Yup. AI should be used to automate all of the mundane day-to-day BS, leaving us free to practice art, or poetry, or literature, or study, or just do leisure activities. Because all of the mundane BS is automated, so we don’t need to worry about things like income or where our next meal comes from. But instead, we went down the dystopian capitalist timeline, where we’re automating all of the art so artists are forced to get mundane day-to-day BS jobs.

I was actually coming in to say the Switch Zelda games. BOTW and TOTK were both fantastic, but I never finished them because it never felt like I had done “enough” to actually go fight Ganon.

Just use a GPL license instead. It allows use with credit, but requires that usage also be released for free. Meaning that it can’t be used by corpos and their closed-source projects.

Yeah, that last paragraph is important. I’m a professional audio technician, and way too many people will begin with boosts instead of cuts. But cutting is much easier on a technical level, because you’re just lowering the volume of something. Boosting is much more technically complicated, because you’re “adding” signal that doesn’t already exist. So you have to make that signal from something, and that’s much more technically difficult than simply turning the volume down.

Imagine you have a signal coming in at a baseline of 0dB. Cutting 6dB is easy, because you simply let less of the signal pass. But if you want to turn it up 6dB, you need to “create” that 6dB from somewhere, because it doesn’t already exist. You can’t just “turn it up” because it’s already turned all the way up at 0dB.

Yeah, the problem is that game publishers are trying to reach the broadest audience possible, which means niche games with unique features and gameplay are dying out. Why bother spending millions of dollars on developing a unique game which might not sell well, when you can churn out another open world lite-RPG with grassy stealth spots and counter/parry based combat which you know will sell well.

+1 for Anna’s Archive. It’s an amazing resource for students too, since they keep research papers and textbooks.

And before someone gets up in arms about the research papers, the researchers don’t get paid by the journals for publishing with them. In fact, the researchers need to pay the journal to publish, and then the journal turns around and charges people to read it.

If you ever need to get research for free, you can usually email the researchers directly and they’ll be happy to share it for free; They hate the journals too, (because like I said earlier, they have to pay the journal thousands of dollars,) but feel obligated to use them to publish.

Even worse, that research and journal publishing was often funded by public funds and research grants. So the journal is paywalling research that taxpayers already paid for, and should be free to access.

There’s a LOT of snake oil in the audio world. Especially home theater and home studio setups. I’m a professional audio technician, and some of the “audiophile” setups I have seen are just outright asinine.

Use balanced signal for runs over ~3 feet. Use the cheapest star-quad cable you can get, and the most basic $4 Neutrik connectors. Why? Because that album you’re using to test your “hi-fi” sound system was recorded using exactly that: Cheap ¢30/foot cable and basic Neutrik connectors.

It’s also what concert setups use. You think a concert with six combined miles of cabling is going to be paying $2000 per cable? Fuck no, they’re using the cheap shit (which was hand soldered in bulk at the warehouse workbench by their lowest paid shop tech), to run that million dollar audio system. Their money goes to the speakers, amps, and mixer; Not gold plated wire, robotic soldering, or triple insulated jackets. In double-blind tests, audiophiles can’t hear the difference between a $500 cable and a couple of plasti-dipped coat hangers twisted together.

The people who complain about digital audio also can’t tell the difference in double-blind tests. Because modern audio hardware is able to perfectly emulate old analog gear. Google the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem for a breakdown of how we can perfectly capture and recreate analog audio with digital equipment. Vacuum tubes were groundbreaking when they were first used. But they had a lot of issues, and have very little relevance in today’s systems. They’re prone to burning out, notoriously fragile, and can be emulated perfectly.

It depends entirely on how the airline boards their plane. If they board front-to-back (like boarding first class early) then any open spots in the front are just that: Open. The people sitting there have already boarded.

Also, the “raise it to $15 per hour” minimum wage debate has been going on for so long that the $15 is now outdated. If the debate started again today, the number would realistically be closer to $25-$30 per hour.

And if you just got upset because you’re making $30 per hour and don’t want to be equated with minimum wage, then maybe you need to consider how much you could be making if minimum wage were higher. Here’s a hint: You’d be making much more than $30 per hour.

The real trick is to just use whichever overhead you see open as you approach your seat. It doesn’t need to be directly above your seat. You’re going to have to pass by it again on your way out of the plane anyways, so it’s not like you’ll be delaying anything during deboarding.

This is a noise reduction thing. It’s the same reason apartments only do hardwood on the ground floor. Your downstairs neighbors don’t want to listen to you moving around, and carpet is a great insulator and cushion.

Eh, kind of. Remote Desktop with an admin account would be more useful than physical access to a locked computer. Because if Bitlocker is enabled, then all that matters is that you can sign into the computer. Use strong passwords, don’t open RDP to the WAN, lock your workstations when walking away, etc…

Even cloning the drive to crack later (historically, this was a popular choice if you had physical access) is pretty useless if you don’t have a user’s password.

Louisiana had famously (or infamously) lax liquor laws for decades, so maybe that‘s what you’re thinking of. Shit like drive-thru daiquiri stores, where as long as they don’t put the straw in the cup it’s not considered an “open” container. So they can just hand you a cup full of liquor, and the straw separately.

It’s also a large part of why New Orleans developed a reputation as a party town; Louisiana kept their drinking age at 18 while every other state was at 21, so all the college freshmen/sophomores would go to Louisiana during spring break because they could drink.

Yeah, the main company for most hotels literally got the exclusive contract by bribing the hell out of all of the hotel owners/executives. And they were so notoriously shitty that they bought a smaller company a few years ago, just so they could change their name to the smaller company’s name and attempt to sidestep lots of the bad reputation.

I mean, if they’re bagged in a low humidity environment and the bag stays sealed, there should be very little chance of them getting soggy. Because in order for them to get soggy, the bag would need humidity.

It’s the difference between past tense, and past participle. “I drew a picture” vs “the picture was drawn”.

And here’s a reminder that, following the horrible shooting at Uvalde and the police’s staggeringly bad response, they still reelected the local sheriff.

Yeah, I have a piece of mission-critical gear that is controlled by a computer running Windows XP. Because the control program is written in Flash and modern systems won’t run it. Migrating to a modern system would require a complete rewrite in a new language, and would also likely kill a lot of functionality.

Yup, this. Cover your ass by putting shit in writing via email, (and bcc your personal email too, so they can’t just delete the emails off the mail server and pretend they never existed.) But besides that, if the boss wants to have a vulnerable system, then that’s their prerogative.

Their argument towards fair use wasn’t ignored. It was inapplicable.

It’s ridiculous to assume that an organization whose main purpose is data archival would knowingly and blatantly ignore copyright law

Except that’s exactly what they did. They knowingly and blatantly violated copyright law. They had a system in place to ensure fair use compliance. They intentionally disabled that system, in violation of fair use, to allow unlimited free downloads of the books they had archived.

IA’s entire argument was basically “but we’re a library” and totally missed the part where even public libraries need to comply with copyright law. Even with ebooks, they can’t simply distribute an unlimited number of copies; They have licensing agreements in place, for a specific number of specific ebooks to be checked out at any one time. And they have to use time-locked DRM to ensure compliance, by automatically revoking users’ reading ability when their check-out time is up. IA did precisely none of that.