a person, group, idea, or object that “for better or for worse… has done the most to influence the events of the year”

I’ve always done that. If it’s not a contact, I let it go to voicemail. If it was actually important, they leave a message.

Nobody is giving kids alcohol

When I was a kid I always asked for a taste when my parents had a drink with the meal. It was just a sip and I never liked it and it burned (it was usually a hard spirit), but I still asked every time.

When my wife was 5 she was being sent to the still to do a taste check and see if the brandy is strong enough yet.

In my country unlimited fiber was $6/mo. Imagine the shock when I moved to the US (also in Mountain View initially). Eventually I got AT&T fiber for “just” $40/month, but now I moved to an area outside their coverage and it’s back to Comcast :(

I’ve had my Samsung Bar for 5 years now and no issue with it, if that’s worth anything

I like that getting rid of glasses today is rejection of technology, while in Asimov’s Caves of Steel, wearing glasses was rejection of technology.

What the sigma?

Eating onion raw is the only way to mask its sweetness. Or maybe boiling the crap out of it until it tastes like nothing at all. Otherwise, onion is very sweet.

Well, I haven’t played these types of games when I was young. But I have no intention of spending money on microtransactions and the games I’ve chosen have been fun as a f2p player, so they work for me.

As for my kids, they’re still in elementary school and they’ve been raised mostly screen-free, so it’s not something I need to worry about just yet.

I play these games in bursts. Play until exhausting the actual content, then stop when it turns into a grind-fest. Come back a year or two later when there’s enough new content to make it fun again. Usually also with a whole bunch of returning player rewards. Repeat.

A I never ever spend a single cent in these games.

Games that I play include Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail, both of which I just checked and don’t work on Linux due to anticheat protection. I see there are some alternative open-source launchers that would get them working on Linux and Mac, but I wouldn’t risk my account using those.

Years ago I switched to Linux on my PC and everything was fine. But there was a game I wanted to play that didn’t work on Linux, so I created a small Windows partition to dual boot. Later, that game became two, then three, and so on. I had to reformat some partitions to ntfs (iirc I was using reiserfs) to expand available storage for Windows to add more games. Then at one point I realized it’s been a while since I’ve booted into Linux and I don’t even know if it still works.

So yeah, use whatever fits your needs. I’ll always pick Linux PC or Mac for work, but I’ll stick with Windows for gaming.

For context, I’ve been on computers since the 8bit era and I’ve been programming for just as long. I prefer the power of a terminal over GUIs, my “IDE” of choice is vim. I use Git Bash in Windows for access to Linux-style commands. So yeah, I am technical and I prefer Linux for practical reasons. But when I want to play a game I want to just start it and play it, not work for days to maaaybe get it to mostly run fine except for some features.

Edit: one of the games I had to use Windows for was League. A competitive online game with anti-cheat features.

Edit2: note that this was many years ago and some other games I needed Windows for will now probably work on Linux effortlessly. At least one has native support for Linux now.

Instead of writing captions, the team asked annotators to record 60- to 90-second verbal descriptions answering a list of questions about each image. They then transcribed the descriptions—which often stretched across several pages—and used other large language models to clean up, crunch down, and standardize them.

So those other LLMs are needed to train this one?

Same for copyright law. The point was to give creators a few years to profit from their work before it goes into public domain.

That’s my situation at a Silicon Valley tech company. Nobody ever mentioned unions one way or another but I honestly have no idea what I could ask for that I don’t already get. We have good benefits, good perks, everyone works frok home, unlimited PTO that nobody tries to limit or work around (all we are asked for is to give a rough estimate of time we’ll be taking off during each quarter so that it can be factored into planning), good work environment, good pay.

It’s like saying Microsoft Windows is the most loved OS on PC. People just go with the option in front of them. Spotify is the biggest streaming service now, Amazon Music ties in with Alexa.

I remember the girl who accidentally tried to walk through a glass window. Three times in a row.

I did not say companies should have no liability for publishing misinformation. Of course if someone uses AI to generate misinformation and tries to pass it off as factual information they should be held accountable. But it doesn’t seem like anyone did that in this case. Just a journalist putting his name in the AI to see what it generates. Nobody actually spread those results as fact.

Their product doesn’t claim to be a source of facts. It’s a generator of human-sounding text. It’s great for that purpose and they’re not liable for people misusing it or not understanding what it does.

If you read the whole text and interpret the highlights as emphasis then it’s just annoying and hard to read (sort of like those people who add random commas everywhere). If you read just the highlighted text then it sounds like a summary, but there are mistakes in it, which is why I assumed AI.