I recently switched from 320kbps to lossless, and there are very few moments where I can tell a difference. The biggest one is in the cover of “Tom’s Diner” by AnnenMayKantereit. There’s a section of the song at 320kbps where it goes almost silent, other than faint whispers of the band counting out the silence, but in lossless you can hear them actually singing the song quietly

Still increases footprint/grants more credibility to the Fediverse, which I think is a good thing. It just won’t really impact the daily experience here

I live in the PNW. I picked an instance in the PNW. Sometimes I see local news, and often I read comments from people within a few hour drive. It’s nice to have a small, local community here, while still having access to the rest of the world together. So I guess recommend picking the largest instance in your region if you don’t have any other preferences.

Literally just went through getting the app built /deployed for my parents and my partner’s parents using the old method a few weeks ago. I’m super glad the app is on the app store, but it’s just bad timing for me lol

That’s the lovely thing about open source: if this ruins blender, the community at large can pivot and fork blender to allow it to thrive in the way the community wants it. In small projects this type of pivot can ruin the momentum of a project, but in large-scale projects they are a lot safer.

Jabba, Pizza, Sunglass. Easy peasy

Yup. All my IoT devices are on a network that doesn’t have access to the internet. To control remotely, I use a VPN. Even though I don’t think it’s technically necessary, I take the precaution of blocking connections to the big company’s APIs/websites for all my IoT devices, just in case.

I wish this were easier for the layman to do. Some companies like Unifi make it pretty painless, but they are expensive and it’s really hard for the non-networking-savvy folks to know exactly which devices you need from them to have a working setup.

Are you kitten me right meow??

That is exactly the argument that was made

Depends on your definition of “damn near everywhere” I guess. I don’t see that as a declaration that “almost every single place in the US looks like this” I saw it more as “there are places all over the US that look like this”.

so definitionally not the whole US

I think it’s pretty silly to hear someone say something is everywhere and assume that someone meant that the entire US is covered by only this exact type of road.

a claim you have nothing on which to base it except that 1/4 of people in the country live in the big cities

Actually, that’s just near major roads. 80% of the US population live in cities or urban areas. Considering that these stroads are a standard feature of US urbanization, and can even be found near smaller towns, it would suggest that the vast majority of people in the US live near this type of road. I don’t have actual numbers because no one is collecting this data. But by presenting data that provides some level of tangential evidence, we can start to form a rough picture of the data we’re interested in.

Mate the argument isn’t that the entire US looks like this. I’ve been to all the US’s national parks, and a boatload of of state parks. I’ve lived in a small farming town with more cows than people. However, in terms of where the majority of people actually live in the US, this kind of road is very close by. I can’t find the numbers on what percentage live within a few miles of a freeway, but I’d guess it’s a majority. ~24% of people live within 500m of road that handles an average of 25,000 cars per day. Sure, in terms of space, the freeways are small, but people live near freeways. I’d argue that the sort of street in that picture is within 5-10 miles of pretty much everyone in the US.

I’ve road tripped through most of America. This is definitely in the majority of places near a freeway. Yeah, there’s a boatload of other stuff too, but if you were to pick a town right off a freeway, it’s very likely it’d look like this

The original (presented) heart of the visas were to pull in some of the best and brightest of other countries to fast track them to become Americans, thus bolstering the output of America. This actually resembles the current American brain drain, where other countries are taking advantage of the mistreatment of scientists and other high-intelligence fields in the US to help their country have an even better output. In theory, the original plan makes a lot of sense. Improve the compensation of some of the smartest people around the world, and improve America. But in practice, it is being sorely misused.

This is a well-known comic artist who is drawing in his usual style, I can’t imagine he switched to using AI

I’ve priced it out for myself, and I couldn’t get a build that’s as good at that price, not on new hardware at least. Not sure how they worked out their numbers

My neighbors planted blackberries on their side of the property line. It takes a good few days each year for me to cut them back off my side. Please, if you want blackberries, plant them in their own little zone, and be mindful of how they can spread

Hey now, artificial neural networks aren’t always the bad kind of AI, they’ve been around a long time and I really enjoyed playing with them back during my time at University

You are also missing the huge advances they’ve made in their contributions to FOSS, like proton, FEX, arch, etc. Steam has done an insane amount of legwork to get Linux gaming off the ground. They are the one company that made migrating off of Windows and onto Linux a valid option for me, and a bunch of other folks. Linux was ~0.89% of their userbase in 2020, and since their contributions to these FOSS projects, it has gone up to 3.05%. That’s crazy, considering it had been at or below that 0.89% since 2016.

Just the other day I was researching potential solutions to a programming issue I had at work. Basically, I asked AI “Is there an API call available to tweak this config” It responded “Yes, you can do that with the tweak-that-config command”

I went to check the documentation for the “tweak-that-config” command. It just plain didn’t exist, and never had. Turns out there was no API call to tweak the config I wanted, and attempting to use AI as a search engine is, in fact, a waste of time.

As someone with a little insider baseball knowledge, it was just a few hours down of DynamoDB and DNS. However, that caused EC2 to go down for ~1 day, which causes pretty much 1/3 of the internet to go down. Once EC2 sorts themselves out, then teams/companies (almost all amazon services use EC2 in the back end) that use EC2 have to get their ducks back in a row, and that can take any span of time, depending on how well their code was written to handle failures + how many people they are willing to pay oncall/overtime.

E-reader support is still pretty clunky on Kavita, but doable. I normally host my books on Kavita, and then download them to my eReader, and that does a fine job, but it won’t sync progress across devices