What’s Khorne saying?

Telepaths must feel like watching an analog TV with a vaccuum cleaner running full tilt next to it.

Why kiss rings when you can manufacture your own?

Genshin’s character quests are a hairball. Too easy to accidentally trigger once unlocked, and then you end up with other quests locked out, including dailies. There’s also limited story reward-- I don’t really need a deep dive into some B-plot character who you’ll never see again in the main story progrrssion.

Where? That sounds like a good price as internal SATA BD-RE drives tend to be $60+

As someone who has to deal with PCI compliance issues, there’s plenty of noob mistakes, out-of-date thinking and outright “let’s log this data for debugging purposes even though if any regulator found out they’d nuke us from orbit.”

Sauron did nothing wrong.

There are valid questions, many of which revolve around how and why it’s used.

Some systems have brain damaged approaches to diagnostics/logging, license enforcement, or remote service/update systems that create security holes but are not intentionally malicious.

Security is hard and we should remember Hanlon’s Razor.

How can we ask “are we closer” if we don’t know what the destination is?

LLMs might still end up being an interesting special-purpose system, perhaps with fairly broad applications, but in a direction that’s different from where true AGI ends up coming from.

I hear that again and again, but I don’t quite understand the endgame anymore.

There was the theory Russia had compromising material on him to get him to play along, but the MAGA crowd is so committed and reverent that I’m not sure anything could shame him anymore.

Russia could show a tape of him porking his 7-year-old daughter on the Times Square Jumbotron and the GOP would rally to lower the age of consent to 6. If the Russian financial authorities showed incontrovertible proof that Trump was broke, Congress would declare he had a bazillion FreedomBux ™ to magically settle his debts.

Why would he bother listening when there’s no leverage left?

It’s more chilling to think this is pure domestic terror with no evil-other boogeyman to blame. The far right got all their best and brightest in one place, and thry couldn’t dilute their paranoia and hate enough to serve their greed.

I understand pre-OS X Macintoshes used colons.

I never seem to get appropriately coded romance scams.

I guess the RFI from my computer is jamming the gaydar.

If I need a Chromium, I feel like Vivaldi has their heart in the right place.

Sadly, the WebSerial stuff didn’t work when I tried it recently.

Are you using a shell replacement for the XP style titlebars and taskbar?

Calmira was pretty impressive for a taskbar-based shell, but I don’t recall doing a titlebar swap.

Would we know it if we saw it? Draw two eye spots on a wooden spoon amd people will anthromorphise it. I suspect we’ll have dozens of false starts and breathless announcements of AGI, but we may never get there.

More interestingly, would we want it if we got it? How long will its creators rally to its side if we throw yottabytes of data at our civilization-scale problems and the mavhine comes back with “build trains and eat the rich instead of cows?”

I was surprised the response wasn’t “okay, China made this on 1/50 the budget, so if we do what they did but threw double our budget at it, we can make something 100 times better, and we’ll be so far advanced that we’ll be opening Walmarts on Ganymede next spring, we just need more Quadros, bro”

The argument I could see is for people who want low-stakes imagery on a very low budget.

I used some of the Stable Whatever models to generate some wallpapers for my PC. I’m not talented, so I can get maybe 30% of what I want by hand from a blank page, but if you roll the gacha a few times, I can say “this is 70% what I wanted, and I can clean it up and tweak it to 75%.” If you use it that way, there’s still some personal effort. Sure, it’s still fairly soulless tat, but no more than the prepainted live-laugh-love signs in illegible cursive that clutter our thrift stores.

Yes, if I’m not willing to increase my skills, I should just throw commissions at actual artists, but I’m still way too self conscious to say to someone in person “can you make the vampire prince look 15% more like Liu Kang, and have him carrying a chocolate gateau?”

It also seems real common for blogs and low quality news sites where they need a header image but you don’t need high quality stock photos (how many different photos of traders gesticulating at a display board do you need for economy articles?) Again, low stakes, low budget.

I knew one! Judging by how he handled his BMW, I suspect he’s been trained in vehicular manslaughter.

Won’t someone think of the curbs?!

They’re pretty crisp, but the sour cream and onion technology is decades behind Western leaders.

Wasn’t that the idea behing the Chevron doctrine? Leave the specifics up to experts rather than bamboozling Congresscritters about details.