astronaut_sloth

If I remember correctly, he didn't want to nominate her. He wanted Liebermann and didn't even like Palin that much. She was just sort of forced on him.

I'll be honest, the constant crying and sharing of emotions kinda takes me out of the action. It feels like some of the hyper-emotional scenes are in the wrong place at the wrong time and in the wrong measure. If these scenes were toned down from hyper-emotional to emotional and put in more appropriate places in their episodes, DSC would be a lot better for it.

I don't want to sound like I'm hating on DSC. I think the show has some good bones and interesting concepts, but it's a bit rough like a lot of series are in places (TNG s1...I'm looking at you). Really, if they had true 22-24 episode seasons and just the one series, we'd have LD and SNW-esque stories for DSC, and it wouldn't feel like the red-headed step child series.

No lie, that actually sounds kinda good and I want to try it.

Not necessarily. The Free and Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement is a thing. Most of the Fediverse is FLOSS, and I doubt there's anyone who can take Lemmy or Mastodon closed source and buy every instance and then stop pop-up instances. It does require quite a bit of work, though, so it is difficult.

I think the real challenging thing is that a great FLOSS service needs to attract attention and care. When I bring up Fediverse/FLOSS alternatives to software my friends complain about, I'm met with lukewarm-at-best reactions, generally due to networking effects (I think).

Like @[email protected] said, it's on government phones. The thinking goes that TikTok, which is a Chinese company, is exporting too much data from US government devices. In other words, the government is worried the Chinese are spying. Given the amount of data that the TikTok app actually collects, the fear is probably not unreasonable. All corporate-owned social media collects way too much data, but TikTok really is next level from what I've read.

I think a big difference, though, is that there is political force to ending TikTok. The US government has no major issues with Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. existing. Remember, there's actual legislation banning TikTok. Whether that makes a real difference or not, well, I guess we just wait and see. Personally, I think they all should go down in flames.

It's not just convenient for them to do it; it's how they are able to evade anti-trust action (not that the U.S. is great at it anyway but still). I also run my own mail server. It's not impossible, and I wouldn't even say it's even hard. It's just time consuming to set up (if it's the first time), and there are a lot of hurdles to make it so impractical that it's virtually impossible to the average person. Only the most patient or those who have a real desire to run their own mail server will even attempt it. Anyone can set up their own mail server, but most won't because it's not worth it compared to using something that just works from Google.

I'm a bit more optimistic about the future if Trump loses. To me, the Republicans are in the throes of a cult of personality, and from what I can tell, there is no Trumpism heir apparent. There will be people who try, like DeSantis, but no one has the singular charisma that Trump does.

My prediction is that after 2024, if Trump loses (which is a very big if), 2028 will have a warmed over Trumpist candidate, like DeSantis, who will probably lose. After that, they will have to figure out an actual platform, and around 2030 is when Trumpism will hopefully, finally die.

I agree with this in general, but you still may want to consider using Windows or Mac if there's university only software that is Windows/Mac-based and doesn't play nicely with VMs, which is really common in test-taking software (since it's essentially spyware). An alternative would be dual-booting if you want to deal with that.

The reason I say this is that when I went back to school and started course work, there was an online class that mandated the use of certain test-taking software. I tried to get it to work in a VM (by masking the clues of being in a VM), and it kept shutting me down. I ultimately had to borrow a friend's laptop to take all of my quizzes and tests, which was a real pain. Thankfully, I only had that one class like that, but any others would have driven me to get a cheap throw-away Windows-only box.

In the end, I'd stay away from bleeding-edge for school work, so Fedora is probably your better bet, but there may come a time that you will need to use Windows (much to your chagrin).

I work/study in AI, and it is completely over-hyped. For one thing, the C-suite can't wrap it's head around the fact that AI != LLM; they all seem to think all AI is just LLMs. On top of that, they are way too eager to throw humans out of the loop.

That said, I think LLM applications, even in their current form, are super useful in development and business practices. I myself use it to increase my productivity in coding. But, I use it as an augmentation rather than a replacement. One of my friends put it best the other day, "LLMs are like a junior dev to your senior dev. You need to be hyper-specific, and you need to check it's output." In other words, it's great for off-loading some work, but it isn't going to completely replace humans.

With that said, I'm a bit annoyed that other AI fields are being over-shadowed by LLMs. There's a ton of other interesting work being done in those fields that is super useful and important. All of them, though, are not going to replace humans but rather augment and make humans more productive. I've found that an AI-Human team is most effective.

I think that's exactly what the Republicans want.

For real, I really don't understand how Texas isn't being prosecuted for human trafficking.