2006

I recommend trying another linux distro for a while. Arch has a pretty steep learning curve. So big respect for getting it to work as a first distro, but there is a lot of stuff you have to setup manually that just works on other distros. If you got more stuff working and get a little more familiar you can always go back to arch.

I use arch nowadays, but the first time i tried to install it i basically gave up a few times. If you just want to try it out in order to learn then it’s perfectly cool to take some time. But if your goal is to play games then arch is just a means to an end. Then it becomes really annoying, because you cannot reach your goal.

this is the best one !

I’m all for it, but with plants of this size - or rather such an mount of relatively dense photovoltaic surfaces - i am thinking about the heat that these panels are generating. i am guessing it would be similar to such an area out of asphalt. if these panels were cooled the heat could also be used to warm massive heat storage tanks.

“machines mimicking living things” does not mean exclusively AI. Many scientific fields are trying to mimic living things.

AI is a very hazy concept imho as it’s difficult to even define when a system is intelligent - or when a human is.

on the contrary! it’s a very old buzzword!

AI should be called machine learning. much better. If i had my way it would be called “fancy curve fitting” henceforth.

In this case it’s a giant housing shortage though. The city (and large surrounding area) is Freiburg in the south. Rents are so expensive and available flats are so rare that companies don’t find workers who could actually live there. Also: the comparably good loans don’t mean much when it’s only channeled into a greedy landlord’s pockets.

Edit: oh no i was wrong it’s Nuremberg - their public transport organization is also “VAG”. But Freiburg has a huge labor shortage due to unaffordable housing and housing shortage.

must be a shithole country if that’s legal.

he got 100 Million Dollars from Spotify. Of course he thinks he’s highly intelligent.

In my experience there are quite a few tenured professors that are brilliant in their respective fields (so i heard), but we’re absolutely terrible in teaching their it. In my case this was physics (and also mathematics where i met some of these specimens). I suspect if you understand a certain field so naturally and really excel at that it becomes a second nature it it is more and more difficult to put yourself in an outsider’s perspective. It is so foreign and unimaginable for you that someone might not understand this and that aspect naturally that you cease to be a good teacher in this.

I’ve read a comparison of several newer file formats (avif, heic, webp) with jpeg-xl. The conclusion was that jpeg-xl was on par in terms of compression, sometimes better and very fast. also it can re-compress jpgs directly.

here’s an article describing it https://cloudinary.com/blog/the-case-for-jpeg-xl

Have you been to Europe? Have you walked the streets of Paris? The US was built with enough space being everywhere. American roads are wider, cities are mostly built like square-grids of roads built in a time when cats existed whereas European cities emerged in the middle ages. They’re tightly packed with little extra space. Sometimes (very rarely) here there are old Cadillacs that can be rented for weddings. Seeing one of these cars on the street is an unreal experience. They’re just so huge. They don’t fit on the streets here - and those are cars from the 60s or 70s. Everything seems tiny compared to them. From a European perspective it’s really stupid to build such large vehicles as driving and parking it is much more complicated when everything is build for small cars. Now that SUVs are becoming popular here too it’s just a really annoying. Less parking space per vehicle etc. On cities like Paris - one of the tightest city on Europe this is just annoying. And i haven’t even written about fuel consumption. Paris has had huge problems with smog in recent years.

SUVs are not super rare in the EU (unfortunately). They are pretty common in cities and cause a lot of accidents.

if you have a wheelchair you get dedicated parking spaces anyway. what’s your problem? what are you talking about?

I’d like to add that Paris is one of the tightest cities there is in Europe. there’s just so little space already. with thousands of badly parked scooters cluttering up sidewalks people got fed up very quickly. the vote was pretty one sided IIRC.

a Chromecast is one of those inputs. And it has been a nice product. The reason people are mad is that they Google changed the product after they bought it significantly.

and yes. Today the only reasonable good TV is a computer monitor connected to a device I have control over.

It has less to to with people having MBAs and much more to do with companies having shareholders. Once you’re a publicly traded company there are overwhelmingly strong external forces that compell companies to increase revenue. Even if the business model is perfectly solid and it doesn’t make sense to expect rising profits the shareholders only care about growth rates. On the stock market a companies value is only dependent on its growth.

Take Netflix for example. They’ve had so many users some years ago when they were basically the only streaming service that one might have said they reached market saturation. That would’ve been a money making machine that people could be content with. But since the market always needs growth it isn’t enough and netflix is always trying to “innovate” or squeezie more monthly payments from the existing customer base.

cory doctorow has coined the great word “enshittification” to describe this process. And its driven by the need to grow further even though its to the detriment of the service or the customers. In the end it’s the people with the MBAs doing it. But if they’re not doing it the shareholders replace them with those that do.

It peaked there right? So the rest of the day it was lower wasn’t it? Still very expensive!

ITT people who think any argument can be countered by pointing out any inconsistencies of the person making it.

Think about it: If a chainsmoker would say to me “don’t smoke that cigarette! It’s unhealthy for you”, what would be the right response? According to these smart people here it would be: “Ha! if it’s so unhealthy why are YOU doing it???”.

One can make a correct argument and simultaneously contradict it with their actions. It doesn’t automatically void the argument.

The chainsmoker arguing against smoking is actually a perfect example to capitalism. He is addicted to smoking so much so that he is unfree to make decisions, out of control of his own life. He might have a clouded judgement at times and yet, is still able to correctly identify the problem, or parts thereof.

To capitalism we are also addicted in a way. Most aspects of our lives are controlled by it, many are made possible by it and also many bad things are enabled by it. As an individual it is almost impossible to not participate in capitalism. In order to have a baseline existence you need to participate in capitalism. Yet we can try to argue against the current system and try to find ways of making it better. It’s a really dumb argument to say “hahaha, but you bought vegetables in a supermarket, there for your critique of exploitive behavior of this supermarket chain is invalid”.

Additionally only allowing this shirt when it’s worn as a self-referential joke is also dumb. One can be critical of capitalism AND at the same time (self-referentially and/or ironically) admitting the inherent contradiction in one’s behavior.

It’s a little like critisizing people who speak on behalf of tolerance of they fight against nazis or other intolerant groups of people - and thinking your very very smart. The goal is more tolerance for people in the world because it makes the world a better place. It is not tolerating anything for the sake of being tolerance. That’s just apathy.

I worked as a projectionist in 2009 when the cinema got its first digital projector in order to be able to show Avatar in 3D. At the start of the movie no one actually knew if it would work. Due to the movie being encrypted - with every cinema in Germany waiting eagerly for the password - No cinema was able to play the movie. But everywhere cinemas were packed with people. Because of fuckups somewhere in this incredibly stupid system the movie was delayed about half an hour (IIRC) nationwide. With no-one knowing if it would eventually work - especially nice for the people working at the cinema having to deal with angry audience members.

At the same time the 2D 35mm film-version we also had started without any problems (it was massive and pretty dicey to carry it around).