The sloppiest was the X-Men movie where Magneto has a sensible, empathic plan to end discrimination, and they just had to mention like in one sentence: Well, his machine has a defect though, so it will cause unintended destruction, and we have to stop him.

Well, any story with Magneto as antagonist, tbh.

Good stuff - made a Patreon account and a bounteous € 1 sub for this.

For me, “earn rewards” is really important.

I doomscroll on 3 different platforms, I view xxx-sites, I check the weather, I buy a shower mat.

I should be rewarded!

(What is the reward exactly?)

I heard that as well. Some say that the “fancy city folks” as which the Grimm brothers were perceived got an already watered down version of the real thing.

Compared to American adaptations such as Cinderella, the written Grimm version is the wild one, though.

When you are German and they read you the ORIGINAL Grim tales at bedtime, you know what’s up sooner than you’d wish.

For 2 years, I had to set up production environments on RHEL, mostly Apache and Keycloak servers. I had a limited, very specific list of sudo permissions, and I had to ask very specifically what I else needed, which was then granted by people who neither knew nor cared what I was working on.

SELinux permission problems were always the fallback reason when nothing else made sense. With my permissions, I could not just straight up check for it. E. g. Apache would not server a folder, cryptic error -> check file permissions -> check general Apache config problems -> assume SELinux permission is missing and request it, supplying the exact command they need to type.

Evidently, it’s not enough when many people try to block or ignore ads.

What would stop them would be a sufficiently large minority that really takes note of the ads they see and actively avoids the products. Like, even when it is the best for a given situation, buy the second best instead.

Only that would take away from the people they still do reach.

In theory, even a minority (20%?) could make ads harmful for the advertiser.

The one point I don’t completely understand is the tax debt: Wouldn’t a failed business, no matter how ridiculous, be a complete write-off?

Maybe the problem is that he has to tax each fiscal year independently, so a tax debt in 2023 from successful freelance work would not be diminished by a failed “business idea” in 2024.

wow, you are right! I didn’t bother to check this whole time of needless suffering, but for what I earn with it in less than an hour I could probably buy 2x8 GB DDR-3, lol!

It just seemed a fair assumption that it would be insanely expensive …

I bought a desktop PC for a little over 2k in late 2011, and still use it. I’m a back-end developer, and certainly I would like to be able to upgrade my 16 GB RAM to 32 GB in an affordable way.

Other than that, it’s perfectly fine. IDE, a few docker containers, works.

And modern gaming is a scam anyway. Realistic graphics do not increase fun, they just eat electricity and our money. Retro gaming or not at all.

Imagine how things were if they were built to be maintained for 15+ years.

I’m retro computing, retro everything tech, and I DO need my collection!

Just had to order a keyboard DIN connector (pre PS-2) adapter for a old 80386. Because I obviously still don’t hoard enough old stuff!

One of the few things I’m afraid I won’t be able to use anymore are UMTS (3G) sticks and routers. Although, the router still works a perfectly fine mobile Wifi router, hmmmmm …

This is a crazy use of AI!

What I have been considering, but haven’t found a readily available setup yet: Make a user with lots of read permissions (most of /etc, API keys & passwords in separate excluded files). That could be done with very restrictive sudo patterns. Let the AI run commands under that user directly (it can do sudo -l to get an idea of what it can do). Then, use it like in Star Trek “Computer - run a level 2 diagnostic”.

Not as the centre of attention when fixing a problem, but as additional input / modern rubber ducking.

lol, getting all displays working is indeed my biggest worry for my last Windows PC, migrating next month. It has both an NVIDIA and a Radeon GPU, and that works great on Windows. But a quick test boot from USB did not go so well on Ubuntu, so the truth will only come out after a real install with drivers.

I’m reading AI content there, and when I post, I’m getting accused of being a bot / using an LLM. Fantastic.

Ideas?

• CO2 tax - if it’d be high enough to completely pay for the damage, this shit would stop pretty fast. But even less than that would help. Alternative: Certificates without loopholes. Some use would survive, e. g. an IT professional would still use $ 50 worth of energy per day if it gives a 10 % productivity boost, but models would start consolidating and use all tricks to keep it efficient, rather than push out whatever they can. Only works when imports from regions that refuse to participate are taxed when imported, or outright banned.
• Huge advantage of machine learning: The “when” is completely flexible. Could just use excess power from renewable peaks, or even nuclear & coal nightly production. But as long as it’s cheap enough to just make more power around the clock: Why should they? They won’t do it voluntarily. Solutions could start with a “green” label for consumers, but that would probably not do that much. It also won’t help when we force them to use 100 % renewables and nuclear, and then they just buy all solar panels and wind turbines off the market leaving us with higher costs and trouble switching to net 0
• Evaluate the market and identify the bubble. Does an AI focussed company make conservative use of existing capabilities, without overhyping them, or put their money on likely near-future developments, or depend entirely on optimistic future capabilities?
• With such measures in place, we’d still have the models they trained so far. They’d eventually plateau anyway (or already have). When training of new models stops, as we make it too expensive to spend a lot of power for a tiny improvement, a good part of the power waste stops.

Could be even worse, look at what happened to Stauffenberg’s family.

Arguable whether he signed up for that.

Fight and die in defence of a NATO ally? Yes. Same as the aggressor, if the elected government decides so, such as in Iraq? Also yes.

Risk having his wife, children, grandchildren taken away and put in Sippenhaft (collective punishment) or put in a reeducation orphanage? Not sure there is a moral obligation to that. Safety for his family was one of the things he got out of all this.

His risks for resisting beyond what he already did are higher than they would be for the average citizen. On the other hand, he also could do more than the average citizen.

A tough call, and I would not judge.

Yes, it’ll all be about “unity” and “healing”.

Note that even in Germany post WW II, where a real effort was made and at least the official line was uncompromising, the large majority of Nazis and their ideas in politics, society, law, industry GOs and NGOs died slowly of old age over the next 50 years. Without that effort, even a future Democratic president (if even possible) would just be a waiting game for the next Trump.

It does feel delightfully lazy to pick a recipe and send the settings with one tap. But the forced rate-or-skip spoils much of the fun.

Also basically, it’s time and temperature. It’s not like a Fallout-style robot that cooks complex meals for me. Could do without.

PHILIPS HD9880/90 Airfryer Combi XXL. I can select a recipe in the app and send it, so the settings are perfect for that.

But the downside is that it goes off like a smoke detector and blocks all controls and display until I rate the recipe or select “skip”, on the air fryer display.

But if it’s voluntary, it’s not smart to sound like “you are an idiot and I don’t like you”. Especially people with mental or legal problems might avoid a situation where they are being confronted about their faults.