TehPers

The last thing I want to do with complete strangers is give them my phone number lol. Aside from obvious privacy concerns and call quality concerns, Discord is internet-based, so I don’t need cell service or international calling to talk to people.

Screen sharing during voice calls is super helpful as well. It’s a pretty major feature of Discord, Teams, and I believe Skype (RIP), but Teams is not really any better than Discord and a lot more bloated.

Discord comes with other issues, but I would be fine with services offering an ad-supported free tier and an ad-free paid tier. That’s been a thing for a while. If Nitro gets rid of these ads, then that seems like a possibly sustainable approach to me.

Of course, this is ignoring Discord’s other issues, like their handling of user data. I’d love a service like Discord that was fully e2ee, even if it had an ad-supported free tier (without tracking) and a paid ad-free tier. Existing alternatives often lack some Discord features, like screen sharing and voice chats.

Removed by mod

Someone close to me gave up on the hotlines in the US and now just uses ChatGPT. It’s no therapist, but at least it’ll hold a conversation. If only the hotlines here weren’t so absurdly understaffed.

I have a 16 with a discrete GPU. Couldn’t recommend it more. It does sound like a rocket ship sometimes, but performs like a midrange tower, which is exactly what I wanted.

From the article:

While the bill is meant to address a serious problem—the distribution of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII)

Trump says a lot of things that, if taken in a certain light, can be NCII. Might be a good idea to flag his posts on all platforms so that they can be further investigated by those platforms if this passes.

All with the goal to keep NCII off the internet, of course.

A single 128GB mainboard is $2000, so four of them is $8000. Not the same as a machine with 512GB of unified memory.

For the M4 Mac Studio, it costs $4800 to upgrade from 32GB to 128GB. I believe everything else “base model” is $2000, for a total of $6800, but this is also a full working computer and not just a mainboard.

That last quote had me rolling. Good on Brian for having a working brain.

It also concerns me that so many SD legislators are hearing voices in their heads at home, but I guess that’s a problem for their psychiatrists to figure out.

My thumb does not happen to be 7 inches long. Unfortunately, app designers seem to believe it is and put their hamburger menus in the top left.

And my hand’s not small. It’s moderately sized, I’ll have you know.

Shortly before the meeting ended, Trump said, “This is going to be great television.”

In case anyone was curious about why it ended so dramatically.

Sounds like they need some Flex Tape. One of the employees they fired might even have some lying around if they ask nicely.

For me, it highly depends. Turn-based strategy games, I can easily play at a much lower framerate (30 is fine tbh though I always appreciate more). FPS-style games? 60 is a bare minimum, but 100+ is what I would consider to be enjoyable.

In at least a couple states, the police have said they won’t follow demands from ICE without a court order. It could be a lot worse. Progress is still progress.

Trump’s FEMA chief lied to the agency

These headlines could be a lot simpler if they weren’t so roundabout.

There’s an entire category of machine learning dedicated to having two AIs “fight” against each other. One generates something while the other classifies it as either AI generated or genuine.

Anyway, this is a complete tangent. Just thought it was interesting. AI detector tools for LLMs aren’t usually very accurate, unfortunately.

Thanks Obama.

A Few Modest Proposals

If anyone was going into this expecting satire like I was, the article appears not to be satirical.

As depressing as this is, I’m not sure what people were expecting. “Government efficiency” should have been a dead giveaway…

Now Trump just needs to issue a press release talking about how they’re streamlining their operations or some BS.

Where I disagree with you is not that the US is bad - the US is terrible, and there is plenty of evidence of that. I don’t even disagree with there being censorship in the US. In fact, Trump is objectively a piece of shit who wants nothing more than to become Xi/Putin himself.

What I disagree with is equating censorship in the US with Chinese censorship. I can call Trump a piece of shit online without worrying that the FBI will show up at my door. The models that are trained in the west will happily entertain any (non-violent) political discussions I want. There may be bias, and Trump may be trying to create censorship, but it’s not quite to that level yet.

Having personally received the bizarre internal agency emails circulating this week encouraging me to snitch out my colleagues to help root out the evils of DEIA thought in US gov’t the last week has only crystallized it for me.

I am concerned that the US will become as bad as China in terms of censorship, which is part of why I’m trying to leave right now. However, it’s not there yet. They are not yet equal, nor are they even close yet.