New kinds of water, you say? The marketing department is already on it and boy have I got news for you!

People have been trying to make it a thing for a while. I don’t know whether or not it started at a news outlet, but multiple news outlets have picked it up, so…

Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.

Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It’s one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we’re still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.

You realize that’s because the gigantic server farms powering all of this “AI” are orders of magnitude more powerful than the sum total of all of those idle home PC’s, right?

Folding@Home could likely also do in it in under a second if we threw 70+ TERAwatt hours of electricity at server farms full of specialzed hardware just for that purpose, too.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimming

Basically, the rocking back and forth she’s doing as a coping behavior.

Yeah, it TOTALLY doesn’t have anything to do with him getting caught tripping balls on camera right next to his lady friend at the White House table who was so disassociated that the poor girl couldn’t stop stimming.

I would be doubled over laughing for a good ten minutes if I accidentally smacked some NPC and got “randi ke beej” yelled at me.

Original pre-microsoft Skype was not AS bloaty. It ran on my underpowered PC at the time with no issues.

Several patches/versions/whatever after Ms gutted the p2p aspect and centralized the servers, it slowed waaaaaay the hell down.

Make of that anecdotal evidence what you will.

LOL

Ten years ago I would have just blocked the MAC address.

Agreed, that’s critical. That said, I periodically subscribe to all of those, and all of the ones I’ve tried in the last year on Firefox on Debian, have worked perfectly. If there’s any left that still don’t, I haven’t tried/encountered them.

That’s great news and it gives me a lot of hope.

You raise some great points though. The average user isn’t going to use workarounds or alternatives, so we should focus on actually solving the problem instead of saying use this instead.

These kinds of things are the first things that come to mind when people start going all “Linux is ready for $blah” because while I can figure out how to deal with these issues, they’re invariably the first things I get phone calls from my non-IT-career friends about when they switch to Linux.

Windows changes insane amounts of interface whatnot on the regular, users can usually figure THAT out, finally, no matter what OS they’re using.

It’s the stuff that just works out of the box on windows or Mac but doesn’t on Linux that’s at issue, and it’s what will continue to halt widespread adoption at the casual user level, unfortunately.

The ability to stream media from legit paid sources. (Netflix, Comcast, max, disneyplus, prime, I don’t know where the list is currently, but anything that bitches about user agent.)

TPM.

The ability to play multiplayer games that rely on anti-cheat ( seriously, make Linux a hit with the fortnite crowd and the upcoming generation will think of windows as boomerware )

The ability to use an HDMI cable at full speed. (It’s the leading A/V cable standard and the only one some people understand. )

Then there’s the stuff I’m unsure of the current status of but that I know was a problem once upon a time: Online banking, online doctor stuff, encrypted emails from mainstream providers, you know, anything that could qualify as “every day stuff” that works out of the box on windows and yet sometimes requires complicated (for grandma) setup on Linux.

The belief that everyone decrying Harris’ stance on Gaza was knowingly or unknowingly participating in enabling a worse stance on Gaza than the still-not-great one we would have gotten with her.

Look back now with hindsight and tell me what would be better for Palestinians in Gaza. What we’re getting with trump in charge? Or what we might have gotten if every single person who said negative things about Harris’ stance had instead focused solely on how Trump’s stance was objectively worse per his own words.

By not putting the focus on the absolutely 100% guaranteed WORSE stance of the two, people enabled talking points that led, in part, to where we are now.

THAT is why so many of us screaming about harm reduction and the lesser of two evils is SO pissed off about single-issue Gaza voters not putting in for Harris.

Stop letting perfect be the enemy of good. It leads to this.

Elections are about holding your nose and making the best of a bunch of imperfect choices.

Trying to make it anything else from the top down is folly. You have to start from the bottom up. Until that happens, we will never see our way out of a two party system.

Until he wasn’t.

Lucas was eventually quite against large swaths of the EU.

It doesn’t change how many people enjoyed it.

I think we can both agree things would be vastly different if Tolkien were still alive, but what I sincerely doubt anyone can agree on is what that would look like.

Just look at how many origins there are for orcs.

