Guess the Snowflake (third party data storage and processing company/service) breaches earlier this year taught us nothing.

Maybe if you’re going to have a username that implies you’re an artist, you should learn to actually make art instead of just using the automatic plagiarism machine.

Yup. That’s kind of the rub. It’s not a pay gap on paper anywhere in the sense of pay scales, it’s a bunch of societal biases that lead to overwhelmingly common “emergent” systemic behavior that skews women towards the lower end of the pay bands they coexist with men in while also often denying them promotions into higher positions and pay bands that are more frequently given to equal or lesser skilled men.

Very few of the individual cogs in the system are intentionally aiming for this outcome, but it’s the combination of a shit ton of biases built up over generations about women and how they are expected to behave that all smashes together into the shitty end result of pay discrepancy along gender lines.

I think that’s going to depend on the specific server you upload it to, and then the other servers it may go through to federate to whoever is viewing it, and the settings for the underlying pictrs service on each.

You should look into the Dreamcast conversion mod and the Lantern Engine (lighting engine tweaks) at the very least. Pretty much everything that comes with the “Better SADX” modloader is great.

In short, when they updated the Dreamcaast original to DX, they changed the textures entirely along with most of the player models and broke the lighting engine. Every time the game was ported after that, the textures have gotten more compressed and lower quality, and more bugs have been introduced.

For example, you know the spot in Emerald Coast where Sonic can clip through the wall really easily and drown? Never happens in the Dreamcast original, fixed by the conversion.

So mods that restore stuff tend to bring the quality up considerably and fix bugs. Personally I prefer the DX player models (the Dreamcast ones look barely better than PS1), but you can adjust the DC conversion mod to switch off whatever changes you don’t like.

Oh, and for replayability, the time trial ghosts mod is great. It displays a see through playback of all your movements from your fastest playthrough of the level, like racing games do. So you can race yourself.

Also, with the modloader you get real widescreen. No more inane borders on the side squishing things to 4:3.

Don’t forget that framing things in ways that maximizes emotional response (fear, anger) increases views, which increases ad views, and directly contributes to their bottom line. They have direct incentive to increase anxiety and worry, so everything is couched in scary hypotheticals of varying often undisclosed amounts of credibility.

They could, or they might not. The biggest thing is that we already have been through 4 years of Trump. We have some idea of what that will look like, we aren’t going in completely blind.

As far as this “being the last election”, there’s too many safeguards in our governmental system and too many armed people (in both the civilian and military population) with deep vested interests to ensure real elections still happen for that to change.

There’s a hell of a lot of posturing and hot air going on and that has gone on from Trumps camp that has absolutely no true way to get force behind it.

Things will be bad, but panicking will just make it thay much harder to distinguish true threats and problems from what isn’t.

Think of it like this: Your car is stalled on a train track, and there’s a train coming a few minutes away. There’s also someone with a gun in your backseat about to shoot you. The train makes more noise, but the more immediate threat is the guy with the gun. Being more calm helps to discern those sorts of distinctions, and that the best solution would be to run from your car rather than try to pump the gas.

For every could, might, and may there’s a didn’t, might not, etc. You could start pissing blood tomorrow, but I assume you’re in good health that you probably won’t. But you still technically could.

The news media across the board is optimizing for ad views to support their existence with money. Keeping people stressed out increases viewership, so it’s in their best interests to put everything through a funhouse mirror and rely on technicalities and speculation to stoke emotional response. There’s been studies done and books published on this.

Bad times are not end times.

We had four years under Biden to find the skeletons from Trump’s last presidency. Please point me to them, as obviously I’ve missed something huge like roving squads of minority slayers or something.

It’s going to fucking suck. Yes, people will die as a result of horrible policies and the general sociopolitical climate, but people claiming that minorities are literally going to be hunted en mass are out of their gourd.

Too many armed civilians spread through all the population demographics for that to work to the level a lot of people are screaming about.

It wasn’t the time before we lost either.

Saying you understand why something happened isn’t being smug or in any way happy about the outcome.

Stop externalizing your poor mental state and take a break from the internet or something.

Panic doesn’t help anything. Neither does horror. We survived one Trump presidency, we’ll survive this one, despite it being monumentally worse.

Do what you can to help those you can around you. Work in and grow the support structures in your local community, family, and social circles.

Panic leads to stupid, rash, not well thought out decisions. It should be avoided as much as possible while you take a long, honest, realistic look at the situation and evaluate what is and isn’t in your power to effect.

You’re right that passive defeatism isn’t helpful, but you don’t have to go straight to the other extreme of emotional turmoil.

