The internet is such a strange place

Neat! I’ll probably try it out. Like it or not, short form video is really popular now, so this feels like a good thing to grow Pixelfed and the fediverse

I don’t get it. Can you explain?

The SS Edmund Fitzgerald and the brave men who died on board

I like the Green Party’s eco-socialism, but their anti-vaccine lunacy and inability to do anything electorally beyond run a presidential candidate every four years doesn’t give me the warm fuzzies.

I like Cornel West, and I appreciate his long-standing commitment to left-wing and anti-racist values.

That said, I live in the real world, where Donald Trump is running as an open fascist promising to make America a dictatorship if elected, and Joe Biden is the only candidate running with a realistic chance of beating him.

So I’ll be voting for every Democrat I possibly can, while wishing they were better than they are, as always.

In my experience, predominantly male environments are fairly disdainful of anything non-technical and include a lot of unexamined biased views toward women. Workplaces with more women, or a balance of both, don’t have the same issue, in my experience.

I’ve worked predominantly in two fields - engineering and environmental policy. I find the culture of engineering to be pretty toxic - too many conservative men. Environmental policy suffers from too much being demanded of workers, I think mostly because of the expectation that you’re motivated by your passion, rather than being paid for your time. I don’t know if that is directly tied to the gender balance in the workplace, but certainly women historically and presently are not compensated fairly for their work.

It’s a shame that I’m better at doing engineering, because I vastly prefer to not work in a place where I can hear my boss listen to Hannity every day through the wall.

What exactly is an “AI PC”? What makes it better than a non-AI PC? Is this a product that consumers are asking for?

Yeah, that seems reasonable to me

What do people mean when they say “the internet” in this context? The social internet of the 2000s?

I say this it feels unimaginative to me to say that the internet is dead. Social media? For the major platforms, sure. But the Fediverse feels alive and novel, and the Internet itself is certainly not going anywhere - could you imagine if email went away?

I don’t know, I am in large agreement that the internet has gotten worse, with that accelerating with generative AI. But I also feel like being driven away from Big Tech platforms has led me to learn more about how the Internet actually works and to discover topics and communities that I hadn’t before. Maybe the internet isn’t wholesale dead, just changing

It’s amazing how if you ask the Boomers I know, they’ll tell you that cities are terrifying and riddled with crime every few feet. But when you actually go a city, it’s pretty normal. Maybe a bit less foot traffic and a few more unhoused people than pre-COVID, but still pretty much the same. Definitely not the war zone they describe!

Ballot initiatives are crushing it in Michigan lately. Ending gerrymandering, legalizing weed, protecting reproductive rights, and improving elections have all passed through ballot initiatives in the past few years. Direct democracy works. I feel for people in states that don’t have that option (cough Indiana). I feel like we might be starting to see Michigan emerge as the anti-Florida

I was a teenager and sold an old iPod Touch on eBay, first time I’d ever sold anything on there. The buyer reached out and told me she wanted to mail straight to her son who was deployed in Nigeria. I didn’t know any better, so I put it in the mail. As soon as I did, they cancelled the order, and I had no recourse. Of course eBay was no help. Ruined my day, for sure, but in the grand scheme of things, not a huge price to pay to learn that lesson.

I don’t see a specific place to report an offensive plate, but I did send an email to the Indiana BMV. They review personalized plates and reject some, so this must have slipped past their radar.

https://www.in.gov/bmv/registration-plates/license-plates-overview/personalized-license-plates/

https://faqs.in.gov/hc/en-us/requests/new

sets the revolving door to max speed

Look y’all, i fixed regulatory capture!

Honestly, I think there is something to that. You probably do need to be a sociopath in order to become a CEO like that, but I’d also buy that becoming wealthy, by any means, is probably going to change you and your worldview whether you like it or not

Greenwald used to be a respected journalist. Now he’s a right wing hack

Stonetoss is a Nazi

Yep! It’s a good way to get over the fear of a blank page, but I don’t trust it for more than outlines or summaries

I also really dislike the pop-ups and “recommendations” that I have no interest in. It feels like I’m being advertised to when I’m specifically already paying, in part to remove ads.

