And how exactly do we know for certain that all that juicy web access data complete linked to whatever identifying information associated with a Mozilla account isn’t going to be sold?!

It’s their “Final Solution for the Palestinian problem”

Well, it is supposed to go boom

How about wiring AI chat bots to other AI chat bots?!

“I’m a person taking an order at a fast-food restaurant and you are a person who wants to eat something there but is unable to make their mind about what exactly they want to eat”

(Thinking about it, that prompt makes for a good setup for an improv comedy sketch, though I doubt the chat bot taking the order would be good at emulating a human getting progressivelly more angry whilst trying to remain polite)

It’s for putting down patients that die and turn into zombies.

Massive Arian Master Race vibes on that picture.

Well, I’m not from America either.

My conclusion about how “Russian interference” is just the Democrat’s version of “imigrants are taking your jobs” comes from what I’ve read from American sources and observing a very similar phenomenon in Britain, were the politicial system is quite similar in being a de facto power duopoly thanks to a First Past The Post voting system.

My experience of also living in smaller countries is that they’re way less nationalist, hence local problems are more likely to be seen as having local causes and “blame foreigners” excuses have less traction (though, as we see now in Europe, blaming immigrants does have some traction).

Mind you, I’m not saying that Russia isn’t interfering or that they’re good guys in any way, I’m saying that their influence in a country like the US is a tiny fraction of the influence of the local elites of that country, not least because for almost a century Russia was seen as an enemy of America so there are a lot of antibodies against it there.

As for all this shit in Iran, I think what we’re living is a period of the end of an Empire (the US) and the rise of another (China), all of which is part of a natural cycle (even if it tends to take 100+ years) that happens again and again in History.

In that sense what’s going in Iran is nothing more than a consequence of the latter part of the fall of a empire when some kind of populist strongman promising a return to the time of greatness gets power in the decadent, weakened, Empire center and then proceeds to do all manner of actions that further weaken it. Historically getting into stupid wars to distract the masses from internal problems or in the hope of using captured resources to prop-up the Empire, all under the mistaken belief that the Empire is still powerful, is pretty common of such End Days Of Empire leaders.

IMHO, this war is not really about Iran - Iran and Iranians are just the unfortunate victims of the death throes of Imperium America

Exactly.

The “foreign bogeyman” is the single most common way for those holding to power they do not deserve, to keep holding it.

In fact this is so common that it doesn’t just apply to authoritarian regimes like that in Iran, but also both of “couldn’t care less about common people” parties in the US (“immigrants” being the Republican bogeyman and “Russia” being the Democrats’) and even to Bibi’s desperatelly holding to power in Israel in order to avoid jail time for Corruption.

So nations willingly playing that bogeyman role towards Iran actually strengthen the regime.

And this is just the side of “utility for sociopaths in power”. There are also the genuine believers who think they’re doing what they have to do for their country and whose belief that “we have to remain in power no matter what or this country will be destroyed” is also reinforced by foreign countries acting against their country, the worse those actions the stronger that believe and the more extreme actions they will accept to “protect my country”.

Given the long history of foreign intervention in Iran and how this regime rose to power as on the back of a popular uprising following the spark of democracy in Iran being crushed and the dictatorship of the Shah restored by foreign powers, I suspect both of these dynamics are strongly at play there.

Compared to what Israel did to Palestinians, those horrible figures are rookie numbers.

Same thing if compared with the numbers of deaths in Iraq as direct and indirect result of the American Invasion (estimates I’ve seen were of over 100k killed directly and over 1.2 million indirectly) as well as in countries in that area were Western nations imposed “regime change” like Libya were people are still dying due to the chaos and infighting between the warlords that took over when Kadhafi was killed.

Even a murderous regime such as the one of the Ayatollahs is nothing next to what countries like America and Israel do when they succeeded in Regime Change in the Middle East, and especially when they get control of a country there.

Certainly given the raging racism of its population and what it has done to merelly the 2 million people in Gaza, the Israelis gaining control of a muslim country of 90 million people would likely result in a Genocide of such incredible proportions that it would push the Holocaust itself into a minor footnote in the history of mass murder.

The US and Israel would be way worse for Iranians than even that murderous theocratic regime.

This is why this specific war is way more important than even that murderous crackdown.

So it uses up way more hardware and power whilst not improving the part of the game were the fun is: gameplay.

What’s next NVidia, an AI driver that plays the game for you?!

DLSS 7: You don’t even need gamers to play the game. AI will play the game for you.

(Wasn’t that a Microsoft patent?)

It can check if people are typing or using the mouse.

It’s also possible to use the camera of a notebook to track if a person is present and looking at the screen or not.

Any company using that shit is the kind that uses “bums of seats” rather than actual deliverables as a measure of performance, which means they’re also the kind of place were unpaid overtime is the norm and, if in dev, things like projects often ending up in a death march stage - such places are stupidly inneficient and badly managed with a disfunctional work culture.

Avoid such companies like the plague - you’ll be luck if the worst that happens is insane work hours.

Never, ever, EVER use your personal equipment for work.

There are a ton of legal reasons for that, not just around who owns the Copyright of work done on that machine as well as licensing of the software running in it (most commercial software has different licensing conditions for personal and commercial use) but also because if there’s some kind of legal case against that company your equipment might very well be confiscated as part of an investigation.

