we didn’t ‘sell’ the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity

Jesus. It doesn't matter whether you sold it or auctioned it. It doesn't matter if it was for charity. What matters is that IT WAS A ONE-OF-A-KIND PROTOTYPE THAT DIDN'T BELONG TO YOU AND YOU AGREED TO RETURN IT (and the RTX3090 they sent with it), and you didn't do what you promised.

Everything wrong with LTT is summed up in this response. Instead of going to the company's CEO and composing a response on behalf of the company, we get a bunch of over-personalized complaints about hurt feelings and imperfection, fired off only 3 hours after the GN video, that make it 100% clear this is all about Linus' personality rather than a dispassionate review of the facts.

Err...

Users will keep their exisiting (sic) email addresses on this service, and would get it free for the first year. After that, there will be options of paying for a service, or an ad-based free service after that.

So, what's the problem, exactly? Just take the ad-based free service. Gmail, Yahoo, etc. are ad-based free services too. Nobody is forcing them to change anything.

I'm just stunned that anybody is making an effort, honestly. As an older tech nerd with kids and adulting and all this crap, I can't imagine the kind of impact it must have on people's time and attention to run a site like this.

Of all the recent spin-ups of reddit alternatives, I'm honestly more excited for beehaw than anything else. Having a consistent vision and concept of operations seems to be the only way to prevent media from sliding with the rightward-shifting Overton window. Every other social media site taught us that if you do nothing, your site will turn into an alt-right hellhole.

Don't worry, in a few years, they'll just use an AI trained on copyrighted music to write an "original" score, declaring the training inputs to be "fair use" and the output to be "transformative", and all those pesky concerns about licensing will go away.

As well as a fair whack of cash.

On a pile of advertising money

TIL you can turn off Youtube history. Done!

Everything has to be cooled, it's a question of efficiency. Directly exchanging the heat into cold water is arguably better than expending fossil fuels to generate electricity to pump the heat out of your servers and into the atmosphere. You get multiple losses with current technology: fossil fuel efficiency losses, electric line losses, air conditioning efficiency losses. And the additional electrical generation dumps more CO2.

I think what distinguishes Internet service provision from all the other "platform" aspects of the Internet is that Internet service has become a kind of baseline utility. Everything depends on it: your smart home devices, your security system, Point of Sale systems, etc. You can't search for employment without it, your kids can't attend remote school, etc.

We all understand that when someone buys advertising space in a newspaper, they are forming a contract with that newspaper, and the paper has to be a willing participant. But that's not really how we think of utilities. I think we'd all be pretty unhappy if the electric company refused service to a facility, or if the water company refused to hook somebody up to the water supply, or the fire department refused to put out a fire, due to the property user's political speech. Even if we deeply disagreed with that speech.

I think ISPs are a lot more like utilities, and a lot less like newspapers. If it's that important, then write a law explaining exactly how and when ISPs are intervene by removing or refusing service in these situations, and defend the law in court. But don't leave it up to ISP terms of service.

the enemy is more defined, namely rich people

Well, rich northerners. That's a very important distinction. Southern gentlemen -- that is, Confederates -- are excluded.

Richmond was the capital of the confederacy, so it's important to point out that they were north of Richmond particularly.

To cope with the pain, they can tend to “kick down” on other groups, like obese people,

It's a very specific appeal to a right-wing stereotype from the Reagan era: the urban "welfare queen", refusing to labor, getting fat off welfare while country "working poor" starve.

Of course, the reality is the opposite: per capita, rural folk get larger government disbursements in the form of welfare and disability than city dwellers.

The execrable stereotype was invented to turn the poor on each other. The country, full of uneducated hicks, the cities full of welfare cheats getting fat off your tax dollars. And while the proles fight each other, the fat cats steal wages and get tax breaks.

I suppose it's possible that Mr. Anthony is so far down the rabbit hole, having been raised with these ideas as "common sense truths", that he doesn't even realize he's been fed a partisan line and he's just repeating it like a good soldier.

