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.

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?

Fine them one million a day until the generators are done. That should motivate them a bit more.

Toasters could do that in the fifties. Crispiness is directly related to surface temperature and you can detect that with nothing fancier than a bimetal strip and some clever engineering. If you want to use modern technology you could use an IR sensor and a two cent microcontroller.

Using AI for the task suggests that they stuck a camera in there and use image processing to badly simulate an IR sensor. Less reliable than two metal strips welded together but also way more expensive.

Mind you, even relatively simple fridges can technically have firmware because these days the cheapest way to implement something like a defrost timer is with a microcontroller. Of course that firmware is so simple that it doesn’t need updates and definitely doesn’t need to be connected to the internet.

Other than that I don’t really see what a smart fridge can do that you can’t cover by sticking a cheap tablet on the fridge door. Sure, maybe a smart fridge can order butter from Amazon when it thinks that yours runs out but you can do the same with your phone and “buy it again” in seconds. Assuming that you even want to buy your groceries from an e-retailer.

It’s definitely a pointless price inflation device that makes the fridge less reliable to boot.

“Complex” doesn’t mean “balanced”. Israel has always pulled underhanded shit like extending its de facto borders by means of “settlements”. The Hamas/PLO fight also didn’t happen without its involvement. But there have also been factors like the involvement of foreign powers, German guilt, the similarity between Zionism and early Nazi deportation plans, and so on.

The conflict between Israel and Palestine has been a mess from the very beginning and it’s understandable that people were reluctant to get involved. Of course these days most of that complexity doesn’t matter and not taking a stand is a luxury we shouldn’t be able to afford.

(I’m saying “shouldn’t be able to” because honestly we routinely ignore genocides; this one just happens to be particularly hard to ignore because Israel is a spotlight hog with huge diplomatic influence.)

A couple years ago it was complex. The complexity just stopped mattering once Israel turned the conflict into a war of annihilation.

For the record, as a German I do remember the lessons we learned from our grisly past: That genocide is evil and that it’s very easy for a country to sink into utter barbarism. I wish we could take the principled stand we owe to our past victims and condemn Israel for its actions.

Unfortunately, that’s just what the German people learned. German politicians apparently learned from our past that our mistake was to genocide the wrong people and to lose the war.

And modern mid-range photo cameras come with crazy features. Autofocus that can detect human and even animal eyes and instantly focus on those. Lenses with whisper-quiet and crazy fast ultrasonic focusing motors. Image stabilization both in the lens and in the camera.

Oh, and your photo camera can record video, too, because why wouldn’t it?

Step 1: Get elected as POTUS.
Step 2: Move into the White House.
Step 3: Immediately burn the whole place down.
Step 4: Stand atop the ruins waving the Canadian flag. Get gunned down by an angry mob. Go out in a blaze of confusing glory.

Problem is, if your slang is too new it looks like gibberish. Of course you could try something else that stands out. Like badly translated idioms.

But it’s probably jacket like pants. Even if you tear your ass open to make your writing look less 08/15 that doesn’t mean everything’s in butter. It’s probably only a matter of time until LLMs will copper off that style as well and your clever plan turns into a zero number. And that’s where the hare lies in the pepper: Your clarity goes over the Jordan and it ain’t itching the LLMs’ bean. It’ll get trained on your stuff anyway and the cat bites its own tail.

Maybe bad translations aren’t the solution either.

The same happens to people who write a lot and pay attention to their style, such as this gentleman. The way LLMs generate text is strongly influenced by what used to be considered a high-effort eloquent style. Varied sentence lengths, triplets, typographically correct punctuation, yada yada yada. Until recently, that stuff used to be the hallmark of professional writers (and Kenyans, apparently).

What were LLMs trained on? Professional writing, first and foremost. Books, scientific papers, op-eds, blog posts. So by default they take a polite, professional tone with all the flourishes and best practices that previously used to be de rigueur for authors and the like. So now what happens when someone used to “proper” writing writes something?

Everyone thinks it’s AI slop because that’s how LLMs talk. High effort now looks like low effort. And because tech bros immediately went on to develop “humanizing” tech, any other style will soon also look like low effort. And the same is true for art: Being able to produce highly detailed pictures with spectacular colors and shadows went from something impressive to evidence that you’re just a random jackass with a ChatGPT subscription.

You can’t really win anymore. Anything short of a live performance or a feature-length movie could feasibly have been generated by a fully automated content mill. That really sucks if you want to engage in creative expression of any kind and doubly so if you once thought you could make a living off of that.

Clean lines and a warm color scheme might be a good middle ground. The old version’s wallpapers were a bit too busy and the new one definitely looks way too sterile.

But yeah, of I had to choose I’d go with the old one.

I’m pretty sure that if a judge would grant that injunction there’d be one less a week later.

This would be a great time for an injunction to force the data center to shut down all of those turbines until the matter has been resolved legally.

Of course you need to be able to pay for a lawyer who convinces a judge to pass that injunction.

I don’t think Foster is portrayed as heroic.

Sure, he picks fights with people/things many viewers would like to be fought, from street gangs to Nazis, from corporate bullshit to inflating prices. But he’s also shown to be unstable and dangerous even when he doesn’t want to be.

His very reason for being in the traffic jam that makes him start off on his rampage is that he can’t face the fact that neither his company nor his family want to deal with him.

The more the movie goes on the more it drives home the fact that Foster is not someone to look up to. He’s always been unstable and entitled and now he’s finally snapped.

The cop is shown as more heroic but is really just used as a vehicle for suicide by cop. A suicide that is clearly Foster telling the easy way out of a life he can’t handle anymore.

I take Falling Down as a deconstruction of the kind of power fantasy we get when things piss us off. Sure, we think it’d be great to just blow up what we don’t like but the movie shows what kind of person we’d have to be to actually do it.

It’s not quite “more every week”; the numbers seem to be roughly stable since April. Of course it’s still a lot.

One question that occurs to me is whether they can actually sustain this. Missiles aren’t that cheap or fast to produce so it’s possible that they’re throwing out more than they can sustain in an attempt to wear down Ukraine at the last moment.

I’m not an expert on the weapon systems involved so maybe I’m way off base.

A business is under no obligation to ensure that employees in underperforming departments get the star treatment. If agriculture-oriented rural towns generated as much money as grifting the stock market with AI does they’d be treated accordingly. As it is they’re a cost center and will be neglected or cut entirely.

That’s not how a country is usually run but for a business it’s very much on par.