Microsoft’s mission isn’t to improve the public good. Microsoft’s mission is wealth extraction for its shareholders.

Windows is worse for you as an individual consumer. But I would argue Windows is a better product for advertisers and other interests that go beyond you. Those interests are at odds with your interests. You need to look at the bigger picture.

Instead of regulating people, how about we regulate big tech and their predatory business practices instead.

It’s not the cameras that are tracking you, it’s the machine vision that reads licence plates, and that has not been around longer than you’ve been alive.

All these loops can detect is if a massive chunk of metal moves over them, no PII. Knowing how many cars use a road is critical in knowing if a road is congested or not, and that helps make roads better for everyone. It’s not part of the surveillance machine. This kind of sensor is no more nefarious than the 100 year old sensor in your toilet that stops filling the tank when it is full.

Take your tinfoil hat off.

If nobody wanted them, including you, then you have your answer, no? Or maybe you are undecided? It sounds like you can’t decide if you want to keep them or not. Nobody here can make that decision for you.

Personally I don’t think an art project or a donation amounts to much more than avoiding the question of whether you want to keep them or not.

LLMs have no opinions. They are merely mathematical models that predict how an average person (mostly Internet people) might respond plus a little bit of invisible priming baked in to steer the behaviour a little (which is also easy to change yourself).

A lot of these chatbots, notoriously chatgpt, are heavily primed to pander to the user.

Nothing is stopping programmers from inventing and using new words. Getting people to use those words is another matter. You are hand waving the ability for programmers to dictate to non-programmers how language is used, but I think that hand waving also hand waves the idea of language to begin with. So I don’t think any answer you get will be meaningful.

Not really. You can get manual pumps for PEX A which are about the same price as a tile cutter… They are fine. You only need those 500$ power tool expanders if you were doing plumbing all day every day.

Depending on where you are in the world, and how much of this is coming out of pocket, this is either really good or pretty bad.

The left-right linear political spectrum is a simplified fiction. I think it is a waste of time to try to fit people on this spectrum.

If my laptop is offline can I just not use it because it can’t confirm my id?

Yes. The powers at be will stop at nothing to take more, and more, and more power away from you. This is human nature.

I think it is safe to say that OP’s question was lay speak for “what is the mean time to get to a result”. Other than that I don’t think you actually addressed the question.

Let me try to get it started:

Randomly generating music might be akin to password cracking. Cracking short or simple passwords can be very fast, while cracking long or complex passwords can be very long. The rate of password guessing also affects the time to get a result.

To calculate an answer, we need the following information:

• Guessing speed (how fast is each “song” generated and checked?)
• Minimum “song” length that needs to be generated
• Complexity of “song”: how many instruments (“voices”), resolution (are whole notes only ok, or do we need. Half or quarter notes?)
• Settle on some subjective definition of “song”. Is S.O.S. in morse code a “song”

You might be able to take a genre of music, and decompose the songs within to get some answers… I don’t have the time for that. Anyone want to take a stab at estimating the calculation?

Do nothing about school shootings. Destroy hobbies and manufacturing instead. America is rotting from the inside.

I’d rather these jobs be automated than the ones AI is gunning for.

Did they haul out a nativity scene? Go to church? No? Then it was a cultural celebration, not a religious one. Nothing hypocritical about that.

Might be a good time to remember that Christmas has adopted many pagan traditions.

You are both right. Armored vehicles still serve a function, but I think it is fair to say that that function has diminished or at least changed significantly.

You would be correct for a switch only, but not a router (serving multiple VLANS and/or hosts via a trunk port connected to a single switch or WAP). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trunking

Star Field is a great example of a game that has amazing, immersive visuals, but the crappiest gameplay imaginable. All style, no substance. In the end it makes for an overall still crappy experience.

I can’t think of a more fitting title to showcase this AI tech.

What are the odds it’s self sabotage in an attempt to force the ship to leave.

How is the average person going to know that? If Joe blow can’t easily get to the distro they “should be using”, Linux ain’t happening for most people.

It all makes sense if we remember that the garden variety AI we have today (ChatGPT, etc) are nothing more than fancy models that predict which words typically appear one after the other in books and reddit posts.