Except it’s not for all. They get all of the downsides but few of the upsides.

It’s like they’re paying for something, not receiving what they paid for, and being told they don’t want what they’re paying for in the first place. Expect they’re also wildly overpaying.

It also doesn’t help that ACPI is a badly-designed mess of a standard. I remember that in the 2010s one of Apple’s selling points was that their laptops had sleep and hibernation that worked every time. Heck, MacOS X could even decide intelligently when to do which. This mostly worked because they fully controlled the hardware, firmware, and software. Other laptop manufacturers could just take their best stab at implementing ACPI power states and hope their implementation matched Microsoft’s.

Microsoft tried to solve the mess by introducing the S0ix ACPI state (aka “Modern Standby”), which was defined in a way that could actually be implemented without too much guesswork. Unfortunately, this was during the Windows 8 era when Microsoft decided that laptops should be more like smartphones so S0ix is much closer to turning your screen off on a phone than to actual standby.

The system randomly waking up and deciding to do work is an explicitly intended feature because what if you get a Teams message while your laptop is in your bag? Sure, you might say that you’d either have Teams on your phone or wouldn’t immediately care but that kind of thinking won’t get you anywhere within Microsoft. Also, Windows actually has very little restraint about what it does when it wakes up so it might decide to install a heavy update or an application might decide it’s important enough to do work right now. While the laptop is in your bag. Cue you wondering if the laptop turned off because the battery’s empty or because it overheated.

And to make things worse Microsoft specified that in order to be allowed to use Modern Standby, the device must not offer S3 (sleep/suspend-to-ram). Some manufacturers still allow you to enable S3 but it’s a legacy feature that’s even less well supported than before.

Followed by “Did your character just derive from first principles how to hotwire and pilot a helicopter?” - “Look, three nat 20s in a row is three nat 20s in a row.”

Transparency, mainly. If the results are clearly available there’s less opportunity to create confusion about them. But yeah, it’d be a minor change.

That’s a reasonable change. I definitely would encourage a reform of the voting district system, though. There is no reason for districts to exist or matter nowadays and they can be replaced by a fairly simple set of rules regarding how far polling places can be away from voters and how many there must be per X voters in the area.

Oh, absolutely. But I do believe that the chancellor can’t be fully separated from their party. There has to be a certain level of agreement or the party wouldn’t put them up again next election.

By her own behavior she was relatively decent but still rooted in the CDU. And to my knowledge she didn’t really oppose her party’s spending policy much. Given that this spending policy was a gigantic exercise in shortsightedness I’d say that yes, I can factor that into my appraisal of her tenure.

Merkel was reasonably decent at foreign policy. And she did know how to carry herself. Her domestic policy was questionable, though, and her reign was the time of the “black zero”, aka the brilliant economic policy of cutting infrastructure spending to save money because surely highway bridges can do without maintenance for a couple decades. Actually, they sacrificed many things on the altar of reducing new debt at all cost, including a buildout of the power and data grids and the East German economy.

In my opinion the biggest contributor to our current problems is the CDU’s economic incompetence, which has thoroughly undermined the stability of the country for a twenty year vanity project.

All in all she wasn’t entirely shit, which is pretty good for the CDU these days. She was vastly more competent than Merz but that’s not a tall hurdle to clear.

Not necessarily. Germany uses just pens and paper ballots for the election and has fairly trustworthy results. We can typically call the vote after six to eight hours, with the last votes being counted within twelve.

We do that by requiring all parties that are electable in a region to send representatives to the polling places. After voting ends, all ballots are taken to a backroom and divided into stacks. Each party representative tallies the votes in one stack, than passes the stack on to another party’s representative. They tally the stack as well; if any discrepancies are found the stack is passed on to another representative and so on. Once all ballots have been tallied and everyone agrees that the count is accurate, the ballots are put into sealed containers for secure transport to the election commission and the tally is reported to them electronically. The whole process is open to public inspection so if you want to watch people count votes for eight hours on a Sunday night you can.

