If anything eventually it’ll be like gardening seeds. Where yeah, there’s a lot of hybrid seeds that might be good for certain traits, but what a bunch of gardeners really want are heirloom varieties that are more naturally-selected and therefore more reliable over multiple generations.

Without hardware decoding, it will take more compute to decompress, but sites usually wait to fully roll out new codecs until hardware decoding is more ubiquitous, because of how many people use low-powered streaming sticks and Smart TVs.

It’s not for the end user at this point, it’s for YouTube/streaming companies to spend less on bandwidth at existing resolutions. Even a 5% decrease in size for similar quality could save millions in bandwidth costs over a year for YouTube or Netflix.

I would imagine they mean something like jellyfin/plex, which don’t necessarily get you away from torrents. Unless you want to go the slightly more legal route of ripping DVDs and Blu-rays and re-encoding everything for yourself. I say “slightly more legal” because while you are legally allowed a backup or archival copy of your own media (in the US), you still usually have to violate the DMCA to break encryption so you can rip your archival copy.

I’ve had in-person jobs where I was on the clock for 12 hours and did probably 30-40 minutes worth of actual tasks over that time. I guess what I’m saying is that it isn’t only wfh jobs that can feel almost too “easy.” Only advice I have is enjoy it while you can, because if and when it ends, getting thrown back into a “normal” job can feel overwhelming for a bit.

It can be, but sometimes packages are removed from the official repos, but still available in AUR, only running yay -Syu will install the AUR versions of dependencies that are no longer needed, and can leave you with a bunch of unnecessary packages from AUR.

If you run pacman -Syu on its own the unnecessary dependencies will be removed and you won’t get the AUR versions, and then yay -Syu will only update things you actually want from AUR.

This. If the attendant/clerk is telling me about the self checkout, I’m going to assume they don’t want to deal with ringing me up, and I’ll happily handle my own shit even if they are standing there on their phone not “working.”

Now if a manager tells me to use the self checkout? Fuck that, absolutely, I don’t work here. But I’ve got solidarity with the underpaid employees who’d rather not deal with me.

It took me a second to realize you didn’t mean github.

It’s not any different from running a random bash script, which is why according to the Arch wiki, users of the AUR should “verify that the PKGBUILD and accompanying files are not malicious or untrustworthy.” That’s also why good AUR helpers ask if you want to look at the PKGBUILD every time you install or update anything, because best practice is to read them every time so you know what it’s doing.

The AUR there for convienience, which means it tends to get used by newbies who really probably shouldn’t be using it. But I also won’t pretend that I follow the guidance every time myself.

Based on the attempts we’ve seen at censoring AI output so far, there doesn’t seem to me to be a way to actually do this without building a new model with pre-censored training data.

Sure they can tune models, but even “MechaHitler” Grok was still giving some “woke” answers on occasion. I don’t see how this doesn’t either destroy AI’s “usefulness” (not that there’s any usefulness there to begin with) or cost so much to implement that investors pull out because none of the AI companies are profitable, and throwing billions more to sift through and filter the training data pushes profitability even further away (if censoring all the training data is even possible at all).

20 thousand years of this, seven more to go.

- Bo Burnham, That Funny Feeling (written in 2020)

Correct, they do scale the boss HP when solo vs a normal trio game, you also get one guaranteed free revive and shops are guaranteed to sell a revive item. Personally, I’d still rather queue with randoms, but we’ll see how that goes when they add duo games. Queue times can already be a bit long sometimes, and I’m a bit concerned that losing duo teams to their own mode will make solo queues even longer and more annoying.

I’ll admit I tried talking to a local deepseek about a minor mental health issue one night when I just didn’t want to wake up/bother my friends. Broke the AI within about 6 prompts where no matter what I said it would repeat the same answer word-for-word about going for walks and eating better. Honestly, breaking the AI and laughing at it did more for my mental health than anything anyone could have said, but I’m an AI hater. I wouldn’t recommend anyone in real need use AI for mental health advice.

Fakespot was somewhat accurate at catching when Amazon sellers take a well-reviewed item and swap out the product for another, by changing the title, description, and pictures. We’ve probably all read a review on Amazon that feels like the reviewer is posting a review of a completely different product, like a review that seems to be about a kitchen utinsil on a listing for an unusually affordable camera. It’s a pretty common scam that Fakespot was pretty good at catching. It didn’t seem as good at adjusting ratings for legit products and seemed to kind of randomly knock off a a half to one and a half stars on pretty much every listing, even on quality products.

I was going to say there’s no way they still are since Silverlight was discontinued by Microsoft in 2013, but it is Riot Games so ¯\(ツ)/¯

A bunch of Disney movie sites did for a while, back in the day when every movie had it’s own website with trailers, promo, and a link to buy tickets and/or the DVD release.

I was absolutely on a version of the alt-right pipeline a decade ago. I was raised by far-right, Mike Johnson-style “Christians,” so I was already pretty far down that path before I was drawn into any pipeline.

Luckily, I ended up on a weird libertarian branch of the pipeline (LearnLiberty rather than Prager U), and somehow the YouTube algorithm steered me into Veritasium’s content on climate change, and clips from Adam Ruins Everything. It sounds a bit crazy, but those things started opening my eyes and expanding my worldview. Probably didn’t hurt that my favorite TV show at the time was Leverage, which had plenty of its own anti-corporate-grifting themes.

Eventually, I realized that the Libertarian utopia doesn’t work because greed is an unlimited resource, and that makes regulation important.

Of course, there were other things that helped me escape my upbringing and the alt-right pipeline during gamergate (I wasn’t into gaming at the time, so that probably helped), but looking back and seeing how easily I could have ended up being a January 6 insurrectionist. I’m so thankful for all the little things that nudged me out of that worldview, and helped me see reality.

I wish there was an easy way to show young guys that the people they are listening to are liars and grifters who are manipulating young men into believing that their real pain is somehow the fault of women. But if I look at my own journey, it was a thousand little nudges. I didn’t change overnight, but there was a day during the 2016 election cycle that I remember realizing that even though I had spent almost 8 years despising Obama, that he had been an alright president - especially compared to the Republican nominee, Trump.

Mine (early LCD model) has “Made in China” on the label, which even if most of the parts are made elsewhere, if final assembly is in China, that’s the tariff rate that will apply.

Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the SteamDeck doubles or triples in price before long. We already knew Valve wasn’t making much, if anything, on them, and with a 245% tariff, I kinda doubt they’ll just eat that.

But what qualifies as social media? We can all probably agree that Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, etc. count, but what about say Discord or WhatsApp? How about browsing older forums (like open ones where you don’t need an account to read them)? What about news articles or blogs with a comment section? Is a wiki social media? Depending on how you define it, the majority of the internet could be considered social media.

Plus there are plenty of sites that just won’t ever bother to try to comply. For example, I live in one of the more stupid states in the US that has required age verification for porn sites, PornHub has complied by just blocking their site in the state with a notice that they won’t implement a system like that for privacy reasons. But they and their sister sites are the only ones I’ve seen that have bothered to make any changes. The same will inevitably happen with social media. You’re just going to push kids to shadier corners of the internet that don’t care about laws, and they’re gonna end up radicalized by nazis, or taken advantage of in worse ways.

The whole problem is parents who don’t want to be parents and tell their kids they can’t have a smartphone. And I get that the dumbphone market is kinda limited, and that some parents just don’t care what their kids are exposed to. But trying to fix this problem by changing the internet is never going to work. The only way to fix the problem is to have a spine and make appropriate changes IRL - like banning smartphones for underaged kids in school, or show your full distopian side and prosecute parents who let their kids use social media.