I bought my first Pi in (I think) 2014. It’s one of the things that got me into IT. The low price was an important feature, since I was much less reluctant to experiment and take risks with hardware that cost as much as a family meal. But nearly $400 the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.

I guess I’m lucky in that I got a pi 5 back when they were selling at MSRP. I have a couple Pi 4’s, two 3’s (one I can’t find anymore sadly), my original Pi 1 model B, an also lost Pi zero W that I successfully soldered the GPIO pin headers to, and a Pi 400 I bought on a whim.

When people ask me about experimenting with Linux I usually tell them to either emulate it in virtualBox or buy a Raspberry Pi if they want a bare metal experience. It was specifically because the Pi was cheap and thus low risk if something did go wrong.

Gulliver’s Travels brings up a similar idea all the way back in the 18th century. I’m too lazy to look up names, but one country has a small population of immortals who are legally declared dead at 80 so they can’t monopolize power.

I feel like this is a good worldbuilding exercise to bring up over on /c/worldbuilding. One of my fictional polities had a wealth cap that funded local municipal improvements. But they always seemed to fund lovely parks conveniently close to the taxed person’s neighborhood and never, say, public transit expansions.

Only if it were 100% local.

I love how these exact orange and white barrels seem to be a multiversal constant.

What I miss most about gaming in my youth was the time I could dedicate to a single game. I bought Baldur’s Gate 3 and keep starting new games and quitting before I get out of the starting area because I realize I simply don’t have time for an 80 hour game anymore.

Aeri(th|s)

Disclaimer: I only speak for myself. Blindness does not respect class, creed, or culture, so every blind person will have their own opinions and experiences. In my case AI hasn’t shown much tangible benefit beyond what clever algorithms are already doing, for optical character recognition etc.

Beyond blindness My knee-jerk reaction to AI is strongly negative simply because it’s another locus of concentrated societal power (Who else is there besides Open AI and Anthropic and maybe Groq? IIRC everyone else is just using one of those on the backend. So that’s what, three people, a few dozen if you include the other C-suite folks at each company, pulling a lot of very consequential levers) But that opinion is probably par for the course for your average Lemming.

When looking for videos to listen to in the background I always prioritize “low quality” stuff. They don’t have the perfect mic or studio setup, don’t meticulously edit out background noise, talk in a less polished manner, don’t have a background music track. Prior to the rise of AI it was because such videos were less overstimulating and felt more down to earth, now it’s because I know they’re humans.

Don’t have any recommendations you haven’t mentioned. As a blind person I listen to synthesized speech nearly all day long, so I’m pretty good at catching AI voices. I think the ones trained on IRL people have a “choppy” or “quavering” quality. I’m not an audiophile or computational linguist so I’m sure there’s a term for this I’m missing, but the overall audio has a particular tell to it.

It’s getting harder, though. Now I listen for things like odd prosidy, stuff like odd pauses or inflections or inconsistent pronunciations.

For example, the phrase “So I went to the store” could have a number of inflections that encode info about the ongoing conversation, whether I intend to continue speaking or whether I’m yielding the floor, whether I’m asking a question, indicating surprise, etc. AI is getting better at this but it’s not perfect.

Pronunciation of proper nouns or words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently in different contexts is a good indicator. Just the other day my mom was watching some AI-generated listicle and the voiceover mispronounced the name of a city after correctly pronouncing it every time before.

I just hated my old job (inbound call center agent) so hard that any anxiety about going back to school was overshadowed by relief at not having to talk nonstop 8 hours a day again.

Unfortunately I’m at a bit of a crossroads with my current job (IT) because both Pearson and Cisco make test-taking miserable if you have a disability. My current job isn’t under threat, but I let all my certs lapse because I’m just sick and tired of their nonsense.

I’m going to Gamalon to aid him.

Pfft listen to this young’un with multiple cells over here.

Listen to this hairless bipedal whipper-snapper. Back in MY day we THREW poop at one another. 🐒