No, I go online and just order another one for same-day pickup from a local electronics retailer. Then I restore my files from my backup.

I agree with that generally, but what “methods that work” do you suggest?

Edit: To add, the protest spoilt ballots and low turnout in Hong Kong did exactly what they were supposed to do. It convinced other Hongkongers that the elected Legislative Council is not legitimate and was installed, not elected. This is particularly troublesome for the Government, because Hongkongers have a famous tendency to protest, and sometimes rather intensely.

I’m trying my best not to call you names here, but the point of that exercise was not to exert democratic power but to cause embarrassment for the Government. The Government tried their hardest to make it look like a legitimate election but got utterly humiliated instead with low turnout and large numbers of spoiled ballots.

No, because the spoiled ballots are, in many cases, actually counted. This is what people did in Hong Kong when the Government imposed electoral reform designed to prevent pro-democracy and localist groups from winning. Since it was illegal to tell people to not vote (pro-democracy groups had urged a boycott), people showed up to cast spoiled ballots. That election had among the highest numbers of spoiled ballots in the region’s history.

Then spoil a ballot, write in a nonsensical candidate name, or vote third-party. If you refuse to vote your action is literally indistinguishable from someone who has no opinion at all.

If this law is enacted, the Supreme Court will say that states can’t frustrate the operations of federal agents with these sorts of laws. Chief Justice Roberts will write the opinion and compare it to giving states the power to ban bulletproof vests from being worn by federal law enforcement and call it “a step from anarchy”. Clarence Thomas will then write a concurring opinion saying that federal agents acting on orders from the president should actually be immune for any type of civil or criminal liability for any of their actions, lawful or not.

Then, when a Democratic president takes office the court will walk it back and say “well, actually, there’s this exception, and this exception, and that exception…”

The party of domestic terrorism strikes again

It would be cringe if you were using a shared server and set this as a default for everyone or if it was interfering with something. But if you’re just minding your own business I could not care less what customisations you put on your terminal as long as it isn’t using excessive resources

It’s not an LLM, but Stockfish does use AI under the hood and has been since 2020. Stockfish uses a classical alpha-beta search strategy (if I recall correctly) combined with a neural network for smarter pruning.

There are some engines of comparable strength that are primarily neural-network based. lc0 comes to mind. lc0 placed 2nd in the Top Chess Engine Championships in 9 out of the past 10 seasons. By comparison, Stockfish is currently on a 10-season win streak in the TCEC.

One of my mates generated an entire website using Gemini. It was a React web app that tracks inventory for trading card dealers. It actually did come out functional and well-polished. That being said, the AI really struggled with several aspects of the project that humans would not:

• It left database secrets in the code
• The design of the website meant that it was impossible to operate securely
• The quality of the code itself was hot garbage—unreadable and undocumented nonsense that somehow still worked
• It did not break the code into multiple files. It piled everything into a single file

This seems strange to me. If everyone has accounts with the Bank of Palestine, then why did it turn into everyone demanding cash versus just paying each other with bank transfers through the Bank of Palestine?

But seeing that the Israelis are now trying to just starve the Palestinians out of Gaza, this just sounds like inflation with extra steps.

I think one other factor that people have not considered is the monitor. To run all games at 4K maximum settings, yes, this type of PC might be required. But at lower resolutions, such as 1080p or 1440p, this is overkill and one would be able to run any game as maximum settings even with a computer costing a third as much.

What is “the app” that they are talking about?

And for those who don’t: Plato, a Greek philosopher, was putatively asked by a student while teaching at the Academy what the definition of a man (human) was. Plato responded that a man is a “featherless biped”.

Diogenes, another Greek philosopher and infamous quick-wit, caught wind of this and thought that was the dumbest thing ever, so he gate-crashed one of Plato’s lectures and pulled out a chicken which had all of its feathers plucked out and said “Behold, a man!”.

Euclid’s first postulate: Give two points, there exists exactly one straight line that includes both of them.

Important distinction: A triangle is a three-sided polygon. For example, a quarter-circle is not a triangle, despite being a three-sided shape.

The UK isn’t in Europe though. Haven’t you been paying attention? They voted to leave Europe! Now they’re an island country in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. They have ✨sovereignty✨ now! But of course continent-dwellers wouldn’t know that, since they’re being crushed by metres upon metres of these “safety regulations” (unlike in the UK where they are now measured by the Gunter’s chain and also they can now import chlorinated chicken from America)

I thought this community was “buy from EU”

I am not the parent commenter, but the argument for and against wealth taxes is a lot more nuanced than many people would originally think.

For one, a great deal of wealth in this country (the overwhelming majority, actually) is not money but takes the form of illiquid capital goods like real property and shares in companies. There is a real concern that people subject to tax just won’t have enough dollars in a bank account to pay for it, and forcing the sale of that many goods could render the markets illiquid as it wipes out the red side of the order book every April.

A potential way around this is if the tax can be paid in kind, similar to how wealth taxes were collected historically, such as in the Roman Empire. This could be stupid easy to administrate—a 1% wealth tax against companies can be enforced by just minting 1% of every registered company’s outstanding shares in new stock and then transferring it to the control of the Government. Though the downside is that this sort of tax is very indiscriminate and difficult to target towards certain demographic groups. While shareholders are largely wealthy individuals who would be the target demographic for a wealth tax, they aren’t exclusively so. Effectively that becomes a tax on holding shares in companies, which is a good, but not perfect, proxy for wealth. The drawback to collecting shares in kind is that the stuff that is raised is not really “revenue” for the state, in that it is not money that can be spent, and to liquidate it would incur significant loss for the state as well. Which is basically throwing wealth away. This wasn’t a problem when “in-kind” meant grain and barley that could be used to feed the army, but soldiers can’t survive on a diet of stock certificates.

I am in favour of large-scale wealth redistribution from the billionaire class to the working class, but doing so isn’t as easy as saying “You, billionaire, give me 1% of everything you got, cash.” I think a policy of combined high income tax, high capital gains tax, and taxing loans for personal expenses secured against shares as income is more likely to be effective.

That was already done weeks ago