Two things:

1. Many of these LLMs -- perhaps all of them -- have been trained on datasets that include books that were absolutely NOT released into the public domain.

2. Ethically, we would ask any author who parrots the work of others to provide citations to original references. That rarely happens with AI language models, and if they do provide citations, they often do it wrong.

It's a month after the incident and the mother participated in the interview, so I'm guessing she pulled through.

But, jeez. Did they even attempt to signal her to pull over? Really wondering what the dashcam is gonna show.

There are about a zillion ways it could prove to be impractical. Apatite is a crystal, and presumably this lead apatite is also a crystal. We also don't know if it can be deposited in a useful thickness; the samples tested so far were created by gas deposition on glass. Can it be built up to a useful thickness, and maintain its superconducting properties? All unknown.

But, real progress always comes in small steps. It's exceedingly rare for any discovery to result in a useful product immediately.

If you listen to tech podcasts, you might learn what a logical "or" means.

Next time, suggest they have a rehearsal with a full tech shakedown

How many social media services need to circle the drain that is the alt-right hate speech/extremism pipeline before we all admit that, maybe, there are a lot of toxic people out there who WANT that to happen, and we might be happier if we just told them up front that they are not welcome?

Honestly, I have no problem whatsoever. If Beehaw is not for me, I'll find someplace new. And the alt-right folks can go set up their own Fediverse node if they want. Good luck to 'em.

FYI, Linus Tech Tips got one.

Is this news? Singapore is a city of 6 million on an island that is only 45km across at its widest point.

let’s start with cutting all federal funding in the country that goes to ANY religious organization, church, school, hospital, etc

Why stop there? Tax exemption is a subsidy, and offering tax exemptions on purely religious grounds is clearly "law respecting the establishment of religion".

Well, watch Last Week Tonight's expose' on the mobile home industry.

These homes are built to shitty, even dangerous, standards. Or no standards at all.

As teens take to sidewalks...

As teens take to malls...

As teens take to wilderness trails...

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, we live in a society that threatens to take kids away from their parents for letting them walk to the post office.

I find myself of two minds on this.

The theory seems almost bizarre on its face -- if smarter parents with big-brained babies were less likely to survive reproduction, natural selection would automatically select for smaller heads. Because, you know, the mothers of big-brained babies would die during childbirth more frequently, which (by definition) means reduced fitness for reproduction. It then comes down to whether small headedness or adult intelligence is the larger predictor of successful adult reproduction, I guess.

It's always a bit of a "just so" story to try and reason out the precise mechanisms of long term statistical natural selection that is influenced by MANY factors, but this one seems a bit more ridiculous than most.

But also, "the obstetrical dilemma leads to a widespread notion of the female body as inescapably defective"... seems like a silly takeaway. There may be ample scientific problems with the obstetrical dilemma, but worrying about the message it sends is a moral position, not a scientific one. Acknowledging that certain activities -- such as pregnancy and birth -- carry statistical medical risk is not an accusation that anyone is "inescapably defective". That's an extremist, normative interpretation of the medical facts.

If a doctor tells somebody, "you have a medical condition that is statistically likely to increase risk of X", that's NOT telling somebody that they are "defective". There is no active creator who "made" a person, there was no decision made to produce an inferior product, there is no fumble-fingered worker who screwed up. The recombinative genetic lottery is what it is, and a plain statement of the facts is not a value judgement.

There's also a strong argument that the Indiana licensing board that censured Dr. Bernard were activists who were bowing to public pressure. Many external authorities who reviewed Dr. Bernard's case do not believe that she committed any unethical disclosure.

https://www.statnews.com/2023/06/01/caitlin-bernard-indiana-abortion-10-year-old-advocacy/

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/03/1179941247/abortion-caitlin-bernard-indiana-doctor-medical-board

The thing about Rossman is that yes, he echoes some right-wing talking points. Unlike most of us, he actually is a small business owner who was been repeatedly harassed and mishandled by regional authorities in New York city.

