NCalc+ is pretty good. I don’t use it for anything complicated though.

Yeah, I agree. I do use Flatpaks, Snaps, and Appimages sometimes if I can’t find a suitable deb repo/package. Flatpak is the best out of the three because they do try to avoid too much duplication through runtimes. I also use Docker quite a bit, which has similar issues (and benefits).

I assume the “kill it” comment was a little tongue-in-cheek. On small SBCs, like a Pi, or old hardware, it could be a problem. I’ve seen people with flatpaks taking up 30GB of space, which is significant. I’m not sure how much RAM it wastes. I assume running 6 different applications that have loaded 6 different versions of Qt libraries would also use significantly more RAM than just loading the system’s shared Qt libraries once.

Wastes RAM and disk space (compared to package-manager installed applications) by storing more libraries on disk and loading them into RAM rather than just using the libraries already installed on the distro. It’s probably better than Snap and Appimage though.

Meh, startups and businesses are capitalist organizations, and I think the idea of patents is questionable outside capitalism, so these wouldn’t really be a good metrics. I’d guess the richest countries “innovate” the most because they can support more risky endeavors. The U.S. is the capitalist imperial core, so it probably innovates the most. Other capitalist nations like Haiti, probably not so much.

The best measure of innovation would probably be something like scientific publications. China wins by raw numbers, Vatican City wins per-capita (???).

It’s probably a mix of things, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the politicians most heavily advocating for banning it expect to get some big payout. The first I’ve heard of the TikTok ban was from Trump who was trying to coerce them to sell it to Microsoft (I expect he would’ve got some financial benefit from this). In terms of the data-collection, potentially harmful and biased algorithms, and data exfiltration by government agencies, it’s not like the U.S. companies are much better.

He’s probably talking about the media capitalulating to the Trump campaign by agreeing not to fact check during the Vance/Walz debate. And most recently, the WSJ blocking the Harris endorsement. I.e. a lot of the very rich and powerful people seem to be acting like an authoritarian Trump administration is inevitable, and they’re trying to avoid his wrath or position themselves to be favored oligarchs.

I use LLMs for multiple things, and it’s useful for things that are easy to validate. E.g. when you’re trying to find or learn about something, but don’t know the right terminology or keywords to put into a search engine. I also use it for some coding tasks. It works OK for getting customized usage examples for libraries, languages, and frameworks you may not be familiar with (but will sometimes use old APIs or just hallucinate APIs that don’t exist). It works OK for things like “translation” tasks; such as converting a MySQL query to a PostGres query. I tried out GitHub CoPilot for a while, but found that it would sometimes introduce subtle bugs that I would initially overlook, so I don’t use it anymore. I’ve had to create some graphics, and am not at all an artist, but was able to use transmission1111, ControlNet, Stable Diffusion, and Gimp to get usable results (an artist would obviously be much better though). RemBG and works pretty well for isolating the subject of an image and removing the background too. Image upsampling, DLSS, DTS Neural X, plant identification apps, the blind-spot warnings in my car, image stabilization, and stuff like that are pretty useful too.

Off the top of my head, scenes in:

Poor Things

Nymphomaniac

Antichrist

Requiem for a Dream

Saltburn

It’s neither okay nor sustainable

Source?

You realize mass deportations would decimate the economy? Some cities are 10% undocumented immigrants; Florida is 5% undocumented immigrants. Undocumented immigrants are a significant part of the U.S. economy and culture.

It would also be a horrific endeavor. Police going door-to-door demanding documentation. Probably social surveillance similar to Nazi Germany (along with all the false accusations). 4 million child U.S. citizens would have their parents hauled away. There will need to be concentration camps to hold all those people before travel (if they would actually get around to doing that).

“Law breakers,” isn’t a very good argument. Everybody breaks the law (speeding, jay-walking, etc). The system is currently working as intended, and encouraging people to break the law to acquire an easily exploitable workforce. Incidentally, undocumented immigrants commit far less crime than citizens.

GPL’d clients. Everything is encrypted/decrypted on the client before sending/receiving to/from the server. I may later switch to a self-hosted solution, but don’t want to set one up right now (was using BitWarden’s cloud before).

I just exported my data from BitWarden and imported into ProtonPass. Was pretty easy. Hate the color palette of the app and browser extension though, lol.

Isn’t one of the arguments for raising minimum wage that higher incomes will result in more consumption and social program contribution?

It decreases inhibition as well. IIRC, that’s one reason it’s hypothesised lead exposure contributed to the crime waves, and why blood lead levels are correlated to incarceration.

I have. My bank did a chargeback like they would if it was a credit card. I was told it would’ve been a lot harder to get my money back if my PIN was used. But, I’ve only seen that option available for in-person purchaees.

And most major U.S. media outlets are highly biased toward Israel for some reason. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen the U.S. media this biased on an issue; I have to resort to small outlets like The Intercept or foreign media like Al Jazeera (which are biased in their own way), to stay informed. The only things comparable I can think of is the Iraq-WMD thing, and their perpetual bias against labor rights/for capital.

Looks like the U.S. is going to vote in an oppressive dictatorship to own the libs.

https://spinscore.io/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jta.org%2Farchive%2Fnazis-execute-52000-jews-in-kiev-smaller-pogroms-in-other-cities

Thought this was a Republican ad for a second. Similar language and appeal to fear and ignorance.

AI image generators have been around for a fairly long time. I remember deepfake discussion from about a decade ago. Not saying the image in discussion is though. I remember Alex Jones making conspiracy theories that revolved around Bush and lossy video compression artifacts too.