In 2016 I voted Trump. In fact before that election I mostly voted republicanish except in some cases.

You have to remember in 2016 that Hillary was deeply unlikeable, and I believe her email scandal should have put her in way more trouble than it actually did. Her platform at the time was that you should vote for her because then she would be the first woman president! The country needed something else.

Hillary was not the answer and it was the DNC’s inability to read the room that lost them the election.

I fucking love Bernie but he wasn’t the right guy either. He sticks to his ideals which is a fantastic quality but doesn’t win general elections, which realistically needs people who are more center aligned.

I regret my Trump vote and will never repeat that mistake but it’s hard to know where we’d be had it been that Hillary shyster.

This seems like both a feature and a bug with the fediverse. Some topics just fit a lot of subs and then you multiply that by all the Lemmy instances. It seems like the discussions around big topics can really get spread around.

A lot of research has gone into this and for better or worse it works so well that any price not set this way is not getting the best results for the seller.

When I was young I remember that banks often had large drive-thrus with pneumatic tube systems at each car stall.

There would only be one teller but they could serve quite a few lanes.

If you wanted a cash withdrawal, you might put your ID and your withdrawal slip in the tube, and a few minutes later it would come back with cash in it.

It was pretty rad. But ATMs seem like a better bet overall.

The most effective method of protesting would be to find a way to get the masses to turn against the lawmakers in such a way that they convince the lawmakers to solve the problem that the protest is focused against.

But most of these protests just piss off the masses. They run their day with traffic, they destroy heritage sites that people care about, and while they do get in the news and get some publicity, people’s memory is quite negative. And there are zero focus on anybody who could actually change the situation.

There’s a pretty good chance that every employee facing this offer is in a position where Dell sees them as replaceable. They want people who follow orders and not much more, so if you want to look at it through that filter Dell got what they wanted.

Unless somebody over there at the top is crazy, Dell would have had individual deals with the true innovators, decision makers, movers and shakers internally who are viewed as top tier and irreplaceable.

I suspect the optimized egg laying DNA is different from the huge breasted good tasting chicken meat DNA.

So the male born egg laying DNA chicks are unfortunately not useful to the farmers except for whatever they used the ground up remains for, which I suspect is probably feed or fertilizer.

Funny games. The US probably has spies on the Russian ships. Russia may have a spy or two on the US sub. Neither side is remotely surprised by any of the public information on this.

The US sends Cuba a check to rent Guantanamo bay. Cuba doesn’t cash it.

I kinda suspect Cuba would prefer to evict the tenant but in this situation the one with the nuclear powered subs gets to set the terms.

If the pharmacy companies and insurers weren’t sleeping together then the insurers might be doing some kind of collective bargaining. But nope.

It sounds obvious on the surface but higher wages don’t always equal happier staff or more output.

I don’t think the staff making 500k at OpenAI will be measurably happier with another 100k, for example.

But there is definitely a lot to be gained by getting staff as far away from a sense of poverty as possible and ikea might have helped their line workers a lot with this change.

Hell to the no.

There must be bots trolling GitHub for API keys, crypto secret keys, and other such valuable data

One of the best things ever about LLMs is how you can give them absolute bullshit textual garbage and they can parse it with a huge level of accuracy.

Some random chunks of html tables, output a csv and convert those values from imperial to metric.

Fragments of a python script and ask it to finish the function and create a readme to explain the purpose of the function. And while it’s at it recreate the missing functions.

Copy paste of a multilingual website with tons of formatting and spelling errors. Ask it to fix it. Boom done.

Of course, the problem here is that developers can no longer clean their inputs as well and are encouraged to send that crappy input straight along to the LLM for processing.

There’s definitely going to be a whole new wave of injection style attacks where people figure out how to reverse engineer AI company magic.

The strategy makes a lot of business sense too. It’s why piracy controls in Microsoft Windows were so weak for so long.

Steve Ballmer said something along the lines of if the Chinese are going to pirate software, I want it to be Microsoft software.

I’m not sure if this game has an online mode but generally speaking the network effect of online means more people playing equals a better online experience. If half those people didn’t pay, the ones who did pay still get a better online experience right?

