Downside: Many companies use open-plan offices, which means it’s too busy to concentrate. So everyone wears noise-cancelling headphones in order to be able to work at all.

The only time I actually felt that being present was a benefit was in a company that had one from for every two people.

“Computer, I use Arch btw.”

The holodeck’s exit arch appears in hopes of keeping the user from debating rolling release Linux distros with Ludwig van Beethoven

It’s also a bunch of scripts that automate the operation of said compiler.

Gentoo is not for people who like to compile software; it’s for people who like to watch as software is compiled.

More specifically, “absolute” refers to being above the law or other oversight. An absolute ruler is not bound by the laws that govern everyone else; being able to rule by decree is a consequence of that as there can be no laws that prevent this.

The Marathon AIs weren’t all bad.

Leela meant well but was completely outclassed.

Durandal had been rampant since before the first game and only reached some degree of stability once he stole that Pfhor ship. He was basically designed to be unstable. While he was certainly an asshole with rather loose morals, he also made sure that Leela could warm humanity about the Pfhor and that his S’pht allies got what they wanted. He’s on the verge of being an antihero.

Tycho… Well, we only saw him after the Pfhor rebuilt him and that version of him is pretty clearly a villain.

Thoth was barely conscious until he merged with Durandal. I can’t say much about him. He is possibly involved with altering the timeline after the W’rkncacnter was released so I’d book him as a good guy.

(I am mad at the new Marathon but for different reasons than the AIs.)

You pay five million bucks to the government, presumably to be pocketed by the president. Under the legal concept of l’etat, c’est moi you have therefore substantially benefitted the United States.

Aren’t the rebels the bad guys at that point? You know, with the whole gassing thing? The rebellion against the Galactic Empire doesn’t exist, seeing how the Galactic Empire doesn’t even exist yet.

I did that and what I find interesting is that exactly one MEP replied. Well, his assistant did but that still counts. The way the reply was worded even made clear that someone did read my mail specifically.

I’m not a friend of the BSW but I will acknowledge that their MEP Jan-Peter Warnke is in opposition and responsive (via assistant).

But even if the rest of the bunch was silent, do send those mails. Or send paper mail. Or a fax; we’re taking about German MEPs after all. Either way, make your voice heard.

That’s similar to how I do it, except that I also invert most FPSes.

Basically, my mental model is that I move the camera around. In third-person games with a from-behind perspective, the character’s position is usually a fulcrum that the camera pivots around. So if I want to look up I have to pull the camera down. Hence inverted.

For first-person games I’m less consistent with inverting but I usually do. The camera may not pivot around a point ahead of it but in my head it pivots around a point directly at its front. Some games don’t feel like that to me but most do.

That’s also why I insist on inverting my mouse wheel, by the way – my mental model is not that I send up or down commands to the computer, it’s that I push the document up or down with my finger like I would on a smartphone. The mouse wheel is a touchscreen surrogate. Having the document move up when I push it up feels wrong.

I think major factors in people bitching about the Windows 10 EOL is that a) Windows 10 was explicitly marketed as the final version of Windows and b) Windows 11 is so unappealing that even companies are reluctant to upgrade.

Normally, that wouldn’t be a big problem. We had dud releases before. Windows Vista had few friends due to compatibility issues but was workable. Besides, 7 was launched shortly after Vista’s EOL. Likewise, Windows 8’s absurd UI choices made it deeply unpopular but it was quickly followed by 8.1, which fixed that. And Windows 10 again followed shortly after 8’s EOL (and well before 8.1’s).

Windows 11, however, combines a hard to justify spec hike with a complete absence of appealing new features. The notable new features that are there are raising concerns about data safety. In certain industries (e.g. medical, legal, and finance), Recall/Copilot Vision is seen as dangerous as it might access protected information and is not under the same control that the company has over its document stores. That increases the vector for a data breach that could lead to severe legal and reputational penalties.

Microsoft failed to satisfyingly address these concerns. And there’s not even hope of a new version of Windows releasing a few months after 10’s EOL; Windows 12 hasn’t even been announced yet.

It’s no wonder that companies are now complaining about Windows 10’s support window being too short.

Yeah, and in the 70s they estimated they’d need about twice that to make significant progress in a reasonable timeframe. Fusion research is underfunded – especially when you look at how the USA dump money into places like the NIF, which research inertial confinement fusion.

Inertial confinement fusion is great for developing better thermonuclear weapons but an unlikely candidate for practical power generation. So from that one billion bucks a year, a significant amount is pissed away on weapons research instead of power generation candidates like tokamaks and stellarators.

I’m glad that China is funding fusion research, especially since they’re in a consortium with many Western nations. When they make progress, so do we (and vice versa).

At least the fusion guys are making actual progress and can point to being wildly underfunded – and they predicted this pace of development with respect to funding back in the late 70s.

Meanwhile, the AI guys have all the funding in the world, keep telling about how everything will change in the next few months, actually trigger layoffs with that rhetoric, and deliver very little.

Don’t worry; we’ll find an artist so bland that we’ll get zero points even if we’re the only participant. The audience will fall asleep and wake up a week later with no recollection of the event. The victory will be awarded to Sweden on principle.

A good foam pillow under my head, a bit of my blanket between my knees. Sometimes I think about getting one of those knee pillows but so far I haven’t bothered.

I won’t go back to a down-filled pillow. Those will inevitably stop supporting my head during the night.

As opposed to Mr. Assertive on the right, whose invitations aren’t even read until it’s too late.

I wouldn’t say pure rage… They were certainly high energy but not super focused on being angry. This may in part be due to Fred Durst adding major frat boy vibes.

I have no idea what they’re like these days.

Note that, as far as I can tell, the “Second Kowloon” depicted in the show is a much nicer place than the original Kowloon Walled City was.

I fully agree. LLMs create situations that our laws aren’t prepared for and we can’t reasonably get them into a compliant state on account of how the technology works. We can’t guarantee that an LLM won’t lose coherence to the point of ignoring its rules as the context grows longer. The technology inherently can’t make that kind of guarantee.

We can try to add patches like a rules-based system that scans chats and flags them for manual review if certain terms show up but whether those patches suffice will have to be seen.

Of course most of the tech industry will instead clamor for an exception because “AI” (read: LLMs and image generation) is far too important to let petty rules hold back progress. Why, if we try to enforce those rules, China will inevitably develop Star Trek-level technology within five years and life as we know it will be doomed. Doomed I say! Or something.

They are being commonly used in functions where a human performing the same task would be a mandated reporter. This is a scenario the current regulations weren’t designed for and a future iteration will have to address it. Lawsuits like this one are the first step towards that.

Of course it’s more normie. As more people from more diverse communities join, the average becomes more, well, average.

For instance, not everyone who moved over from Reddit is a communist trans furry cybersecurity expert in a chastity belt – some people even somehow manage to be none of those things.

I think there is room for them and there’s even room for them thinking the original crowd is weird. We need to maintain that “weird” is good, though, and that people can just look away if a topic makes then uncomfortable.

It works with .ml and friends – they can spend all day living their understanding of communism and everyone who doesn’t share that understanding can just block them and move on with their lives.