BananaTrifleViolin

I think a lot of it comes from schools, and in particular physical education and competitive sports. There is nothing wrong with competitive sports but the attitudes around it in schools can be so toxic, and in particular it can be used to create hierarchies. The idea of being good at sports and that being masculine was something I certainly experienced a lot at school. Also people who weren’t as academic but thrived in sports were lauded.

My school had various sports teams and clubs, and fuck all academic activities. Sports aren’t toxic but the attitudes around them can be, and particularly adults who feed in toxic attitudes and values around it.

The BBC article that this article is a bizarre summary of is far better (the Gizmodo article even links directly to the BBC article). It give a far better overview of the issues; the main crux is they cost most than anticipated through both theft and cost of the machines themselves. The consumer’s disliking it is a less point and more naunced essentially “customer’s want the technology to work but it isn’t” which is also what you’ve said.

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240111-it-hasnt-delivered-the-spectacular-failure-of-self-checkout-technology

Personally I preferred the self checkouts because I don’t want to interact with someone, but th they fail so much (because of the weighing which is to stop me being a supposed thieving scumbag, not to benefit me) and you end up standing around waving at a random stranger to come and fix the machine awkwardly while a massive queue waits impatiently for a machine. I’ve recently switched back to the manned checkouts for bigger shopping trips.

You can use PowerPoint in a web browser with office 365. Really don’t need windows to run it anymore.

This is an interesting concept but doesn’t seem like it has long term legs.

It depends on what you mean by open source and also even eBook reader (I’m assuming eInk), but if people want open source e-readers I would say flashing existing reader hardware with open source operating systems would be the way to go. However I’m not sure if there is much motivation to do that.

There are Android based eink ereaders available with more freedom than Kindle devices (Boox is an example) and you can side load free or open source reader software onto Kobo (maybe not Android Kindles though?), and you can load free books onto e-readers via software like Calibre. So you can read books in privacy outside the vendors ecosystem - it kinda reduces the imputus to build an open source ereader (hardware or OS).

I’d love to see a truly open source Eink device - particularly software wise. But I doubt the demand is enough. And this Open Source hardware solution seems a bit too cut back to fit the bill.

And the commanding officer only tried to stop them when they heard the last victim asking for help and realised it was in hebrew.

Seems the IDF shoots first and asks questions later. This is what’s happened to unarmed jewish hostages, who were shirtless, holding a white shirt on a stick which is the universal sign of surrender. What about the million people living in gaza coming up against this? Holy fuck.

The headline is also dumb. Any election can be won by 1 vote. Doesn’t matter that 43000 people voted.

Not strictly correct. Spotify pays out from its net revenues (revenues when billing costs and tax are removed) and it pays to the various industry rights holders who then distribute the money. There are lots of complex deals in place and big rights holders are likely to have better deals than ad hoc users, plus it’s different in different countries.

The 70% figure is a PR thing Spotify pushes about as part of its constant battles with rights holders on exactly how much it will pay them. It’s trying to claim most of the money goes to artists but it’s opaque how much goes where.

The safety angle may be overplayed but it is not the only element of this kind of change. Better and safer infrastructure for walking and cycling encourages walking and cycling.

So there are a whole host of benefits: reduced pollution, better citizen health and wellbeing, encouraging use of local walkable businesses, etc.

Also a reduction in deaths and injuries on a background of increased pedestrian and cycling is also noteworthy. I.e. not just reduced the existing injuries but also less injuries despite more people.at risk.

Yeah I was surprised they took it down. I think it’s a foolish knee jerk reaction and is patronising towards readers.

Ironically there is know nothing to put the current spike of interest in context as you can’t read the letter on the guardian website.

I’m actually really unimpressed with the guardians action - they don’t respect their readers and clearly no longer believe in freedom of speech. They could have modified the article to put the letter in context themselves rather than link to a 20 year old article criticising it. It also makes it hard for those who want to push back against the letter and answer those who are pushing it.

