wing-_-nuts

vanguard? I have considered just closing my bank account and having my paycheck direct deposited there

I dunno why anyone would want a front loader. If the seal fails, you have water on your floor. If the machine fails during the wash cycle, again, no way to easily get your clothes out without getting water on the floor. If a top loader fails, neither of these things can happen.

No, actually, we have explicit taxes for SS and Medicare, and we've known they were not bringing in enough revenue to fund those programs since the 80s.

The trust funds are almost dry, so we're either going to have to raise those taxes to fund those programs, or cut a critical safety net to the American public. I know where my vote is going.

What a nonsensical argument. Yes, that's why we're all living in government owned housing, because if you tax something, it inevitably gets taken away, and nobody wants to buy houses, cause the government is just gonna take it away...what?

Nothing, hence my point about it being a straw man :^)

Because our current social safety nets all work by assuming the next generation pays for the care of the current elderly. Those elderly do need 'stuff' they need doctors and nurses and nursing homes. Thus taxes will have to go up, and if it has to, it may as well be progressive.

Man I always love the straw men you guys stand up to fight this. More taxes = socialism, and not nordic socialism, no, actually, communism. Therefore mass death / genocide. Ok. Sure jan.

Why not? We tax property every year on it's assessed value. I think it's pretty clear that the wealthy will need to pay more taxes throughout the world to deal with an aging population.

I'm a little tired of billionaires 'buy, borrow, dying' to get around the paltry taxes they're currently subject to. We need a harder tax to dodge.

This made me laugh. I too, browse like corporate security is sitting at my desk.

>If we filter out the unsubstantiated fearmongering, all we've got left to discuss are NIMBY rants and geopolitics.

I'm sorry, what?

I'll put it to you again, you sound like me after playing around with gpt 3.5. It was interesting, but it wasn't good. There were still questions as to whether scaling would persist. My doubts were pretty much obliterated. LLMs haven't been mere text completion for a while now. Heck, even a model small enough to fit on my 3090 is now shockingly competent and useful. Does claude sometimes go off on weird tangents making me reel it in? Yeah, but it's genuinely great in present form, and it's the worst it'll ever be.

You're welcome to your opinion. It used to be mine too, but I disagree now. I find pretty much every AI benchmark has shown forward progress, some with non public datasets, and some things have gotten scarily better.

I had a dark mode extension slowing things down. Then I got annoyed with the site performance and enabled 'reader' view

Oh hey, it's my point of view from a year ago...

It's definitely changed in that time

I have no doubt that AI will massively transform society. That cat is out of the bag. It took decades for electricity, and then computers to change society, but this is the first technology where the average person can simply describe the problem they're trying to solve and it will at least attempt to help them solve it.

I very. much. doubt. that the trillions of dollars spent on AI will have a positive ROI for most companies in the race. It's all well and good to have the latest fable, but if some chinese company is hosting a cheap open weights model that's only 6mo behind at a tiny fraction of the price, you're gonna get your lunch eaten.

They really just need to mandate that new datacenter construction uses closed loop cooling, and must provide an upfront investment sufficient to add enough carbon free energy to the grid to power it. That would, of course, make it much more expensive, but maybe it'd be enough to make investors consider whether lighting trillions of dollars on fire is really the best use of their money.

...and that's not a scenario that anyone is talking about employing with nuclear. We need enough for baseline load. Being able to build small modular reactors would give us scale that would help cut through the regulatory cost. By the time this crop of current reactors need to be decommissioned, we'd probably have dirt cheap grid storage figured out and could move away from them, but in the mean time, we need all the zero carbon energy we can get.

I don't think solar even needs advocates at this point. Battery backed solar should win on pure economics.

'Fuel efficiency' is not the bottle neck to getting more clean energy on the grid, scale is. Waste? grind it up, vitrify it, bury it in an abandoned coal mine or something. People get more radioactivity from a coal power plant than they will ever get from properly handled nuclear waste.

I'm sorry, if you're gonna link to a 111 page pdf, please at least quote the area of interest?

Yeah, I don't mind walmart making a psa about theft if that's what they want to do with their money. I very much do have a problem with them putting their thumb on the scale and donating millions to one political candidate over another.

You want to hire a lobbyist to show up and educate a senator on soybean production, more power to you, but it shouldn't come with a check.

'Termination shock' will be a very real threat, and lets not pretend that injecting sulfides into the atmosphere is going to improve air quality or help the ozone layer. Best option is to rapidly cut emissions, but I think we can already see that we're not going to chose the best option here. Hopefully SAI can give us the time we need to decarbonize, but I'm sick that we're gonna have to geoengineer at all.

I've seen estimates of the cost of sulfide injection to be about 2-3B / yr / 1C.

That's not outside of the capability of a country like India, much less China

Last estimates I've seen for the cost of stratospheric sulfide injection was ~ 2-3B/yr.

That's not nothing, but it's definitely something India could afford to do unilaterally, not to mention China

>This is literally going to kill millions.

You could be right, but I think the more likely outcome is a 'Ministry for the Future' scenario where India or China just decide to unilaterally implement geoengineering and dare the rest of the world to stop them.

>Automation is wonderful to cut cost for them but for the users being unable to get support is a horrible experience. But you cannot go elsewhere because they are the only player in town.

I can't tell you how many times I've experienced this with comcast. The last time I had to deal with it, was when I bought a new cable modem. I call in to provision it, the automated system assumes I have one of their modems and fails. For some reason I can't get technical support on the line and finally I resort to yelling 'cancel my account' over and over again until I finally get someone on the phone.

The guy was able to solve the issue in 5 minutes flat. The problem with automation is it's only ever going to be able to handle the 'happy path'

I can't find the benchmarks now, but the ones I recently saw on hacker news, xwayland was notably worse than either wayland native or xorg native. Bad enough to be noticeable by the average user.

Also, as benchmarks show, xwayland introduces pretty bad latency..

Yeah, instead of the wayland folks leading the effort to fix issues, it's often some individual DE / WM going off, fixing it the way they prefer, and wayland grudgingly adopting it as official because they know the ecosystem is fragmenting bad enough as it is.

If wayland had been sold as a hardened display for those who needed that level of security, I would not have a problem with it.

As it is, the community got constantly browbeat with 'this is the future' and 'it's so much faster!' when recent benchmarks have proven that to be false.

Great, so let wayland be a hardened option for those who care.

You'll excuse me if I am not terribly enthusiastic about breaking all sorts of functionality to solve a security problem I've never experienced in my 25 years on linux.