Some of those are wild to see.

That shit would be forcibly taken from them so fast here in the US, thanks to eminent domain and the worship of corporations exploiting resources to the fullest. I think they’d get paid, just not y’know, have freedom and property rights and shit.

Better use the self-checkout while you still can!

https://www.gs1us.org/industries-and-insights/by-topic/sunrise-2027

Pfft. I’m in my 40s with an established engineering career and a small home that I’ve owned for 18 years now.

I am also not paying for any streaming services I can avoid, not buying many games, sailing the high seas, and our cars are like 13/14 years old.

Because shit is crazy, especially being in the US. I am keeping my world small and focusing on my family and my community.

I’d say do it, and put a lot of effort into the video but keep it generic and don’t mention the company or product by name.

Then in a few months when that shitshow goes under you’ll have the video ready to go for the next place!

I’m convinced that much of, if not most of, society sees technology in our personal lives as a way to (ideally) not have to learn anything or put in one bit of extra effort.

I’ve been getting my hands dirty and doing more things myself over the past few years, and ya know sometimes the journey is more impactful on you as a person than the destination is. Learning things and interacting with the world around you is good.

I’d argue that the rate of decay per atom is actually random, except that the probability per unit time is scaled according to how long the half life is.

You need a shitton of atoms so that you can average out all that randomness and find the emergent property that is half life.

Fortunately, any amount of radioactive material large enough for us to do anything with it does indeed have a shitton of atoms! Avogadro’s number is one of my favorite scientific constants because it reveals the crazy scale of the atoms we take for granted.

Like with U238 and its 4 billion year half life, one mole of just that atom would weigh 238 grams and have 6.022x10^23 atoms. A half-pound or quarter-kilo chunk of very heavy metal that fits in the palm of your hand contains over 602,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms.

Some of those atoms are going to decay today, and some of them will still be radioactive in 100 billion years.

Alarming, but not surprising.

The setup that works for me is LibreWolf as primary browser and Firefox ESR if a site doesn’t work.

I don’t do web development or anything, but I haven’t run into anything that hasn’t worked recently. Librewolf works for almost everything, but if some stupid login page doesn’t like some privacy thing that librewolf is doing, I’ll try one more time with some more loose permissions, then it’s over to normal firefox.

All of those things are true in the US. It is just somehow culturally acceptable here that a third of the cars commuting to the office or stopping at the grocery store are giant trucks that should be commercial vehicles.

I appreciate you sharing, and I mean this as a light-hearted comment and not an insult:

You discussing your difficulties in getting NPD treatment while also capitalizing pronouns referring to yourself is 🤌

But he can see Jesus?

“I can’t see germs so they aren’t real” sounds like the kind of meaningless strawman “got 'em!” argument he might make against atheism or whatever. It would be stupid then, too.

But no, he of course did the more sincere, more stupider straightforward version of that statement.

We all know his history and how ridiculous it is that he has the job he has, etc.

But to read an article from a handful of years ago talking about him as the random worthless propaganda TV host he was at the time… it somehow still stings.

You can run a LOT of Windows applications in Linux with how good compatibility layers have gotten. And there are also VMs as a heavier option.

Granted, for work stuff maybe it would be more convenient not to switch, but it might be interesting to experiment!

Oh it was a long time ago, but not so long ago that it’s suspicious.

Are they really such amazing actors

Unfortunately I don’t think they need to be good actors in the first place.

One of the lessons of the last decade of the shit show that we call human society has been that awful and/or stupid people rise to positions of power and influence every day by acting confident and promising things they can’t deliver.

The modern confidence man isn’t the thief of the street but the legitimate executive.

I’m imagining Microsoft taking it all the way and when you buy a Win13 license key, it basically installs a custom theme in KDE Plasma or maybe Cinnamon.

It might be worse for their profits long term than sticking with their locked down bullshit, but it’s kind of funny to think that they would first make billions of dollars of sales on their linux distro.

AI will replace workers. AI will replace people who make art and music, and write things.

This part made me think how I’ve commented recently that AI does the thing it was designed to do, but that the thing it was designed to do is generate something you could believe somebody wrote on the internet.

That doesn’t mean the answer is correct, of course. It’s often confidently wrong, just like real people online!

But when it comes to artistic expression, there is no clear right or wrong. Music, art, and the written word are some of the most human things we have, but you are absolutely right that they will be replaced. If a marketing director can pay Google a few dollars to generate a hundred concept drawings so they can do “I’ll know it when I see it” design, that’s a human artist job they won’t budget for.

Yep. My disdain for the combination of fascist government where everything is surveillance, and sociopathic corporations and billionaires where everything is a cynical cash grab, overcame me excitement for tech “products” a long time ago. I’m in the US so it’s especially bad.

I still have a smart phone that’s 4-5 years old, and I do of course use it every day, but I consciously avoid using it every hour. I love when I misplace it in my own house, to then not look for it for hours. The only person who is going to message me anything urgent is my wife and she knows where to find me.

Constant phone addiction is one of those situations where when you remove yourself from it you can more easily see it in others. It’s like there’s a new form of body language where when you see that slight forward tilt of the head you know they are in the Phone Zone without even seeing the rest of their body.

They are the starters for the entire Eastern United States!

If we work together comrades, maybe we can get the government’s new death ray to destroy the Orphan Crushing Machine that has been causing issues.

The point is less about those specific activities and more about how roads enable commerce, trade, services, and general economic activity that’s necessary for society.

Roads are not the only solution, of course, but at least where I live it’s the solution that was already built into the infrastructure and city/town layout.