That, along with their incessant and poorly communicated A/B UI testing, is making me more and more frustrated. Don’t get me wrong, the price for a Duo membership is excellent for the amount of music available, but I have started to build out my own collection that I can stream through Plex as a backup, since I expect their platform to only get worse over time

I believe LineageOS has a wider selection of devices

Maybe the decision to have children is highly personal and should be left up to individual people to decide, either way?

How would Autodesk or Dassault discover that you are using a pirated copy of their software in the first place?

I suppose a better way to phrase it is- why is an NPU necessary? What does it enable these machines to do that a Surface sans NPU can’t?

And yes, these are business-oriented. But my question remains the same - is built-in AI a feature that businesses, as consumers of this product, are asking for? And presumably this is just the beginning, and future personal devices from Microsoft will have NPUs too. I haven’t heard any clamoring for that, but I could very well also just not be noticing the people that are

Did you read the article? Or did you just see ‘North Carolina’ in the title and decide to complain about the United States?

Yeah, “civilly liable rapist” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it

Nope, Ottawa County is still just a county. However, in the last election, the county commission got taken over by Ottawa Impact, a group of extremely far right activists that have proven very popular to a smaller segment of the population, and wildly unpopular with the majority of people in and around the county. It appears that there’s starting to be a backlash to their idiocy and hatred from the folks with any sense, it’s good to see

Two questions:

1. Eating bugs is not an abnormal human behavior, and it is not uncommon in cuisine across the world. So I don’t see how that’s a negative thing, inherently?

2. How would using cash translate into a message of “people power”? You’re still paying the same amount of the same currency for the same product, just in a different form.

Yep! That’s what I do. I use just about everything else in Proton’s ecosystem, but I choose to use Bitwarden as my password manager. Just feels like better practice to not be wholly dependent on Proton for all my security.

Indiana has the second or third largest naval base in the country - Crane Naval Base. Oddly, it’s nowhere near water in the middle of nowhere in the southern part of the state. The military and defense contractors do a lot of recruiting for engineers at Purdue.

It might help, but not in isolation, imo. I think there is value to both having new people with new ideas as well as having people with knowledge of how institutions work. If you have entirely new representatives every term, then everyone is learning things anew (from the corporate lobbyists who are their same jobs for every legislative session). If we did away with private money in politics and publicly funded campaigns, then I think the case for strict term limits is stronger

Unironically yes.

Make all drugs legal, so they can be regulated for purity/safety, and treat addiction like a disease, rather than a personal failing

i’ve always said that people will know when i’m a millionaire because they’ll never hear from me again lol

if i’ve got enough money to sustain myself in a little house in the woods, i’m fucking right off and never coming out

Does word soup come before or after word salad? You’re right though lol, I just copied the title directly from the article

We already have a more elegant solution than training AI when solar arrays produce more electricity than the grid needs - batteries. It strikes me as a better option to save the energy for later use than to burn it off to train AI.

“The term ‘tankie’ was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defense of the Soviet use of tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.”

See: Tankie - Wikipedia

I find the stackable layers interesting, but I like the decentralization of the fediverse. I’m way outside my realm of expertise here, but would it be possible for a platform to adopt both?

I mean, you’re more than welcome to try! I’m just curious why this issue in particular strikes you as a high priority

God, I hate McKinsey

I started around 2018, using crouton to run Ubuntu on a Chromebook so I could have better functionality. I went back to Windows for a while, then I started using Pop!OS as my daily driver last year. I still don’t know if I love it, but I’m sticking with Linux of some flavor going forward.

It’s too complicated a decision to discuss on a wide basis. It’s a highly personal decision that parents should make for themselves. The fight against climate change is far from over, and there were still people having kids during the Black Death.