That doesn’t make sense? How would you have the “add from search bar” feature in the settings screen?

It’s a context specific method of adding a search engine - you add it when you’re at the site. Meanwhile the setting screen is global for the browser.

If I was laid off by a company I wouldn’t go back unless I had no other choice. If a company didn’t see your value previously and now it supposedly does, what is to say it will not change again in the future and fire you again? A lot of companies do a last-in first-out approach and are cyclical about hiring and firing to please shareholders. That’s where these tech companies are at now.

Also who wants the potential of a CV where you were laid off twice by the same company? It’d be like them taking your CV and wiping their arse with it before handing to back to you as security escorts you out of the building.

Don’t go backwards, keep moving forward.

This is the problem with believing too much in models. A model can show you anything you want - it’s output is only as good as the parameters and algorithms you set it.

Modelling the climate in the next 50-100 years is already extremely difficult and fraught with inaccuracies but we have lots of models and data to extrapolate from, so we do have a crude idea where we’re going. But we can’t model next years weather with accuracy, just the base trend. Crucially important warning for climate change but limited otherwise.

Modelling out to 250 million years is basically a crock of shit. The tectonic movements are predictable and gross predictions that a pangea arrangement might be warmer may have some validity but modelling the climate and evolution and status of mammals is pure conjecture.

Good thing about modelling that far is you will never have see you model’s accuracy being tested. Publish a paper, play into current fears around climate change with an irrelevant prediction about 250million years away, get an article published in the New York times and egos massaged all round.

What OS and device are you running on?

What extensions do you have running?

This is unlikely to be a simple Firefox problem. Try running Firefox in Safe mode and see if you have problems then (go into the main menu and then help to find the option to run without add-ons).

If the videos play well then it’s your extensions. If the videos do it play well then it’s drivers or the set up of your device.

I’ve only had problems with Firefox playing videos on a Raspberry Pi in the past due to a bug with drivers for video acceleration not working proberly. I had the problem with Pi OS but not a full Linux distro on the same device.

This has already been confirmed a non story. He said this around the launch time and Larian have since confirmed that the section has been found and played.

This article shows the poor state of gaming “journalism”. Stories taken from each other and no actual work done by the “journalist”. So false rumours spread.

Kotaku have an updated version of the story, link below. I have no idea if they broke the story first or are another of the copycats though.
https://kotaku.com/baldurs-gate-3-astarion-voice-actor-hidden-area-section-1850860934

It’s disturbing that there isn’t a good process for removing judges at the end of their career. Being “nudged towards retirement” by family after you are beyond your ability to perform the job is appalling. It’s the arrogance of presiding over other people’s lives through legal cases until you decide you don’t want to anymore rather than whether you should that’s so bad. What about all the citizens getting suboptimal legal judgements?

It’s called confabulation, and it’s not “normal” aging, it’s a sign of memory loss. Dementia is a common cause.

I find it staggering that the democratic party are going with him as their presidential candidate. Feels like a mix of the sunken cost fallacy and a fear of turning away from someone who is currently beating Trump in the polls.

Arguably Trump confabulates too but it gets dismissed as he’s been a liar for so long no one notices.

2024 is looking like an election with two elderly men with dementia vying for the whitehouse, and another one as senate leader. That’s how extreme US politics has become - you could put up a literal monkey now and as long as he’s in the right party he would get nearly 1/2 the vote.

It’s all a sign of how dangerously broken the US electoral system is.

It’s a rather bizarre argument, essentially saying “it’s not the whole solution so it’s not a solution at all”

The article dismisses lab grown meat because the technology might cost $450m to build one 10,000 metric ton per annum producing factory, claiming it won’t work because of economies of scale. But they clearly have no understanding of economies of scale. There is economies of scale in the building of factories and reactor production too. One novel reactor is expensive and difficult to maintain, but a global chain of 100s of factories become much cheaper to build individually and maintain as you have a whole supply chain and supporting infrastructure built out.

