A while ago I read the book Swarmwise by Rick Falkvinge about the process of starting a political movement in Sweden, and some aspects of how their democracy works seemed comparatively impressive to me, and better capable of genuine representation because the barriers to getting started are not so insurmountable. Still, I’m not convinced overall of the narrative of changes to the structure of government being generally positive. You used a technology metaphor, but it’s been a clear trend for tech platforms to actually become worse over time in terms of user agency, privacy and exploitation, something that to me seems mirrored in government. A lot of what people see as solutions to problems take the form of an increase in centralized control and a weakening of barriers to that control, and I see those barriers as the ideological core of how the US was originally designed to work. A specific law might be shown to have positive results in itself, but be achieved by an unsafe concentrating of power. In particular, I think the way the executive branch has been expanding over the last century is very concerning especially with stuff like the Patriot Act and everything associated with it.

Basically, especially right now it’s clear that a lot of the people in power are malevolently insane, incompetent and demented, and it’s really important that we maintain and improve protections to keep them from doing too much damage, so I am skeptical about ideas for major reform especially when the idea is to take the shortest path to policy goals.

Can you give any specific examples

I can agree it’s a little bit racist and wrong to tell the story using that sort of slur, and honestly I kind of think likely the entire story is very racist due to being fake and made up to get a laugh at the expense of Indian people, but if it’s real it seems worse to be knowingly bringing harassment down on your coworkers by intentionally antagonizing people for a laugh when you’re supposed to be doing your job, I think that probably does more actual harm.

This often happens to me on Windows with the Index so it might not even be a Linux specific issue

It’s possible to absorb more or less from your food, for instance someone who is lactose intolerant is not going to gain as much weight from eating the same amount of cheese as someone who is not

Well my point is that Satan is kind of awful too anyways. He is not exactly in opposition to the terrible things God is doing in the Bible and in fact eggs him on so it doesn’t make much sense to be pro-Satan if you are anti-God.

Story of Job is basically

Satan: bet that guy wouldn’t worship you anymore if you ruined his life

God: Totally would, watch me kill his whole family

They are both on team asshole

Total water absorption doesn’t matter that much because the significant thing is surface texture. If you’re going to dry them anyway you might as well instead wash them without directly pouring water on them.

This assumes you’re going to fry them. If you want raw mushrooms in a salad, it’s going to be a lot more noticeable.

Running mushrooms under water makes them soggy, that’s just reality. You can get them just as clean wiping them with a slightly damp paper towel or cloth without that happening.

“We immediately began to sink, they saw that… They heard us all screaming, and yet they still left us,” he told the BBC.

"The first child who died was my cousin’s son… After that it was one by one. Another child, another child, then my cousin himself disappeared. By the morning seven or eight children had died.

It replied that its staff worked “tirelessly with the utmost professionalism, a strong sense of responsibility and respect for human life and fundamental rights”, adding that they were “in full compliance with the country’s international obligations”

…

I used to write that kind of stuff for a living when I was really poor and scraping by, it paid by the word and so low that you could realistically only crack minimum wage if you kept typing continuously and didn’t stop to think or do any research.

Microsoft hasn’t detailed ESU pricing for consumers yet, but the company did previously reveal it will offer these extended updates to consumers for the first time ever

They’re actually gonna make us pirate security updates huh

After all, they - the U.S. and its crappy allies - have declared a war on us without rules!

How about that “no nukes” rule tho

Yes but only if it’s actually secure and safe ie. fully open source

I think framing this as “refusing” to use AI is kind of weird. They believe in doing things the traditional way, great, I think games that use all hand-drawn nondigital art are also cool for going against the grain like that, and making a point of supporting artists is laudable, but it isn’t like anyone is trying to force them not to.

The person who predicted 70% chance of AI doom is Daniel Kokotajlo, who quit OpenAI because of it not taking this seriously enough. The quote you have there is a statement by OpenAI, not by Kokotajlo, this is all explicit in the article. The idea that this guy is motivated by trying to do marketing for OpenAI is just wrong, the article links to some of his extensive commentary where he is advocating for more government oversight specifically of OpenAI and other big companies instead of the favorable regulations that company is pushing for. The idea that his belief in existential risk is disingenuous also doesn’t make sense, it’s clear that he and other people concerned about this take it very seriously.

One unified interface I’ve been enjoying is Stability Matrix, which lets you conveniently switch between different image generation frontends without having duplicates of the model files.

Text generation: LM Studio seems the most user friendly IMO

Voice transcription: I’ve been using AllTalk TTS, was a little frustrating to set up but works

you can’t withdraw it from their ecosystem

They changed that a while ago

So, you’re saying that if I use Coinbase, I could withdraw the keys and have full custody over it after I buy it? Then where’s the custodial catch that I always hear about with Coinbase?

Yes. Idk what specific criticisms you’re referring to but probably just related to how it is a centralized exchange, which does have some genuine drawbacks like reduced privacy, for instance they don’t sell Monero or other privacy coins. The reason I also mentioned Kraken is that it is the only fiat gateway exchange that does sell Monero, with other ones if you want to be private you would have to first buy some non-private crypto, then send to a crypto to crypto exchange to buy a privacy coin and go from there. Also there are a lot of people that just buy crypto on Coinbase and never withdraw it, so for them it’s custodial all the way.

If you are comfortable with PayPal you can buy crypto from them afaik, though I am fairly sure you will have to provide additional KYC info than name and credit card, most of the cryptocurrency community obviously hates KYC and there would absolutely be centralized non-KYC options for buying crypto if it wasn’t blatantly illegal to offer that.

isn’t Coinbase custodial? I will not use custodial exchanges

That’s totally fair but consider that if your intention is to purchase crypto and immediately withdraw it to a personal wallet, there are zero practical drawbacks to an exchange being custodial because they are only holding your crypto in custody for the brief period of time between when you click the buy button and when you click the withdraw button. A DEX with escrow is going to be less custodial than that, but I would call it still a little bit custodial, since even if the escrow person doesn’t have the option to take your crypto for themselves they could still potentially collude with the seller and send it back to them, which means there is a brief window when the crypto you have purchased is not truly under your personal control. You can have a crypto to crypto dex be perfectly non-custodial (ie. Uniswap), but you can’t have a fiat to crypto exchange be perfectly non-custodial.