Aside from the occasional hit show, the real product is the illusion of choice.

The problem is that the more you fight change, the more you change things. Your movement becomes more and more focused on resisting change, and less focused on preserving any good qualities it once had. It's an inescapable bit of futility, hard coded into the human condition.

And they've even got one that leaves his shirt untucked! Definitely a wide range of experience and viewpoints in this squad.

What happens when, because it's so quick and easy to churn out, 50% or more of the web is AI generated slush, which is then scraped and incorporated into the next generation of LLMs, which increases that percentage and in turn is then scraped, and so on, and so on?

How low can the quality of your training data drop before the results become intolerably bad? How do you raise the quality of that data without a massive investment of human labor? How much glue will be told to put on our pizza two years from now?

Generative AI could be a powerful tool, but even ignoring ethical considerations, this seems like a profoundly bad way to imement it.

Seems like they adopted the world fucking, transformed it, and diversified it into new areas. World fucking used to be about war, finance, manufacturing, and pollution. Now it's about war, finance, media, fashion, manufacturing, the internet, politics, tech, society, food supplies, religion, pollution, and making the rich feel better about themselves.

I feel that the majority of innovation occuring in modern capitalism is confined to two key areas:

1. Regulatory capture and market control.

2. New ways to mindfuck people into overpaying for goods and services.

Permanently Deleted

Seconded.

I've got a pair of Skullcandy Mods. The sound quality is decent but not stellar, battery life is good, charge time is good and they feel pretty solidly made. Pretty good deal for $40 on Amazon.

I previously had some of their ANC overears that while not spectacular, were much better than I expected given the price point.

This. I just want to write something I'm somewhat satisfied with and have people appreciate it.

I switched in 2021 and I thought the same then.

I usually recommend Mint, Zorin, MX Linux and Pop OS starting out. But since Linux is free, all it costs you is time and energy if you want to shop around. DistroWatch.com has an expansive database of distributions.

There's a lot of good reading material and tutorials out there. And while you might find some folks who can be dismissive or elitist in the community, genuinely helpful and friendly people are out there too, so don't be afraid to ask for help.

Mint is pretty good at "it just works" thing and has a very friendly UI. It also comes with a few very handy tools developed in house by the Mint team (though these can be installed on other Debian/Ubuntu based distros). It's usually high on the list of recommended distros for people new to Linux or who just need general purpose computing without a lot of fuss.

I figured it was a given. If Trump gets elected, climate change accelerates. Does anyone think any different?

I have a few servers that I've put together, both towers and rack mount, that are fairly old in IT terms but would still sell for thousands used.

I pulled most of the parts out of the trash.

Ishmael

Forrest got it.

Wait, Gibbs is the least compelling character on the show. Maybe I just see things in a different light, but the only thing that separates this from a bog standard police procedural is watching all the other characters try to deal with the fallout from Gibb's hollywood issue most-tragic-backstory-ever trauma and solving the mystery of why he hasn't been shuffled off to a desk job where he can't do much harm yet.

All of the supporting characters had more depth, development, and more relatable back stories.

EDIT: Mark Harmon is the executive producer, that explains everything. That should teach me to post without reading the full article, but honestly it won't.

Yup, it's easier for a user to justify a small purchase and lose track of how much they're spending and that's exactly why they do it.

It's the same with in-app currency, they sell you 100 coins or gems or whatever for $2.99, then charge you 75 for the shortcut to the progression required upgrade. You don't want to let a quarter of your money go to waste, so you're more tempted to put another $2.99 down to utilize it and buy the next upgrade. Cue the leveling treadmill.

It's a sort of weaponization of the study of human behavior IMO.

Yup, and as I said, it's possible that I'm attributing these design changes to the wrong thing, but it's hard not see them as greed driven when you consider what's happening in other parts of our digital lives.

It was more due to the way a lot of the games I liked to play started to make changes to gameplay to try and push players to spend more money. Unnecessarily long grinds with subscription based paid shortcuts, freemium/premium BS, game modes that started to require you to be online for a certain amount of time each week to progress.

Gaming was always more of a social thing for me, and once it started to feel like an unpaid, part time job for me and my friends it stopped being fun.

EDIT: I may be projecting dark patterns onto something that's just driven by market forces these days, but I kind of doubt it.