Going early and going late often helps a lot with avoiding people who meander around blocking movement through the store.

Unfortunately, where I live is pretty heavily populated so the shelves are also a lot more empty if I go late or go too early.

Bots that scrape for training do not usually respect typical methods of asking them kindly to not look at their data.

If we could start from scratch and force these bots to check for some kind of opt in data before scraping, I’d be a hell of a lot more comfortable with Gen AI scraping.

At this point, most models are trained on content taken without consent. In most cases, much of that content would, if a human were to consume it, be considered stolen/pirated. The courts just decided that these AI companies are above those laws for reasons. That reason is money.

Not an expert but… typical computers do what they do by transmitting (primarily) electrical signals between components. Is there electricity or isn’t there. It’s the “bit” with two states - on or off, 1 or 0. Electricity is the flow of electrons between atoms. Basically, we take atoms that aren’t very attached to some of their electrons and manipulate them so that they pass the electrons along when we want them to. I don’t know if there is a way to conduct and process electrical signals without using an atom’s relationship with its electrons.

Quantum computing is the suspected new way to get to “better” computing. I don’t know much about the technical side of that, beyond that they use quantum physics to expand the bit to something like a qubit, which exploits superposition (quantum particles existing in multiple states simultaneously until measured, like the Schrodinger’s cat metaphor) and entanglement (if two quantum particles’ states are related to or dependent on each other, determining the state of one particle also determines the state of the other) to transmit/process more than just a simple 1 or 0 per qubit. A lot more information can be transmitted and processed simultaneously with a more complex bit. As I understand it, quantum computing has been very slow going.

That’s my shitty explanation. I’m sure someone will come along and correct my inaccurate simplification of how it all works and list all that I missed, like fiberoptic transmission of signals.

I was just checking. I have progressive family members who insist that ranked choice is actually an inferior method. I asked them to explain why and they just tell me that there are ways to game it that are too complicated to explain…

They are quite politically involved but still, for some reason, trust the Democratic Party “old guard”. Likely because they are their own generation and had a great life during their time in power.

• first past the post for all national elections.

?

Are you aware of how many conservative members of the Supreme Court are supporters of Unitary Executive Theory, at least if it applies to conservative presidents?

It is a running theme. Just like their representatives, GOP voters don’t give a flying fuck who gets hurt by their policies - maybe even celebrate when it hurts the right people - until it affects them personally.

I have my own problems with corporate Democrats, but at least they make a show of trying to help their constituents and maybe even pass something helpful so long as it doesn’t rankle their billionaire donors.

Literally no reason to worry about branding when Word is synonymous with word processor and Excel is synonymous with spreadsheet. The only real competition is Google Drive, but they are shoving Gemini into everything too so…

Absurd false equivalency.

They are anticompetitive, just not in an obvious way that is antagonistic toward consumers.

But the Steam platform does not maintain its dominance through better pricing than by rival platforms. Instead, Valve abuses the Steam platform’s market power by requiring game developers to enter into a ‘Most Favored Nations’ provision contained in the Steam Distribution Agreement whereby the game developers agree that the price of a PC game on the Steam platform will be the same price the game developers sell their PC games on other platforms.

While I’m willing to forgive requiring price parity when it’s a steam key, which will ultimately be redeemed on Steam and utilize all of the services provided by Valve, this should not apply to other platforms that distribute the game themselves.

Hey shitbird, move on. Stop trying to get non-fascists to fight each other. Do something productive.

I’m not in favor of this bleak future. I don’t know why we can’t just buy well-made things and fix them ourselves when they are broken. Rather, I know why but I don’t know why we allow it to be this way.

I’m just feeling dark and my only hope is that people see my bleak predictions for the future and act now to stop it.

You simply don’t need a high end PC for gaming anymore.

You mean older gaming PCs can still run most games. I’m sure there will be holdouts and I’m sure lots of smaller, crunchy indie games will run just fine.

Unfortunately, computers are built from common sets of parts. If RAM, SSDs, HDDs, and GPU costs are doubling, then those who can only afford a low or mid-range PC suddenly… can’t. So the consumer market collapses. Nobody will bother making replacement parts for your old gaming PC, and when it comes to new there will be only expensive PCs, ludicrously expensive gaming PCs, and the real goal - thin clients. The Chromebook has already become the default consumer PC. They’re just coming for a different segment now.

More accurately, they don’t fucking care and just want more money. Right now, they’re betting on AI but when that bubble bursts, cloud “PCs” is what they’ll fall back on since all the hardware and, therefore, all the compute will have moved to the cloud and the market for old-style personal computers will have been blown to shit. Recurrent user spending is reliable and makes investors happy. SAS all the things.

Gaming PC’s are dead at these prices

That’s the plan. You’ll subscribe to your cloud gaming service and you’ll fucking like it you disgusting peasant. Own nothing, rent everything.

I’m afraid the best I can give you is a proprietary, always online, underpowered, half-assed piece of spyware that will probably end up costing you a yearly subscription fee if you don’t want advertisements and get a mandatory, irreversible AI integration over-the-air upgrade 1 month after you buy it.

I remember it was a common prank in my office, for coworkers that didn’t lock their workstations, to set their homepage to hampster-dance.

At a LAN party we once messed with a friend’s desktop background. He had a picture of himself and a girlfriend in what I assume was his dorm room as his background. We wanted to take the poster in the background and photoshop it to something funny. Someone had a bizarre picture of a bunch of dudes in Ninja Turtle masks. One of them was holding some chick in a skirt upside down and I think holding a fist against her panties. That photo was so bizarre it sticks in my mind.

I have no idea if he ever realized it. I felt bad afterward when I found out he was MIA at the LAN Party because of an unpleasant medical issue…

Just another layer - the button did nothing to begin with.

While I do want the logs accessible, I don’t know if I want it all on display.

Ever like, dig through Windows or Proton logs? Plain text files measurable in megabytes within seconds.

Ah yes, the old “but racism was so long ago” argument.

Redlining

Voting Rights Act

Voting Rights Act Part 2 (Dec 2025)

“Why should I have to give up my privilege? Racism is over. Whites aren’t benefitting from discrimination of minorities.”

Lol

I grabbed a TubesZB and it has made things so much easier. I can put it wherever I need it and if I need to migrate my HA VM to another host there is no fuss. Literally did it the other day and it worked flawlessly.