Not even Tolkien was a Tolkien purist, read some of his letters where he explained the overarching subject matter.

Originally, the Hobbit wasn’t intended to be connected to the Middle Earth stories of involving sauron and the rings at all, he didn’t even think it was set in the same world at first.

I think getting all up-in-arms about stuff that was still evolving and growing until the moment he died is a bit ridiculous.

Rings of Power is definitely MORE THAN ENOUGH into the realm of “in the spirit of” for me to personally find it highly enjoyable.

I’m having a hard time figuring out why so many people seem to have such an abiding need to specifically shit into other people’s bowls of Wheaties the instant they find out they poured them from the box with the Harfoot biathlon team on the cover, though.

Considering the amount of whipped-up outrage I saw years ago when the first picture of a black female dwarf was revealed, I’m finding myself wondering if a bunch of actual fans are getting caught up in a driven sentiment that has nothing to do with fandom for Tolkien’s actual work and more to do with a few overly vocal groups finding every niche, crack, and crevice they can to put a negative spin on representation in any form.

I am. I absolutely love it.

In my mind this is no different than the 90s when we got a BUNCH of “extended universe” Star wars stuff, some of which went in some unusual directions.

My friends and I didn’t care because it was MORE STAR WARS!

This is MORE MIDDLE EARTH! And it’s AWESOME because of it in my mind.

I can’t wrap my brain around how picky and critical so many people are these days.

Like, does anyone remember when it was nigh impossible to get stuff to watch in genres you liked? That was way worse in my mind than “the lightsabers look weird”.

More like “sales teams are the reason middle managers think ALL employees slack off when not watched.”

I get that sales is a SUPER depressing culture, a ridiculously antiquated work environment, and full of some utterly soul-sucking mandates from above, but I have never seen, in any workplace, a team that needs someone constantly riding herd on them like the sales team.

Every place I’ve worked, every place that a place I’ve worked has had as a client, and every business I’ve ever visited had the same problem – sales people are largely unmotivated because their job has a much higher chance to SUCK OUT LOUD than most of the other jobs at a given company.

When five figure quarterly bonuses, daily friendly team competitions for gift cards, more paid-for-by-the-company outings than the c suites get and pickle ball on company time twice a week aren’t enough to hype people up to do their actual job, something is really fucking wrong with the job expectations.

Some of it is about the "Why"s.

Netflix nearly stamped out piracy for a while there by being a vastly more attractive alternative. Between them and Hulu, and to a lesser extent prime(at the time) if it was streaming, you could watch it somewhere at a reasonable price for a marginally reasonable viewing experience that was at least as good as most TPB downloads.

Then the IP owners got greedier and decided to strike out on their own with the “everyone has a streaming service” model, which would be GREAT if they largely shared content, but they don’t.

The greed continues, not in order to adequately compensate creators, but to make a few handfuls of people not just rich but filthy rich. Every action they take suddenly becomes more penny pinching for more greed. At this point lots of the CONTENT CREATORS wish they had a better choice (how often do they say ‘please watch it this way, that’s just how they rank stuff, sorry’?)

Why is it the opposite with AI?

Because in comparison with stuff like streaming video or music platforms, AI is BARELY pretending to offer a functional service in exchange for the greed that’s behind all of the money they’re trying to force it to make for them.

And that’s just for one side of the debate.

Why isn’t the fact that AI is largely garnering the same responses even from DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED GROUPS telling you something about how bad of an idea it is in it’s current incarnation?

Chips.

No coke, Pepsi.

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What is this, a bot post with an imperfect scraper behind it?

Pronounced like “hope” without the “h”, it is indeed a local (Midwestern U.S.) "expression.

It is, mostly, a “shorthand apology”.

“Ope, just gonna squeeze right past you and grab the ranch” (dressing) or “Ope, grab the butter while you’re up whydoncha?”, or “Ope, I spose it’s about that time.”

In the context of that sticker, it’s more like a “sorry, not sorry” but less intense and more polite.

I wonder how much of the state of the place upon that inspection was DUE to:

The plant has been shut down since late July

Like, did they say “we’re shutting down” and everyone just fucked off and left the place in a state?

Or was it just that bad ALL the time?