more than keeping them at operating temperature constantly. I’m sure there’s some truth to both arguments and the best approach depends on particular use cases.

As far as needing to power down to reset the state of the hardware and the OS fully, that’s totally unnecessary with linux.

I pretty much only ever shut down if I need to open the case for some reason, or if the battery dies.

There is occasionally an update where things don’t work right without rebooting, but shutting down is pretty much completely unnecessary unless you’re concerned about power consumption.

This used to come up a lot in meta-fedi talk on Mastodon. The general feeling (from my own observation) is that a central authority for user accounts would defeat one of the big advantages of decentralization: that one service going down does not bring the rest of the network down with it. If all logins have to authenticate to a central service, then if that service is offline then nobody can log in anywhere.

There is capability for federated login in ActivityPub, though, it just doesn’t seem to be very widely adopted. Pixelfed has a “sign in with Mastodon” login option, where you can use your login on a Mastodon instance to authenticate to Pixelfed, and then presumably you can use Pixelfed with your Mastodon account instead of having a separate Pixelfed account. My masto instance doesn’t seem to support it so I don’t know what it looks like.

US automakers designed EVs that are really just toys for the wealthy, not a family mover or grocery getter or daily commuter. It’s not just the EVs: I’m in Canada and the market is different but not that different, and I don’t know anyone who drives a US-brand vehicle smaller than an F150. I haven’t set foot in a US dealership in maybe 30 years. US automakers are apparently baffled that they’re not selling luxury second vehicles at a time when affordability has been on the decline for 40+ years.

Meanwhile, in markets with reasonably affordable, well-built, and compact EVs available, they’re selling like crazy.

I believe that was the point. The examples people keep giving for how AI is revolutionary are examples of things we’ve been able to do quite reliably for years already. Hundreds of years, for both of these examples. The first published weather forecast was 165 years ago, and we’ve known how to forecast the sunrise longer than we’ve known how to write things down.