I think the point they’re trying to make is that racism is a state of mind, and opening oneself up to being racist against a non-human or imaginary thing can open the floodgates to more “real” forms of racism against fellow humans.

Basically the difference between anthropomorphizing bots while one expresses their dislike for interacting with them vs. expressing one’s dislike of being forced to interact with a machine that is made to feel like interacting with a person but isn’t.

I’m not sure how I feel about this sentiment I’ve described, but it’s one I’m open to arguments on since as a white dude I come into it with a mountain of privilege that likely blinds my view of things

When it comes to PC OEMs I’ve observed that right now Dell has really good driver support. They’ve got increasingly good utilities for keeping drivers up to date and they’ve been doing a good job of loading drivers and their utilities into Microsoft’s relevant repositories where it makes sense, and that driver support tends to actually last multiple years. I can often pull down a new UEFI update for a 5 year old Dell PC, which is not something I can say of most hardware manufacturers.

So at the threat model of an enterprise org, I’d prefer Dell for that reason alone. Lenovo and HP have tried to implement some of that, HP seems to have given up after building the bare minimum and Lenovo has their typical wonky software that will become good after a few years if they keep investing developer time into it, but knowing Lenovo there’s about a 60% chance some new executive will come in and change direction, and the software will be made increasingly unusable then later discontinued due to lack of use

However for my personal computers, there’s a high chance it won’t even be running Windows so I just buy based on hardware & price alone

My very first desk job was an outsourced support role where 99% of calls we simply found the answer in the user manual and provided that to them. The other 1% was usually something isoteric we’d forward on to someone within the company. The amount of callers who’d say “I’ve read the user manual cover to cover and I just can’t figure out how to…” And I’d just try to page 12 on the PDF and read them the instructions word for word

At the scale of HP, I can see the logic. You know that, say 60% of calls are directly covered by the knowledge base because you have those metrics. That’s means 60% of their support overhead could be eliminated if they somehow got people to read those documents. Hardware sales usually have very thin margins and a customer contacting support can easily cost more in support than the entire profit margin of the product (and often it’s a self-inflicted problem) and of course an RMA for most products basically negates all profit from that sale. It’s a real business challenge and the asshole solution is to simply tie people up for 15 minutes in the phone system before connecting to a human to see how many people hang up and how much that reduces support load

I tried that and gave up after a year because it was getting old running to the library every few months to print that one page I needed for something odd that came up. Granted it’s been one of those years where so much life insanity happens that you have to work through. But now I’m happy that I can also print coloring pages and anything else I feel like printing on top of insurance documents that the DMV needs me to mail and passport applications and new tax forms for fun new tax challenges I’ve found myself in, and so on.

I’m on former Centurylink fiber which was similarly sold off to private equity. Other than the name changes and wonkiness with accessing my account in their system, its been…fine actually? The connection is more stable than it ever was under Centurylink for one thing, and my bill hasn’t changed at all in the years since

Such a vaccine would be an incredible and life if not society changing medical advancement if it is in fact safe and effective. Such incredibly soughtafter medical breakthroughs of course require an equally incredible amount of skepticism and rechecking of data when one does come across them. Here’s hoping this is a major stepping stone to universal vaccination, because that would be incredible

Streamer mode is typically for one of two usecases:

1. The streamer plays their own music, so being able to silence all game music simplifies things
2. The game might contain copyrighted music by known artists, which can trigger automated enforcement. In most jurisdictions music used in a game is fine to stream/record because it’s covered by the developer’s/distributor’s license, but that doesn’t stop overzealous rights holders from placing bogus claims that can muck up your revenue, so it’s easier to just not play music that you don’t yourself have license to play

The price is irrelevant, because they aren’t for you or regular consumers. They’re already reserved and being shipped to AI data centers.

I mean this is the standard operating procedure for all top end data center products, they aren’t sold on consumer marketplaces but can be purchased by suppliers with existing contracts and relationships

As they ramp up yields larger capacity drives will slowly trickle into more consumer channels until eventually the 40+TB drives are like the 8-12tb drives are today

Yeah at work I had a realization recently that power automate and similar systems with AI steps are going to be really powerful. Since you have a bunch of deterministic steps you can just have the AI do the one text manipulation bit where you don’t need deterministic output (handy for non-deterministic inputs for example)

I’ve heard advice to initially release a demo on Itch, encourage those who enjoy the demo to join your org’s discord, then blast discord to go buy the game on steam on launch day to help boost your day 1 numbers on Steam.