We need somebody to wear a 360 camera and go walk every aisle every day. Use image recognition to get the SKU and price from the labels + estimate stock level. Upload the data to an API that’s accessible to all for like $5/month.

Kind of like the Streetview cameras but for spying on actual in store prices.

I think the rules are typically negotiable in advance, especially when it’s down to just 2 contenders.

Debates have the potential to show more than eloquence or intelligence, they also show soft skills like whether the candidate can control the conversation, control under pressure, how easily they succumb when bullied, and give the audience an opportunity to read their body language, which may develop (or remove) trust.

Biden famously told Trump in a debate: “would you shut up, man?” And in that moment quite a few Americans were swayed to select him believing he’s not susceptible to getting run over by trump mouth diarrhea attack like so many other politicians are.

Impressive, I don’t think I’d heard of Ceefax. It seems like it was broadcast and then recorded, and then this set top box knew how to interpret and parse the data into this format.

I guess the target audience is Russian citizens and military personnel?

I ran a single line BBS system in the Seattle area in my early teens which was early '90s. At the peak we were averaging about 20 calls a day and I kept the whole thing running for a few years. I had a four drive CD-ROM tower system loaded up with shareware CD archives and a connection to fidonet, so you could exchange email with anyone else who had a fidonet address around the world. It was freaking cool and the skills I learned building that prepared me to jump into IT during the .com boom which was a pretty lucky career break for a teen in Seattle.

That era was the tail end of the golden days of BBS systems because Prodigy and CompuServe followed quickly and what they had was professional content creators and some of the first integrations for buying airline tickets, stocks, reading the news, and functional email that reached a wider audience. At that time, you have to remember there was no other way to access those services in real time. Your only other source for this would have been TV or newspapers, or picking up the phone and calling a travel agent.

A lot of these services’ business model was selling hours of access. So you might pay 30 bucks a month for 50 hours, and if you stayed online longer you’d pay more. Those numbers were fine because after you finished whatever you wanted to do, there was nothing left to look at so it was easy to log back off. Very few people were leaving anything resembling an instant messenger logged in all the time.

Those services were constantly updating so every time you logged in you’d see new games, photo libraries, user-generated content in their forums. But in the end they were essentially overgrown BBS’s with funding.

All of them, including AOL, tried to stay relevant by adding the internet as soon as it became a little more mainstream to talk about. But within a fairly short period of time, maybe about a year, the content available on the wider internet from major sources outpaced whatever Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL could produce on their own, so most people logged in just to bypass and get to the internet.

The next generation of getting online after that was subscribing directly to a local ISP for a dial-up account.

As I think back to this, we knew the future was coming fast, but nobody seemed to really understand what that would entail. Absolutely nobody was envisioning services to come like cloud storage, social media, non-stop connectivity from your pocket etc. That was basically sci-fi movie stuff. Connectivity was simply too slow, and we didn’t even have high-res pics or videos stored on our computers at the time. Photos were still taken on film, and video was stored on magnetic tape. It was still very analog and very few people could afford the hardware to digitize it. Early scanners were crappy, only black and white, and expensive.

The most incredible services to launch at the beginning were the chat systems and forums, and online shopping. Clicking on a picture of a cool thing, Entering a credit card number, and it showing up at your door a few days later was pretty cool, and I can distinctively remember the first Christmas where I did all of my shopping online and then bragged about not having to go to the mall. A pretty glorious experience for somebody who never really liked the mall.

Mail order systems existed but you had to call to place your order on the phone (during business hours), or physically mail your order slip with a handwritten credit card number or a check.

I think one of the most fascinating components of this that struck people was how fast you could communicate with people on the other side of the earth. A lot of people would exclaim “I just talked to a guy in Australia!” as the most eye-opening first experience. That’s a real tell on how isolated we used to be.

In the early '90s, there was a very real sense that most people around you had not ever been online before. So if you started talking about your experiences most people would look at you like you’re an alien, or at least some kind of super nerd. There was a period of time where it was decidedly uncool.

My best friend to this day is a guy I met in middle school and we quickly discovered that we both knew about BBS systems. By the time I graduated there were maybe only four or five guys in our BBS group of friends at our high school of 600 people.

Anyways, sorry for the essay. Having been born into the analog era and grown up as it became digital was a wild experience that those before and those after might not totally relate to.