He's a soldier on the front lines of the over-regulation and regulatory capture crisis. And I think folks on the right and left can agree that big companies working hand-in-hand with government to suppress new business hurts poor people. Whether he's talking about John Deere's or Apple's anti-repair stance, Amazon's over-reach when banning accounts for frivolous reasons, or New York's labyrinthine rules, he's really talking about the same fundamental problem: big organizations using rules and regulations to hurt poor folks.

With that said, I think his opinions on those matters are pretty narrowly confined to the details of running a business. I've watched quite a few of his YT videos and I never see him going "out of his lane" to express opinions on broader social trends. He's not opining on abortion or trans people or any of the other cultural touchstones on the right. He's no Qanon nutjob.

With that said, he's not a general interest tech presenter, and he probably doesn't have much to offer the OP. He's pretty narrowly focused on repair and government/corporate abuse.

Dumb question, but have you explored recumbent bikes, trikes, electric bikes, motorcycles?

If you enjoy the great outdoors, and the bicycle was a mechanism to get out there, there are many options for continued enjoyment.

Chip Wilson admitted that he chose the name Lululemon because he thought it would sound exotic and Western to Asian customers, and because he thought it was funny to hear Japanese people pronounce it.

When Wilson was CEO, he made comments in 2005 saying that it was funny that Japanese people couldn't pronounce the "L" in Lululemon.

"It's funny to watch them try and say it," he told Canada's National Post Business Magazine when asked about the Japanese pronunciation of his company's name.

Wilson denies saying it, according to the New York Times.

source

Oh good, now when I search I'll have to wade through the effluent of AI-produced pablum to find an actual human journalism product.

And you've got KOTOR and Pillars of Eternity and others that are clearly D&D derivatives, but solve the problem handily with a "stash" whose contents are never accessible in combat.

I have never understood the fascination with inventory management. I just want to find stuff, and use that stuff later on. If I wanted something as boring as my actual job, I'd just do my actual job and get paid for it instead of buying a game.

It's a little early to pronounce longevity on Framework. They could be great, the pieces are there for them to be great, but the whole enterprise could fail and leave you with an upgradeable/fixable laptop with no upgrades or parts.

I will never not upvote this.

Short version:

• Police chief was accused of sexual impropriety, and the newspaper was investigating.

• A prominent local restaurant owner got caught in a DUI and the newspaper got a tip and investigated. On investigation, they decided the story was not newsworthy.

• Police raided the newspaper claiming that the DUI tip was the result of illegal computer hacking, and that they had to confiscate the computers to analyze for evidence of hacking.

• The judge who signed the search warrant also had a history of DUI.

• Critics believe that the police used this hacking claim as a thinly veiled excuse to cripple the newspaper and check to see what they really had on the chief.

• Critics have also suggested that the police themselves may have leaked the information to set up the flimsy excuse for the search.

Season 29... of a video game?

I'm kind of glad I don't play in whatever ecosystem that is. It sounds exhausting.

And yet, we know that the work is mechanically derivative.

Capcom has absolute authority to price its games however they see fit.

If they make choices that put them out of business, that's on them.

ffmpeg itself is FOSS

"Plagiarizing" 😜

But they couldn't find a 3090 to test it with! Not even the 3090 that the company sent with the cooling block. Cough.

"Who could possibly be responsible for the catastrophic loss of value of one of the Internet's most beloved brands? Could it be me, the owner, and the decisions I've made?"

"No. The Jews are responsible."

I love Laporte's personality, although he's not strong technically. I feel like 90% of schtick on TechTV was to act like a confused grandpa while others did the explaining.

But it's a pretty good trick for running a balanced, and not overly technical, video stream.

This is like dunking on DeviantArt because it has artists who make cheesecake pictures of ladies. I'm not saying it's something I personally enjoy, but who am I to tell others what art they should enjoy?