Only China’s CCP can protect the sanctity of this process from politically motivated interference by devils in Chinese Taiwan and the United States.

You know, or so they’d have you believe.

The catch that always seems to bring this heavenly process down into the dirt is “identifying” the reincarnated lama. China’s rhetoric, if you look closely, is all about ensuring outside countries don’t interfere in that process. They are trying to assert that only they have the ability to recognize when the reincarnation has taken place, and who it is. Not that they can control who it is.

I know, it’s bullshit. But “people get hung up on bullshit” is a shortened history of human civilization.

At least he’s living in this century, as opposed to Trump, who is still stuck in the 80s watching cable TV and talking about his “ratings.”

I thought of exactly the same thing!

This college doesn’t have the power to fix homelessness at the societal level, but they did have the power to do this. It’s a pretty awesome story.

In addition to this I’m also deliberately fucking up the hand gesture: instead of using my two hands to weigh some invisible objects, I claw at the air like a cat. They lose their fucking minds.

I agree with you.

Is also think our VP is in poor taste to make jokes about how he’d like to fire off an exception to the 1st amendment. It’s just another example of total disrespect for our constitution and personal arrogance within the executive branch.

Yeah converting waste heat into useful energy sounds very very much like “making entropy go down.” We know we can make entropy go down in one spot by increasing it even more in others. But for them to do that here… they’d be turning high entropy into low entropy PLUS more high entropy, which sounds circularly self-fueling or essentially a perpetual motion machine.

Most of our electrical generation capabilities use heat at some point to boil water, but what makes that work is water’s phase change behavior, accessible temperature for that phase exchange, and water’s ubiquity. If he can find another water that does something equally useful but at lower temperatures, without exotic materials… I mean John Galt can fuck right off.

If they can pull this off: amazing. But it sounds very much like a quixotic adventure for a legendary inventor’s final days. Someone call me when they have something applicable.

Having really shitty bags is probably the best idea of all.

Anyone who has knowledge of or works in any areas adjacent to any of these could provide some kind of insight. Fuck me for wanting some grownup conversation about why businesses do the things they do, instead of a circle jerk of hating on mustache-twirling villains.

As predicted, a one-dimensional answer.

Let’s say they want more money: they do have a healthy software subscriptions business. How can they get more by becoming the world’s tiniest streaming service? And won’t that cannibalize their subscriptions business as the experience gets shittier and shittier?

Some actual “whys” within this would be things like (made up, but for example)

1. the subscriptions business is dying - less than 1% of users ever buy a pass and efforts to increase that failed for (another reason here)

2. streaming services are dumping cash into viewer acquisition because a war is on for dominance in that space and Pled is capitalizing on that

3. Plex has high overlap with gamers and are making good money on midroll gaming ads during these streams

4. Plex has legal concerns about facilitating piracy - this is the real reason why sync is shit and they killed watch together. They are desperately trying to pivot out of their old business before they get sued - OR all this streaming nonsense gives them a kind of fig leaf over that somehow

See, issues can be complex and interesting. Just calling them greedy is neither. How is this the greedy play, even?

I hate headlines like this. I’d love to hear the REASONS WHY Plex are doing all of this. But no, it’s just “4 ways in which Plex now sucks” which we all know already.

Before someone says “the reason is money” we need to ask: do the developers of Jellyfin not use money? Why won’t the same thing just happen to them too?

Before someone says “enshittification,” we need to ask: does this mean Jellyfin will soon have the same problems?

We all seem to love Jellyfin so I think we need to understand the actual reason why, or this will just continue happening.

Someone should write a Reddit client that automatically hides the top two comments and all their children, because they’re inevitably stupid jokes that add nothing.

Oh right. No one can make new Reddit clients anymore.

I’ve managed entirely on Google Sheets for years now. And I was a really big fan of Excel. It was never viable for me to rely on Windows to be everywhere I need to be, and the functionality gap closed steadily over the years to the point where the benefits of it being on the web now overwhelm the feature gap. Being free helps too, especially as Excel has gone through various pricing and bundling contortions over the years. Someone might tell me here that it’s now completely free but can I really be blamed for tuning out Microsoft years ago?

Yeah I actually never expected to have an LCD billboard up inside my home.

I would merely hate this and curse the manufacturer. But I know that if it were in my house, my kids, with their raw, unhardened minds, would find it irresistible. The slogans would worm their way into their everyday speech. They would talk about new ads over breakfast. They just don’t have the filters we adults have. So I’m so fucking glad I don’t have anything like this. It’s beyond mildly infuriating to truly insidious.

Accurate. Tech executives often see themselves as so far ahead of the rest of the world that they’re truly a different species. They see a world full of legacy stupidity and think they know better. The constitution is an artifact to them, not an ideal. Their actual ideals are unhinged nightmares of uploaded consciousness and the like. They don’t consider themselves human but post-human, or at least eager to become so.

Trillions of dollars worth of compute mining dogecoin

I wish i knew more about the guts of LLMs because I keep thinking it must be easier to optimize them than to put data centers into space.

I see - so you’re arguing with the Republican premise that safety features add cost. It seems obvious that more features will add some cost, but how much is the question. The number of lives saved is also pretty important to understanding that cost, I would add.

Naturally the GOP are trying to deflect general economic outrage at Democrats and “nanny state” regulators any way they can.