As an old fart, I actively dislike photorealistic graphics in most cases. I’m playing a game, and I kind of want it to look like a game, which generally means more surrealistic - exaggerated contrast, high saturation, low texture - than realistic. I’d rather play where the characters look like caricatures than my next door neighbor. And that doesn’t even go into great games with sprite-like graphics.

Enough is enough. You’ve saturated the art budget, it’s time to pay writers more.

I got my current number around 3 years go, and the vast majority - easily 95% - of calls I get are still real estate, political, or job search spam for the previous owner. It’s on permanent DND, but I’ll check the text log every day or two.

I don’t know about this specific case, but it’s common for the big name researchers not to do any actual research or play any direct part in generating their images. That’s often done by kids - 25 year old grad students, even 20 year old undergrads - or other trainees. Those people may not appreciate how easy it is to detect image manipulation and are still learning what kinds of ‘refining’ of imagery and datasets is acceptable, while the PI that pays their stipend or sponsors their visa rages at their inability to get an expected outcome or replicate a previous result.

Not saying there aren’t people out there just flat-out frauding, but these are group projects with a structure of trust and pressure that can muddy assignment of culpability. Like any committee or corporate action, it can be tough to say that any one individual is the guilty party or which people where just going along with the group.

Also, at least for the Yubi implementation, fixable in software, firmware >= 5.7 not vulnerable. Also not upgradeable, so replace keys if you’re worried about nation-state attacks.

University is ok if you’re starting at zero and don’t even know what’s out there. It’s for exposing students to a a breadth of topics and some rationale of why things are as they are, but not necessarily for plugging them into a production environment.

Nothing beats having your own real world project, either for motivation or exposure to cutting edge methods. Universities have tried to replicate that with things like ‘problem based learning,’ and they probably hope that students will be inspired by one or two of the classes to start their own out-of-class project, but school and work are fundamentally different ways of learning with fundamentally different goals.

Trump is exactly the kind of Karen who would describe anyone disagreeing with him as ‘having a mental health episode.’

Without an adblocker, I used to mute the system and put youtube in a background window. Do something else long enough for the video and all its ads to play, then go watch it. They wouldn’t play the ads on a second play through, and it would interrupt the cycle of constantly playing a new video.

You know that people pay taxes on the wealth embodied in their house, every year, right? Not even their equity in the house, but the full value - both the piece they own and the piece the bank still owns. Their primary residence is most of the wealth for most of the middle class, so we already have a wealth tax for everyone but the ultra-wealthy.

Tax on hoarded wealth is pressure to make that wealth do something productive. If you can’t get enough return on your invested millions to pay the tax, then you will slowly lose that wealth. Property tax works similarly for farmers and landlords.

The ultra wealthy are exactly the people who should be making big, bold, high-risk bets with their money, because they’ll be just fine if they lose a few million. Yet these are the same people who can live a comfortable, even lavish life off the lowest risk, lowest return investments, like government bonds. The rich say social safety nets discourage poor people from working, and I say that tax-free capital discourage it from working.

Also, very important to remember that wealth tax proposals generally target only wealth over a very high threshold. US proposals have been $10-50M, which seems pretty equivalent to the Spanish implementation.

I’m sure you’ll understand if the rest of us are skeptical of a guy worth $20M arguing against a wealth tax.

I mean, you’re right that restricted shares are a special problem in assessing “wealth,” but that’s why tax laws are complicated and full of loopholes.

Typical cat just knocking things off shelves - the library is an inexhaustible playground.

I have something similar, but wifi. Never even tried to connect to it, because you just use the buttons to set temp & time.

I can imagine, though, that an app might have buttons for ‘eggs’, ‘yogurt’, ‘steak’, etc. Or maybe let you program temperature-time sequences. Or let you check how much time is left from the next room. Conveniences. Definitely no need for them to phone home, though, except maybe for an ad-driven ‘recipe of the week’ type thing.

You’d need some way to cache that video, though, because it’d take 24 hours to write 8TB at SD card speeds of 80 MB/s.

The one time Jesus went HAM, chasing religious leaders around their temple with a whip, and whose temple was it? Zeus? Bacchus? Any of those graven-image, many-gods cults? No - he went after his own Father’s priests for being money-grubbing hypocrites.

I’m guessing that story doesn’t come up often at CPAC or prayer breakfasts.

It’s like a bear-sized Matchbox car. And when they take it away, he starts eating the fluff, like a 2-ton toddler.

As someone who follows politics mostly through late night shows and memes, that event was one of very few times I’ve seen journalists push back on the guy. This revelation makes pretty clear that ‘no fact checking’ is a routine demand that media orgs routinely cave to, and I now have a ton of respect for NABJ, which I had never previously heard of.

2. What electricity costs in my area. $0.32/KWh at the wrong time of day.

I assume you have this on a UPS. What about using a smart plug to switch to UPS during the expensive part of the day, then back to mains to charge when it’s cheaper? I imagine that needs a bigger UPS than one would ordinarily spec, and that cost would probably outweigh the electric bill, but never know.

The politicians made sure to exempt themselves from all the consumer protection, anti-fraud laws. They live in bubbles where their own political agendas are too important for limitations.

But I suspect, because my brand new phone number gets a lot of political spam, that 1) a lot of people can’t live with it and change their numbers to escape or 2) a lot of it is recycled burner-phones, previously used to launder donations to fit legal donation limits. But it’s given me a personal rule to never make a donation from my real phone or allow my real phone to become associated with any political process.

What exactly is your point? Because my point is that undesirable shitholes costing hundreds of thousands of dollars is a more pressing problem, with different solutions, than not being able to find a house in Beverly Hills under $4M.

I think we’re working with different definitions for ‘starter home.’ To me, ‘starter home’ is a real estate agent’s euphemism for ‘undesireable shithole.’ It is a home you expressly do not want to live in long-term. It’s temporary housing to build equity while you’re young, able to sacrifice living standard and comfort, and waiting to earn enough to upgrade to an actually desirable house.

From the goalposts you’re moving, it sounds like you think a starter house is somewhere affordable that you’d be willing to move into today and live indefinitely. And yeah, that’s probably going to be unavailable to most people. Most people don’t get to live in their dream house in an ideal neighborhood. Never have.