Since the count is parallelized over all polling places and over all parties within each polling place we can get authoritative results within hours. Typically, voting ends at 18:00 and the results are clear enough to call the election at around 22:00, with the last tallies coming in at around 02:00. There is no debate about manipulated voting machines because there aren’t any voting machines. And since the parties check each others# results during the count it’s assumed that the tally is fairly accurate.

Of course that only works if you have enough parties to matter; with two parties and a talking spoiler effect you’re not going to be as fast. Oh, and in Germany polling places are only allowed to serve a certain number of voters by law; if there are too many voters and additional polling place has to be created. Of course that doesn’t mesh with the American voting district system at all.

Either that or he’s Gowron with a mustache.

How about the feature where you get a notification that someone said something in a group chat but if you click on the notification it opens the private chat with that person instead?

Or the one where you enable recording a meeting and only after the meeting does it tell you that it couldn’t actually save anything to OneDrive so there’s no recording? That’s some advanced UX engineering right there.

Or the one where it hides less used “applications” and decides that the only ones it should hide are the chat and the calendar. Not everyone can come up with that.

Or how it shows a banner telling you to update even if your client is company-managed and especially if you’re using their web client.

FLOSS can’t hope to compete at that level.

Fair point. I applied the term backwards.

Animals generally aren’t held to have moral standing. Besides, animal welfare laws do exist (although the American ones are weak to the point of pointlessness).

Maybe we could add legislation to prevent cars from being badly secured IoT surveillance devices. Maybe mandate things like microphones and cameras to be airgapped from anything that can access the internet. Make storing movement profiles of cars a GDPR violation that automatically carries the maximum sentence. Things like that.

Or we can continue to techbro our way forward, mandate always-on internal cameras and microphones in the name of perceived safety, and impose absolutely zero security and privacy standards. I guess that’s the one we’re going to go with. (It’s not like the CCC hasn’t already used a badly secured endpoint to exfiltrate movement profiles to such a degree that they could identify the individual cars of VIPs and see e.g. when and where they drove their children to school…)

If an LLM has a soul then it should have human rights and be subject to worker protection laws, minimum wage, get to form a union… That’d have an interesting effect on the business models of AI companies for sure.

Heck, what happens if an AI company goes bankrupt? Turning off the servers would be equivalent to murder. Who’d pay to keep the servers running? Could we even retire an old version of a model? The whole “LLMs have souls” idea sounds very tech bro to me: Something that looks kinda cool on paper until you consider any implications or consequences.

How would a decline in tourism voice mild criticism of the US economy?

Let’s just do the whole DS lineup.

Nintendo Switch
Nintendo Switch Lite
Nintendo Switchi
Nintendo Switchi XL
Nintendo 3Switch
Nintendo 3Switch XL
Nintendo 2Switch
New Nintendo 3Switch
New Nintendo 3Switch XL
New Nintendo 2Switch XL

Yes, very sane.

How about Sub Mario Bothers? Switch Mario Brothers? Vanilla But Kink-Friendly Mario Brothers?

I’m not much of a gardener but I do have a frugal girlfriend who loves gardening.

What I can say is that sansevieria make decent gifts for people who are bad at plants; they don’t really care much about getting too much or too little water or light. So they’re great for people who forget to water their plants three weeks in a row and then water daily for a week because they keep forgetting they just watered the day before. (I’m speaking from first-hand experience here…)

And if you need one you can check the nearest graveyard. People tend to show up with flowers, plant them, and then throw away the pots. I could literally get several dozen plastic flower pots from the trash cans at my local graveyard whenever I want. There’s not even anything besides flower pots and soil bags in there.

Gotta be honest, though, “the Empire was building a Death Star that can destroy planets in other solar systems and nobody ever talked about it despite the two small ones being big fucking deals” is a really damn weak premise. They could’ve found some other way of making the remnant of the Empire a threat but then they couldn’t have recycled A New Hope as easily.