Idk about you but if the government took 24% of my money I’d be ecstatic, currently it’s much closer to 55-60%, a too-big percentage of which goes on privatising profit and nationalising losses.

So for context, I’m an asexual guy who had one girl in his classes at high school & went to a 75% male university on a course that was 94% male…

Right after graduating I had the same issues you’re describing, just from “new experiences” more than anything, but when you go out into the world and start interacting with people you’ll be fine - it’s somewhat normal especially if you didn’t have a drive to seek out women previously or even just didn’t have the self confidence to

Also though, that sounds like a bit of a weird interaction as an introvert anyway, I don’t think I’d have been super comfortable either way as I’d be expecting to be robbed or scammed or something, but if someone is expressing interest in something you’re passionate about then they very clearly want to hear about it, so just say things about it even if it’s cringe or not perfect

The intersection between Authoritarianism and Socialism:

Hey, sometimes they like to overthrow a beloved monarchy and install a dictatorship, just to spice things up every so often

It kind of disappoints me that Wales ruins the standard:flag system in the Home Nations though, if they were to be included in the Union Flag I’d want to see it be the St. David’s Cross with the dragon going on the Royal Standard where France used to be

You’re wondering if a place that grew on monopoly and extortion, with some of the most impoverished, deprived and violent neigborhoods in the country, along with some of the most exclusive and expensive collections of gated mansions, could have serious fundamental issues?
I’d think it’s safe to assume that’s it’s this one…

A quick google search when I was initially fact-checking took me to this reddit post; I’m highly skeptical of both the LAPD and reddit so went for 15 minutes to be “safe” but make of it what you will…

It’s around $2.35 in the UK at the moment and that’s the lowest I can remember it being for about 15 years

In an ideal world, if it’s someone who immediately mentions that it’s third time they’ve called this week about a neighbor having a dead tree in their garden, or someone’s mad because someone else parked in “their” spot, someone’s calling the fire department on someone having a bbq or someone’s stubbed their toe, that sort of thing can get put way down the “call back later” list

Everything else gets put through to a person. In LA it’s not unusual to wait 15+ minutes after you call 911; most cities are going to be shorter, and if the wait is under a minute, you don’t need the AI triage. If you do have a wait and block out 25% of calls which are obviously a waste of time with AI, you can significantly reduce that (ideally in addition to hiring more operators, but let’s be realistic…)

everyone and their dog has texts come up on their wrist… texts can also be read a lot more discretely than picking up a phone call

That said, some things do warrant a phone call, it’s just very specific situations

Because he’s not been in public-facing power (ie in the cabinet), and being in power is awful for approval ratings as a lot of the time there’s no good decisions and things you’ve had no influence over still turn the people against you.

The difference between reasoning models and normal models is reasoning models are two steps, to oversimplify it a little they prompt “how would you go about responding to this” then prompt “write the response”

It’s still predicting the most likely thing to come next, but the difference is that it gives the chance for the model to write the most likely instructions to follow for the task, then the most likely result of following the instructions - both of which are much more conformant to patterns than a single jump from prompt to response.

The difference is people still write Java, regardless of whether it’s a dated pos or not, so the use cases have evolved

Then there’s the use of the JVM/JRE which have evolved even more due to Scala, Clojure & Kotlin

My apartment is from 1865 but “own” is a little tenuous… Beyond that it’s probably down to probably 20 year old cutlery or my tv stand which is actually a crate that’s around 100 years old

Yeah, it’s a classic of locking you in and hiking up the prices, and the people capable of porting those sheets are probably way too overworked dealing with supporting the vast majority who have no idea how they work to spend time on it (or getting fired by Elon for not doing anything while being the single block that supports the tower)

It sucks, but I wouldn’t give up on trying to get them to convert, just be aware that it’s very possible that this will be one of the biggest technical (as opposed to administrative) blocks.

Yeah, now AI can produce infinite slop there’s no need for human-produced slop anymore

Most users of word & powerpoint are fairly basic users, but if you’re using excel for work then there’s a surprisingly high likelyhood you’re using a sheet written by a wizard with arcane skills in it with the number of VB macros, pivot tables, and things most people don’t even know exist.

Even if you’re just a user and not creating them, and their functionality would better work in a dedicated program or a database, chances are it’d still break unless you’re very lucky.

Most likely a skiing/mountain biking/car/surfing/hiking/tragic boating accident would be my best guess, other than cancer… If you’re not suicidal, a risk taker or into extreme sports it’s most likely going to be cancer though

Do people need to care?

Do what you need to to secure your privacy, and let people know how much of a travesty it is that their privacy and rights are being stripped away, but at the end of the day they’re their own people and so if they choose not to care that’s their decision, and it’s not up to you to choose how they’re allowed to think or live their lives, even if it appears obviously wrong and short-sighted to you or I

Source tarballs are often super sensitive to environment and distro such that you’d need to modify them to work on the specific distro/with the specific dep versions and so at that point, just precompile binaries?

It’s also much quicker for the end user, nobody wants to wait 5-60 minutes for their package to install unless you’re making modifications to it

Why not just tax based on the number of homes, isn’t that a better idea?

If someone owns three £10M mansions, they’re potentially depriving two families of homes by way of scarsity, but frankly if you can afford a £10M mansion is it really an issue, as you’re not being deprived of a home?

If they instead own one £10M mansion and forty £200k flats/terraces, they’re potentially depriving forty families of homes and so should probably be charged twenty times as much to dissuade people from buying up the cheapest homes.