I think maybe Lina Inverse from Slayers. But picking a favorite is hard.

I’m still sad about the day the real Opera with the presto rendering engine died. And while Vivaldi is getting many of the features and functionality, it’s still a chromium rebuild. I guess it just takes too much money to build your own rendering engine anymore.

It seems like they already cooperate about as much as is likely, so this is mostly symbolic. I also question whether Russia, China or India - the political players here in my limited opinion, will let UAE throw around more political weight just because they joined BRICS. Heck, China and India are more political competitors than partners.

One thing I wish there was were more plugins (and maybe I just don’t know of them) for like Kagi’s assistant, or other vendors than just OpenAI for something like CoPilot.

I have to say, I think I was very lucky because College prepared me for most aspects of my job.I really can’t think of one that it could have prepared me for that it didn’t - like it didn’t teach me the specific bureaucratic processes for purchasing or getting approval from management etc, but how could it? I’m also lucky to be working in my field many years on.

Ehhh, I’d say that expecting results really varies by the job. Or at least the results are usually KPI that are easily gameable if you don’t care about trying for a random bonus. I kept a job and got pay raises by basically doing the minimum and slacking off pretty hard for a while. I worked another job where they mostly wanted someone to be a warm body ready to talk to a customer, but otherwise didn’t really know if / what you did.

Oh, college prepared me for that with unrelated classes that were requirements. And random other bullshit.

Honestly, I think it would be better if we had actual trained councilors / therapists to take some tickets, maybe as a different department that was trained on taking or working with the same ticketing system but also handling confidentiality correctly. The people who contact IT just to talk or to bitch about the current state of the world as seen through a technology lens, or those who are overstressed about tech… I’m not really a people person, I’m a tech person, hence why I didn’t go into social services or the like.

The military history wasn’t so useful but there’s way more history made without guns than with them.

I’d argue that a lot of people have found Sun Tzu useful way outside of a military context, but also it’s useful IMO to see where force fails or succeeds, and not just militarily. I might argue (as just an armchair person) that hostile takeovers etc might have some analogs. Stuff like comparing how various empires handled integrating conquests might sort of apply to mergers (though maybe that’s not exactly military)… Even just the importance and limitations of morale in sprints etc.

My only interaction with Substack is that one podcast moved there for premium content. I thought it was mostly for written newsletters, which I always wondered how much of a market there actually is for paying for one newsletter, but then again I guess it’s just the written version of podcasts so I guess there is a market. Though promoting Nazi content gives me a lot of pause.

There’s actually a service called jolly rodger that you can forward calls to that uses AI and such to try and do this. It’s pretty cheap, under $20 a year (and also does voicemail and transcribes the calls to a text). I think it does cut down on junk calls, they tend to just hangup.

Honestly I never had a problem with MicroUSB and haven’t really seen a benefit to USB-C for basic charging of devices. I guess some might charge faster, but USB-C is so screwed up that you need a magic mix of cable, charger and device to get more than baseline anyway, it works the same as MicroUSB for me.

Honestly I’m constantly amazed it was on this long. I think not having ratings or traditional competition lets streaming shows go longer than they should.

It was never that good, and it just started declining from the pilot. I slogged through S3 due to “giving it a fair chance”, and I regret that every time I think about S3, which I’ve mostly forgotten. ANY other sci fi show and I would have dropped it probably in the first episode, or at my most tenacious in the first season.

I would guess America is so wildly diverse, like most countries, that there’s no real “Average American”. Sure, median income isn’t great and recent inflation has screwed with poorer people all the way through to probably upper middle class.

However, I don’t think there’s “one reason” for people being / feeling poor. It also depends on what you mean by “life changing”.

Anyway - I’d say there’s are very poor people. Some of this is generational poverty, some of it is no family support, some of it is addiction, some of it is mental illness, some of it is bad choices. A social safety net would really help here. For whatever reason the US is against much of one.