So… money laundering and a tool for storing assets in non-liquid form, as usual with the high end art world.

At least it’s a good NES game.

US- Wife went 30 minutes after polls opened and ended up waiting an hour today. New location for us, so don’t know if this is normal here. I’ll edit later with my experience.

Edit: Went around 3pm and waited maybe 5 mins

I’ve averaged 4-5 comments a day since I made my account. Probably not who you’re asking about but I’ll bite.

I’m a SysAdmin/Systems Engineer- My work tends to be feast or famine in terms of how busy things get, and there’s often times where I just have to “babysit” a long running process or script. Also times where I just need to clear my head so I can approach a problem a different way.

And here we have issues with the many different definitions of AI. Nvidia used machine learning to simulate countless iterations of their chip design to find the best configuration and layout (for the specific goals they set their AI to optimize for). They did not use chatGPT or anything that has textual output. It literally cannot spontaneously develop that ability.

It is constrained by the bounds that are inherently neccessary to make it function and by the goals it is created to optimize for. It cannot just arbitrarily “choose” to go do something they aren’t pointing it at. It may do things that aren’t intended, but those are “happy accidents” related (again) to the goals it is given to optimize for. Like a delivery AI jumping off a balcony because it’s the fastest way down, since no goal weighting was given to self preservation or damaging the package.

At the very least, until we have some way to codify the abstract concept of comprehension into a scoring system can be optimized for, none of these things are going to even approach AGI. This is due to the simple reality of how they work under the hood, and don’t for a fucking second believe the charlatans saying that we can’t understand them. We may not be able to discretely track each and every step a model takes in modifying it’s weights or each decision poiny when optimizing for specific output, but that’s a matter of storage space to store each step and drastic speed loss that would occur recording each step. It is not some inherent untracable magic in how they work.

Computers, even quantum computers, work through billions of discrete traceable steps occurring each second. AI still needs discrete inputs, discrete goal/optimization/math to discern good output from bad, even if we choose not to track each step in between.

Put as simply as possible: You cannot duct tape infinite speak and spells together to spontaneously create an intelligence, and that is effectively what current AI is doing in ever increasing amounts. We’re brute forcing it by throwing ever increasing amounts of resources at it, with rare and minor improvements in the underlying math occurring at far slower rates. The nvidea chip thing is just improving the ability of chips to do the math we’re already doing for this stuff even faster, so… more brute forcing.

Edit: Also, nvidea is making more money than they ever have riding this hype train. Of course they’re going to push the idea that absurd leaps of progress are right around the corner, and that their products will get us there. They are the best in the market right now, but anything beyond that is pure conjecture to help drive sales. Their chips are not fundamentally doing anything new, just the same things but more efficiently.

I think there are a lot of fields people are being encouraged to ignore because “it’s totally going to be made obsolete by AI any day now”. I’m sure some of them ultimately will be, but we still have people doing financial services despite so much of the calculations being handled entirely by software under the hood.

The people pushing this AI revolution concept are those who stand to make money off it, and those who can use it as an excuse for layoffs to save money in the short term before they jump to another company and avoid the consequences.

We’ve been “rapidly appeoaching the singularity” for quite a while now, and the current tools being marketed as “AI” don’t actually have any “intelligence” to them. We are not going to magically turn what we have now into “AGI”, it’s simply not possible given our current models and techniques.

From someone in tech, at absolute best this is something that we might see strides in by the time we all die of old age, and that’s being absurdly optimistic. The only people pushing the idea of a faster timeline are those with money to grift off the idea.

There are a bunch of “gimmick” alarm clocks that might help.

I had this one for a little while that sounded like R2D2 being kept alive while it’s brain was being scrambled. If you didn’t get to it in 10 seconds or so, it would roll off the table and start scurrying around the room. It was annoying enough that my parents returned it, after it was their idea in the first place.

There was also one where the alarm could only be turned off by a “key” that would take off like one of those pull cord helicopter blade toys when the alarm went off.

I think there’s also things like big vibrating bass speakers you can strap to a bed frame to try and “shake” someone awake.

In the end what worked for me was just setting a ton of alarms. Like every 15-30 minutes starting an hour before I actually had to get moving.

Good luck.

And if my Grandma had wheels she’d be a car.

Unfortunately you posted a shitty, arguably racist, excuse for moralistic grandstanding and now we all have to deal with it.

Complaining about people complaining about petty nonsense is, in and of itself, petty fucking nonsense and a waste of time. If you feel strongly enough to imagine it’s in any way useful to try and call out this shit, get off your ass and go volunteer in your community instead.

Man, 8 Bit Theater. Talk about a blast from the past.