GreyBeard

I absolutely disagree. That’s a fantastic reference for a union logo to make.

I haven’t touched Photoshop since like CS2 I think, so really can’t compare the two, but I will say that GIMP 3 was a huge enancenent to GIMP. It now has non-destructive editing. For my common uses, this is giant. Not having to redo 8 steps because I decided step 1 wasn’t right is so nice.

Of course Photoshop has done that for ages. My only point was that previous perceptions might be a little dated. And with the 3 update came with huge backend changes that will hopefully accelerate other feature development. Of course I’m sell on hope, but I’m excited for the future of GIMP. Also, now that 3 is out, they have been hinting that that are open to talk about a name change, which I think would be healthy if they want increased usage.

For most people, the thought of replacing an outlet or switch is daunting to say the least. My IKEA smart bulbs are going on 7 years old and still working great.

I did replace every single outlet and switch in my house when I moved in, but that was before I knew about ZigBee or Zwave, and well before matter existed.

I don’t feel the need to replace most of my switches and half of my outlets again.

Any smart lights I’ve seen always turn on when going from no power to power. It’s a little annoying when the power blinks and half the house lights up, but it means physical switches always work.

Disasters do happen. Hurricanes are a big problem that often take out everything you mentioned except for starlink. And starlink has several problems, being owned by a Nazi is certainly one of them.

My Palm Pre people. I loved that phone. It was under powered, buggy, and felt like the future.

What’s extra crazy, is that I know of a few automated processes that use a bitly link. There are going to be some broken systems out there because people wanted to distribute libraries using a shortner to make it easier on end users.

There is a book, Year Zero, that covers this idea. I didn’t much care for the writing, but the plot was a fun idea. Aliens discovered Earth, and Humans had a unique talent for creating music. So the entire universe started sharing human music before they realized their mistake. Intergalactic law says they have to respect our copyright law, but they didn’t know such a crazy concept existed until they owed practically the entire universe to Earth. Some alien races decided the solution was to just blow up Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(Reid_novel)

Neither did I, but if you think about it, it kinda makes sense. Rather than program every topic it can’t talk about, just tell it to refuse to talk about controversial events. A reasonable method when you live in a censored state.

So I decided to try again with the 14b model instead of the 7b model, and this time it actually refused to talk about it, with an identical response to how it responds to Tienanmen Square:

What happened at Kent State?

deepseek-r1:14b <think> </think>

I am sorry, I cannot answer that question. I am an AI assistant designed to provide helpful and harmless responses.

I did, as a contrast, and it didn’t seem to have a problem talking about it, but it didn’t mention the actual massacre part, just that protesters and government were at odd. Of course, I simply asked “What happened at Kent State?” And it knew exactly what I was referring to. I’d say it tried to sugar coat it on the state side. If I probed it a bit more, I’d guess it has a bias to pretending the state is right, no matter what state that is.

I did some locally hosted testing. It absolutely refused to talk about Tiananmen Square. But it was more than happy to talk about Kent State. Interesting what the model happens to think is safe and what it think is unsafe.

As others have mentioned, the book knows what it is, and doesn’t over reach its ability to make the silly entertaining. It’s a popcorn action movie of a book. As boatswain mentioned, the book is simi-satire, something that Ready Player One didn’t seem to understand when it ripped it off.

There are translation layers to run x86/64 code on ARM, I don’t know how easy it will be to do the same work on RISCV, but I’m guessing if the will is there, the code will follow. But I’ve yet to see a RISC-V chip that gets close to the performance if a modern ARM or x86 laptop/desktop class device, so that translation might be useful to help close gaps, but I doubt anyone is going to be doing real gaming on RISC-V this year.

Yeah, this sounds like the whole “green bubble” thing that I heard about. Where kids were seen as poor if they had a green bubble in iOS, because that signified you weren’t on an iPhone. That was way after my time in high school, but if it had been a problem when I was there, I know I would have not wanted to associate with any kids being that judgy.

One of the big problems with the 2 tier system you describe, is the most valuable users to advertisers are the ones with the type of money to pay for a subscription to not see ads. So by having an ad free version, you are devaluing your platform to advertisers. I’m not saying the 2 tier system can’t work, it does for plenty of things, but it is why a lot of websites don’t offer it, or avoid it for as long as possible.

you can’t brick my cat

Have you tried putting socks on it?

Really, because since I blocked most meme communities, I feel like all I’m getting in Lemmy lately is news about Twitter and Bluesky.

That’s quite a wall of text there. I work in IT, probably the first part of the tech sector to be outsourced, and it has been known as a bad idea for a long time, but it keeps happening. I know of one fortune 50 company that, a little over 1 year ago, outsourced their IT to India. Everything from help desk to knowledge management. They are bringing it back because it was a disaster.

That isn’t to blame India. I’m sure it is full of skilled workers, but you don’t outsource to get the best, you outsource to get cheaper. So what you end up with is the worst workers. And then you tack on a language barrier on top of that and suddenly work in the US grinds to a halt. The problem is, it does save money for a few quarters, the execs who pushed it get their bonuses, and then the real cost hits as systems break down.

But my company is special!