There’s working poor, where supposedly the value they bring to a company isn’t sufficient to pay a living wage. I guess elsewhere this is government forced to be a higher minimum wage way more than in the US. This I think is also leading to lots of apathy now in service workers, which means atrocious service at most places, which is finally starting to impact people higher up the income chain. Though it’s usually scoffing that no one is doing a good job anymore.

Middle class people get squeezed by inflation a LOT, and children are incredibly expensive. As you get into middle middle and upper middle classes there’s also the spending problems. This is either driven by lack of or failures of public options, so people are paying for home schooling / private schooling, paying ever more out of pocket to get access to medical care at ever higher rates, and really any service needed can be astronomical or else often worse than doing nothing unless you know a guy. There’s also all the credit card debt that with higher interest rates are squeezing people even more. Some of this is unnecessary spending running out of control, but some of it is lack of wages keeping up with inflation mixed with many things having way more ongoing costs than they used to. Either they have planned obsolesce (Back in the 90s no one had to buy a new landline phone, or wireless phone every 2 years), they have subscriptions (again, in the 90s you bought a car or a radio, you bought a computer, you bought a game, whatever - it lasted with no ongoing payments), and many things just don’t last at all. Then there’s the interest in experiences - which is a transient thing, so you’re always paying for a new one. I’d also say there’s a huge burden on everyone related to college - and it is getting less obvious by the year if that hit in loan payments “forever” is worth the supposed economic boost. My parents grew up when college was like $8,000 max for 4 years and room etc - you could work your way through it, and the boost to lifetime expected earnings was pretty easy to overshadow the effort or loan if any needed. I might have been the last generation to get through with $20k in debt from 4 years, which while I’m still paying on isn’t enough to overshadow the earning benefits. Today (and for the last 15 years or more) it’s more and more for a 4 year degree, while the expected positions aren’t going up in pay very much at all. But if you do go to college that’s going to hit you and your parents for a long time also.

As you get to upper middle and upper class - upper middle is scared shitless by the inflation, wage increase demands, etc that might cause them to fall out of that class, so they can feel “poor” even though they’re far from it.

TL;DR: there are a lot of poor Americans, and many who are “doing OK” either drowning in debt or just feeling insecure even if not technically poor.

I’m pretty sure in the US this is already answered as “no”. The reason is - non-persons in the legal sense cannot hold copyrights at all. This was tested with photographs I think taken by a monkey and maybe a bear. The AI isn’t a legal person, so cannot have copyright.

That’s not to say humans can’t take an AI image, and manipulate it / clean it up / etc and have copyright in the final result if they do a minor level of touching up or more.

Of course, I find the idea of copyright and IP rights in general as usually expressed pretty insane anyway. The AI “conundrum” is just another point showing how nonsensical IP laws are when you actually think about them and the supposed things they’re meant to accomplish.

I actually use waterproof earbuds because I don’t want to blare my podcast or whatever to everyone in the house.

If only there was actually a good car dashcam, but every time I go down that rabbit hole I give up frustrated. The quality (build, mounting, video, whatever) is shit in pretty much all of them, and the “passable” ones look like a web cam from 2005 still.

Really only if you eat a lot of rice. For once a year or so, a pot on the stove works just fine. The actual benefit I’ve see for ricecookers is how well they can hold the rice for hours ready to go, but that’s more of a commercial benefit I think.

Yea, I was never exactly in sales (Geek Squad in store employee is the closest I ever came) but I remember thinking everyone who was like lets get rid of commission in retail sales were very mislead. I still remember the difference in Sears employees in the 90s when I first got a PC and the salesman actually knew to look at the box of the game I was trying to buy and make sure it’d run on my PC before selling it to me. I also remember them knowing about the stuff they sold. This is because with commission, even in small towns you could make a career of it and you’d have actual experienced staff in the stores. As far as I could ever tell, the good salespeople wanted you to trust them, and not to just make a one time huge sale - they wanted you to come back again and again.

Once they all went to non-commission, I recall that being a “selling point” of the stores, but now all you had was a rotating cast of highschool and college summer workers who cared exactly as much as minimum wage paid them to care… i.e. not at all. And they occasionally became unable to even read the boxes they were “selling”. It turned them into less efficient cash register attendants.