I’d also check various gaming communities on as many social media platforms as possible to see if they allow indie devs to announce releases

Have you tried reaching out to YouTubers who review/play through similar games to yours? Can you buy an ad read from some youtubers as a less intrusive style of ad? Do you have a demo at all that you can point people to right now?

Almost drove off with the gas cap and door open on my car

I made it a habit to always glance in my side mirrors to confirm there’s nothing unexpected around me (including open doors or connected gas nozzles) before shifting out of park every time. Granted best practice is to walk around the car once as an inspection before even starting it every time, but that’s more than I often can be bothered to do

The thing with adding lanes is induced demand. By nature of there being more space for cars on that road more drivers will choose take that road over other roads. Cars don’t magically come into existence, people drive them, and people drive them for a reason, most commonly to go to/from somewhere

Trains (and bikes and buses) take cars off the road. Every person riding on a transit solution that isn’t a car is a individual vehicle trip saved. When every vehicle contains an average of 1.2 people in it, you’ve got very close to 1:1 vehicle reduction for every trip that’s not taken by car

So to your point, are some number of non-drivers choosing not to drive because of traffic? Probably a small number of them. But a complete transit system that has the real world effect of fewer cars on the road will mean few people owning cars. Why would a family own 2 cars when one is parked most of the time? Why spend $20k on a new (to you) car if you’re barely using the one you have/had? Fewer cars means less cars on the road which means less traffic. This is the dream.

Goddamn we need so much high speed rail, and yesterday

And so much more standard speed rail too! There’s tons of railroad lines all over the country, and even many old stations still standing. Let’s start building RDCs again (or better, a modern equivalent) and start running passenger services on all of those lines

The challenges are several fold. For one, there’s basically no manufacturers of passenger railcars left in the country. Occasionally a network upgrade will lead to one being spun up for a few years then it’ll shut down once the order is fulfilled because there’s no consistent market for passenger railcars in North America.

I’d propose using a mix of historic British Rail procurement practices and current military contract practices where you put up a pot of money for up for say 3 companies to develop a prototype railcar meeting a specific spec. Make the spec for a fairly basic car and be ready to update station platforms for ADA compliance rather than forcing the cars to be compatible with 20 different platform heights and designs. Then test those 3 prototypes and the winner receives a bonus as the design is purchased by the federal government, and next you license that design out for all manufacturers in the country to produce, followed by an ongoing order of say 48 railcars per year from 5 different manufacturers and you have 248 railcars per year (enough to replace Amtrak’s entire current fleet within 10 years) from 5 different companies (reducing risk of one company mucking it all up) all manufactured with local labor and you have a standard design that is already in active production for other operators to order as well. Repeat this process for more equipment and designs as needed, and suddenly you have a bunch of known standard designs that your network can be built to and you have health competition between manufacturers which will be big enough (because each will have around 50-100 million dollars a year in revenue from that one ongoing federal contract alone) to start performing their own independent R&D to make their own unique stock to try to attract more orders from rail operators

This is what the federal government exists for, making ambitious infrastructure projects like this possible. Policians just aren’t interested in thinking big enough

It’s funny how you can tell when a concept is extremely modern because in languages other than English they tend to just use the English term or a localized variation of the English term

Usually they “save you money” by giving you a shittier policy and relying on the buyer not understanding what coverage they need and why

Seriously going through an insurance broker is awesome. Best dang way to deal with insurance because I can just call up the broker and have them do it all for me, plus they get paid on commission by the insurance companies (which are mostly smaller B2B companies that don’t spend millions on advertising) so it’s not even like you pay more for your insurnace

Which of HaGeZi’s blocklists are you using specifically?

I remember pushing my mom to install one that had a black and white cat wander around the desktop and on top of windows one time when she had to take me to work.

I found a video of a newer version (with bonus Bonzi Buddy), but it doesn’t appear to do the walking along the tops of your windows that I remember.

Appropriately for the topic of this thread, it was all an advertisement for Purina Pet Food

It’s becoming best practice in IT to install uBlock Origin on browsers to help prevent scareware