A good example of this is Apple’s Vision Pro. The 1st iteration of this technology will be prohibitively expensive for most people. But by starting production Apple is stimulating the building of factories and infrastructure to build all the component parts at scale. Version 2 will be cheaper per unit, as will Version 3. The production capacity will increase reducing cost, even if the components iteritively get more advanced and complex from generation to generation. It’s an expensive proposition for investors up front, but the long term potential to scale up is what makes it so powerful.

A “bio-reactor” to make meat is the same - the more you build, the more you invest in the supporting infrastructure, the cheaper it gets. There will be a risk barrier to starting, but it’s crazy to dismiss the whole thing based on the projected cost of the first industrial scale factory. This is similar to Fusion power; the ITER fusion reactor in France is crazily expensive but the idea is the lessons learnt and the build out of the supportive infrastructure is what will move Fusion from a lab experiement to a real world source of power.

The reality is there is no one single solution to climate change, it will by multiple different things happening together that will improve the climate situation. Lab Grown Meat will help reduce methane from animals, while renewable energy will reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, and Electric Vehicles with renewables will do the same and so on.

This doesn’t make sense. It’s more likely we’ll pack more into a high end device then say goodbye to them in tasks like gaming.

Computing power has been constantly improving for decades and miniaturisation is part of that. I have desktop PCs at work in small form factors that are more powerful than the gaming PC I used to have 10 years ago. It’s impressive how far things have come.

However at the top end bleeding edge in CPUs,.GPUs and APUs high powered kit needs more space for very good reasons. One is cooling - if you want to push any chip to its limits then you’ll get heat, so you need space to cool it. The vast majority of the space in my desktop is for fans and airflow. Even the vast majority of the bulk of my graphics card is actually space for cooling.

The second is scale - in a small form factor device you cram as much as you can get in, and these days you can get a lot in a small space. But in my desktop gaming tower I’m not constrained such limits. So I have space for a high quality power supply unit, a spacious motherboard with a wealth of options for expansions, a large graphics card so I can have a cutting edge chip and keep it cool, space for multiple storage devices, and also lots and lots of fans, a cooling system for the CPU.

Yes, in 5 years a smaller device will be more capable for today’s games. But the cutting edge will also have moved on and you’ll still need a cutting edge large form factor device for the really bleeding edge stuff. Just as now - a gaming laptop or a games console is powerful but they have hard upper limits. A large form factor device is where you go for high end experiences such as the highest end graphics and now increasingly high fidelity VR.

The exceptions to that are certain computing tasks don’t need anything like high end any more (like office software, web browsing, 4k movies), other tasks largely don’t (like video editing) so big desktops are becoming more niche in the sense that high end gaming is their main use for many homes users. That’s been a long running trend, and not related to APUs.

The other exception is cloud streaming of gaming and offloading processing into the cloud. In my opinion that is what will really bring an end to needing large form factor devices. We’re not quite there but I suspec that will that really pushes form factors down, rather than APUs etc.

I get where you’re coming from but I think you’re overstating the impact in this day and age. If this had been 1995 it’d be a big deal. Now it’s rediculously easy to install any alternative you like for free.

Libre Office is an entire free fully features office suite.

I’m less bothered about removing WordPad than I am about Microsoft advertising and pre-installing it’s products in Windows - they force Edge on people, they push OneDrive and preinstall a preview of Office. That’s the real problem - not losing WordPad.

At one point Anti-Trust / Anti-monopoly regulators globally punished Microsoft for pushing Internet Explorer to consumers and for a long time in Europe had to offer a choice of Browsers to download on new Windows installs. Now it’s allowed to get away with abusing it’s dominant position to force it’s products on consumers.

Yeah it is also good for a bit more privacy on the internet. I have separate containers for Amazon websites, Google, banking etc. Even more powerful tool if you pair it up with a VPN - can have different VPN locations on each container so break up attempts at tracking and profiling you across the web.