I have bought appliances in the last three years. It’s pretty easy to get “dumb” appliances, but it’s hard to find dumb, high quality appliances, and you pay a premium for them. I heard Speed Queen is the best when it comes to washers and dryers. I have a dumb LG fridge that doesn’t try to connect to the interweb or anything. My washer-dryer is LG and has an option to connect to the internet I will never allow.

He was obviously referring to telemetry bullshit that spies on you when he said “sensors;” not, like, the O₂ sensor an ICE car uses to calculate fuel injection volume.

I wasn’t using Thiel as an example–at least not on purpose. Take any obvious idea and marry it to a technological revolution, and you’ll have a bunch of rich people who got rich mostly by pure luck. Musk is a piece of shit, but the case for Tesla taking off was actually proven by GM’s EV1 ~3 years prior. The main reason it didn’t take off? Well it was twofold: first, GM was reluctant to commit to EVs because marketing them would make their conventional fuel vehicles look environmentally destructive, and second, the battery technology the EV1 used was nickle metal hydride. Tesla succeeded because it coincided with the proliferation of lithium ion batteries, and in that particular case, I don’t think anything unethical happened. If Musk had stopped here we probably wouldn’t think of him as an evil piece of shit.

So a lottery winner is guilty of crimes? There are ways to “win the lottery” inside capitalism without breaking any rules. Sure, the amassing of wealth is in itself unethical in a country where many kids can’t eat nutritious meals, but you don’t necessarily have to be a backstabbing thief to become rich. You can just luck out and have an idea like online banking take off at the same time the technology becomes mature enough for something like online banking to be feasible.

Inheritance is only one way the ultra-wealthy gained their status. There’s also exploitation, luck, predatory business practices, corruption, …

Some gained wealth legitimately, but they usually fall under the luck category and should have been taxed at a higher rate for decades.

lmao

I haven’t used Linux regularly since 2006, which either means I’m out of the loop or an ancient bearer of lost knowledge:

I think it’s “G’noo” like “G’day” or “G’night.”

I’m hoping the brownshirts aren’t smart enough for that, but you may be right.

No longer a theory lol

I don’t know if any phones have this, but on a PC you can set up multiple partitions and have the password you entered determine which is logged into on boot. Then if the ICE brownshirts demand to see your sick memes, you can show them a boring install with some basic apps, instead of the install where you’re informing the denizens of the interwebs that Trump raped kids and the entire GOP is covering it up.

I’ve only used the subways/metros around Boston, NYC, and DC, and not a long distance train like Amtrak, but those were all fine. Buy ticket board train. No security theater BS.

It’s like your car’s radiator. They flush their systems occasionally, but it’s really not much… at least not locally. Who knows what’s going on at the power plant where the electricity is being generated? Arid states should be strictly requiring closed loop systems of data centers and electricity producers alike.

Depending on where the figure is sourced, the water usage may include the electricity generation, in which case you might be using tons of water with a closed loop (data center) cooling system, because the power plant uses an open loop system. Open loop is wasteful, but if the climate is dry, it’s more effective because you get to reject the latent heat of vaporization of water, which is a shitload of energy. (That’s the technical term forgive my jargon.)

I’ve always wondered why they don’t divert the water that condenses onto the cold evaporator coil to the hot condenser coil to cool it. I think some window units do it. I guess it would cause dust to accumulate faster or something.

I think it’s more that the way the chatbots work is the same. They assign a bunch of numbers to tokens, and the numbers determine how interrelated different tokens are. You put in a bunch of tokens and then it spits out what it thinks the next one should be based on all the interrelatedness numbers and some math things like transformers, and the math things have knobs on them to determine how strong they are. It doesn’t matter if the tokens are words in a sentence or peptides in a protein. The underlying technology is the same.

This is an exciting use for a tool that I mostly despise for probably all the same reasons you do.

You can’t. He’s trying to use liberal as an epithet when he means neoliberal. If we’re being pedantic, liberal refers to the full gamut of people who think there should be an open and free society, which usually includes a market and certain property rights. The conservatives use liberal as an epithet to decry the left and now the left is using it to decry the middle.

It would be funny if it wasn’t being used to convince naive progressives to sit out elections and let fascists seize power because the center left “only” wants 85% of what they want. You’re seeing it really ramp up because the US is closing in on a big election, and convincing dipshits to sit out elections is easier than convincing anyone the right can govern.

They’ve really managed to enshittify the site beyond even what I expected back when the API changes went live. I guess it was expected. First Digg shot itself, now Reddit…

Not to “My generation good other generations bad,” but Millennials and Gen X really grew up with technology as it was becoming impressively capable, but required a lot of technical know-how to use. It’s really apparent in the workplace: our fresh-out-of-college guys and ready-for-retirement guys alike come to people around my age when stuff isn’t working. Everything’s too easy now, and it’s hard to look under the hood. (Of course, there are still exceptions for enthusiasts, but you’re never forced to tinker with a raspberry pi.)

And here I thought I was done with penis inspection day after I graduated high school.

Every year, take the 500 wealthiest people and…