Also, more in general, if you have personal practices which are legally dubious or often frowned upon (piracy, porn) you don’t do it in the same machine where you’re doing your professional work, definitelly not on a work machine but even in your own machine it’s risky (see the point above about how your machine might end up confiscated and examined by the authorities if the company is investigated). The principle of “you don’t shit were you eat” applies here.

Even for your own company, it’s best to have the company stuff separate from personal stuff.

Beyond that, it’s also a very good idea in terms of having a good work-life balance to separate the personal from the professional: ideally you keep a very strong separation between work and not-work, at all levels, from work time and outside-work time to work/personal machine and work/personal phone - it helps make clear both for yourself and, even more importantly, others, that there is no work outside work, which reduces the chances of management doing things like call you on weekends or evenings with questions and makes it easier for them to accept when they try it and you say “I’m not at work now, so I’ll pick this up first thing when I’m back at work” - the cleaner and harder the split the less room there is for the “barely in control, almost 100% reactive” kind of manager to sneak work stuff into your personal-time.

It very much depends on what you’re developing for.

Back when I did server-side development (which almost invariably is targetting Linux servers), having Linux as my dev environment was much better if only because I could run parts (or even all) of our server code directly in my machine configured as a Dev Environment.

However, for example, for Game Dev running Linux is much more of a problem because some tools are for Windows and you have to jump through hoops to make it run in Linux, if at all.

If you’re doing development on internal frontend systems for use by the Business side of a non-Tech company, then Windows is almost certainly the best dev OS because the software is meant to run in Windows machines (as that’s what the Business runs, unless we’re talking about creative companies, in which case it will be Mac) so the very same reasons why Linux is better for server dev apply here for Windows - it way more straightforward to develop in a machine where you can directly test at least parts of the code within the OS it will be running in.

Yeah, you can run virtual machines or deploy to a dev server, but that just adds extra steps and hence extra overhead for frequently done things like running small snippets of code whilst developing just to check it’s working as expected.

Then there’s the whole big company vs small company side of things: big companies have dedicated IT Support people and those will naturally try to standardize things for the obvious reason that it’s way more effective (same thing in dev, by the way, good Technical Architects try to keep the number of programming languages used low because its generally more efficient to have libraries, frameworks, maintenance and hiring practices around a smaller number of languages than it is to do it for many languages) which in turn means that in large companies “everybody gets the same” is an almost unassailable policy except for top-level management.

I’ve worked in all sizes of companies, in various industries and 3 different European countries.

In my experience it very much depends on the industry the company in, the division one is working in and the size of the company.

Engineering types in an Engineering/Tech company using Linux isn’t at all unusual in smaller and mid-sized companies. Sales types or accounting, definitelly are using Window. Creatives tend to use Macs, mainly because the Adobe suite runs perfectly in it and the hardware is superior to PC hardware - designer types almost literally salivate at things like 4K monitors.

Real startups (so, not mature Tech companies that try and still be startups) will definitelly have their devs running whatever they want, whist for example big financial institutions will have everybody on Windows, except perhaps top-level management if they’re quirky and prefer Mac for some reason or other.

Then to this add that the kind of professional who not only prefers Linux but can actually say “bye, bye” if they don’t get it is almost certainly be a pretty senior Techie (say, a Senior Designer Developer) and even now those are pretty hard to find for a permanent employment position (you can’t replace those with AI or outsourcing, not even close, and in the path to such seniority many devs who keep on progressing eventually step into management instead of staying on the Technical career track) - outside a large company (were the hiring manager doesn’t have the pull to make it happen), it a pretty good idea to let them use whatever OS they want in their work machine, even if it has to be with the proviso that they won’t be getting any support for it from the IT Support group (which, trust me, they will be fine with).

If a hiring manager has the pull for it and there are no regulatory reasons to make it be otherwise, it’s pretty dumb not to let a rare resource like a really senior dev use whatever the fuck they want on their work PC if that’s going to allow you hire/keep that person.

Why won’t somebody think about the poor land-thieving child-murdering Israelis…

Consoles have mainly operated following the razor and blades economic model: sell the console at or near cost and then sell the games at much higher prices than PC games.

Overall they were always an inferior financial choice vs the PC because that extra costs for console games didn’t take that many games to exceed the savings in upfront costs of buying a console over a PC - turns out that plenty of games which aren’t ultra-realistic extravaganzas with budgets in the 100s of millions of dollars are also fun because gameplay is more important than graphics, and there are tons of those for the PC and they’re way cheaper than the latest AAA fancy-graphics with meuh gameplay games that are console exclusives.

Worse, this was the before: nowadays a console itself isn’t really all that much cheaper than a PC, so even the upfront saving isn’t there anymore.

Unsurprisingly consoles have been losing ground to PCs.

You are correct.

A little digging shows that unlike the CE mark in the EU for electronics, “UL certification isn’t mandatory, but may be required when selling electronic items to retailers”.

UL certification is a requirement for an electric or electronic product to be licensed for sale to consumers in the US. This is enforced on US manufacturers of a product and on importers.

Whilst people buying something from AliExpress for personal use and importing it themselves don’t have to obbey such requirements, those importing them or making them for sale in the US do.

The CE mark does the same thing in the EU.

No idea if in the US there are further licensing requirements for things to be connected to the grid that would close the importing for personal use loophole.

In the age of MBA management, the removal of resilience such as fallback systems because “they’re doing nothing” is the norm.

Nowadays Engineering stuff isn’t done according to Engineering Principles if it conflicts with short term profit maximization.