pgm_01

I feel like this device should also be Gluten Free.

Meh. Lee was not particularly bad, it just was a very wide storm, and the areas that got hit are used to dealing with even stronger winter storms.

Yup. Global Warming is literally burning and flooding people to death, but political leaders and citizens are focussed on UFOs and aliens. Where are the hearings on how the oil industry knew this was happening and covered it up? If you are looking for a conspiracy to hide something huge from the world, that would be a good place to start.

Message sent. One of the cosponsors of this madness is one of my Senators. We need universal healthcare. Instead, we get a proposed universal tracking system for people to access the internet. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

I have used SanDisk cards for years, without issue. They are a huge manufacturer of flash memory, which is why their prices were always good. It is certainly possible and even probable that the quality has gone down. All kinds of companies lower their product’s quality and reliability to make them cheaper to increase profits.

That’s not good at all.

I believe the phrase is:
“Lock him up! Lock him up!”

Seriously, put his ass in home confinement, slap on an ankle monitor and take away all of his electronics because he can’t behave himself.

This is why we are completely screwed if a bird flu or other highly transmissible but more deadly than Covid virus starts spreading. There are people who not only will not follow basic health and safety guidelines, they will actively fight, and sabotage other’s attempts at following the guidelines.

The other part of the equation is that if the wealthier countries had not only shut down but quickly provided vaccines for poorer more densely populated countries, the spread would also have been lessened.

That’s the point of the “culture war” that is currently manifesting as a war against “wokeness.” As long as conservatives are distracted into hating LGBTQ and minorities, the working class will be split and will not have the ability to fight against the people truly responsible for the mess we are in.

The indoctrination works exceeding well, too. I have a relative who voted for Al Gore because of his stance on the environment. Fast-forward to now, and she is posting things on Facebook supporting the overall Republican agenda (Not supporting Trump or DeSantis, but still very conservative.) Basically, a bunch of family stuff including prolonged illness and eventual deaths made her a much more unhappy person, and the right-wing propaganda is designed to pick up people like that and bring them into the machine.

Don’t call it a comeback, I been here for years.

It is unclear how long Amazon will continue to support their assistant in the future. Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year

People use exactly as you are, to control various smart devices, but that doesn’t pay for the infrastructure that makes Alexa run, and people are not using it to buy stuff from Amazon as envisioned.

Google’s products are getting worse as they are now deep into the enshitification process, and making investors happy takes precedence over users. I would welcome an improvement in Google Assistant, but it will probably manage to make things worse.

Your Mileage May Vary

There are a bunch of new 5-star ratings, including some that mention the API, others put in language referencing other apps. Either fanboys brigading or paid shillery of the reviews is occurring.

We must protect high income individuals at all cost. It can’t be considered an improvement if some rich asshole is less rich because of a law, and so the laws need to be rolled back. Republican obsequiousness toward corporations will get us all killed.

That’s how human intelligence works. We assign a value to the source of the information. The fact that the AI’s seemed to be trained without that explains why they “lie” so much. They simply reconstruct patterns without giving any weight to specific patterns.

For example, if you have the information “President Biden will launch a ground invasion of Russia.” If the New York Times, BBC, and CNN are all reporting it, we would give that information a higher likelihood of being true than if the information was found on random blogs. However, if the random blogs reporting the information belonged to reputable reporters or bloggers on military and international affairs, we would assign the information a higher value of being correct than if the information came from Bob’s Bigfoot and Alien sightings Index.

Without the ability to check the level of accuracy of source data, all the generative AI could be corrupted. If you fed an art AI photos of the Statue of Liberty but kept telling it that it was the Eiffel Tower, when asked to draw the Eiffel Tower it would spit out the Statue of Liberty. Right now, without the ability to assess the accuracy of a response, any of the chat-based AI are garbage for most of the use-cases companies are deploying them in.

Firefox for general browsing. Firefox Focus when I want privacy (it can help get around some paywalled news sources.) If I need to use a Chrome based browser, I use Samsung with an ad block.

AI only “knows” what it has been trained on. Since structural racism exists, racism will be present in how AI operates. It does not mean we will have AI Hitler trying to kill Jews, but it might mean things like an AI drawing program defaulting to a white woman when asked to draw a generic woman. It could mean that bias that already exists gets amplified, for example an AI “pre-crime” program targeting Black neighborhoods as potential hotspots while ignoring similar White neighborhoods.

I am currently running KDE Neon 5.27 which is Ubuntu based, on an Inspiron 3551 with an Intel N3540 @ 2.16GHz which is a 4 core Atom,
and 4 GiB of RAM. With this 1 tab of Firefox open, the system is using 2GB of the RAM. I have had no issues running Neon on such a slow system with little RAM, but I don’t usually have many tabs or programs running at the same time. Pretty much all the desktop interfaces for Linux run with far less resources and bloat than Windows, I would start by finding which desktop environment you prefer. I have been a fan of KDE for many years now, but try different bootable distros to get a feel for which interface you would like.

I love how Google’s original intent of simply cataloging the net has now turned them into a net nanny whose job it is to prohibit vile copyright scofflaws from infesting others with their demented thinking.

I inherited a crappy laptop (4 core atom processor, with 4 gigs of RAM, fear the power!) because Windows was running slow on it. I decided to try different Linux distros booting from a USB and had no issues. I literally ran the system for months off of a Sandisk USB drive, and it was faster than the spindle drive in the machine.

My recommendation is, don’t cheap out on the USB drive. No-name drives are fine for word files, but the performance increase from a Sandisk, Samsung, Kingston or equivalent is worth it for any media transfers and will work fine for a bootable Linux.