I don’t disagree but I think there is more too it. Many forces working in tandem to push people into marriage.

Most simply, marriage is glorified by society. It’s considered the ultimate declaration of love (within normal circumstances). Humans often feel the emotion so strongly and wish to express it. Society tells them this is how they should do it. It’s also viewed as an achievement or a measure of love by many societies. You aren’t committed (married)? Do you have cold feet? Do you not love them enough to marry them?

I may be viewed as one of those people for saying it, but there are a lot of pressures to conform to those around you. There is a certain life script - a series of things that those around you have done and expect you to do because… that’s just what you do. You find someone, get married, have kids, etc. If you don’t do these things or take too long to do these things you are defacto weird. You’ll be slowly ostracized, gossiped about, avoided, suspected. You won’t share the life experiences of those around it. It will be awkward. You won’t fit in unless you manage to find enough atypical people to surround yourself with.

Also, most governments create a society where it is beneficial to marry, to encourage stable families and population growth. Certain circumstances can negate the benefits or even counter them, as some commenters have brought up, but in most cases married couples are given boons from the government.

Debate the right? They don’t debate in good faith.

Three concerns:

• Heat - Will degrade faster and perform worse than it likely can because it will throttle itself
• Upgradability - Looks like only SSD and Memory are serviceable.
• Warranty - How is customer service? I have heard mixed reviews on most mini PC manufacturers.

This reminds me of my elementary school computer teacher. That teacher, and his teaching us LogoWriter, changed my life.

I know someone who needs it to sleep due to PTSD. I think limiting REM sleep is actually the point for them. Their dreams are horrendous, wake them up, and sometimes trigger panic attacks which makes getting back to sleep quite difficult.

This is a dumb question but I’ve really wanted to use Pangolin and I have trouble finding it clearly explained whether or not it works, with authentication, for applications that are not browser based. For example, if I wanted to connect to my self hosted home git server from VSC via ssh would that be possible through Pangolin? Obviously I could use it to log in to the web interface but what about apps/applications that I need to punch into my home network? The authentication is browser-based so in my mind it would not.

I’ve been working on the same and ran into the same issue. If not Bandcamp, I’ve had success on Qobuz. Their streaming payments to artists, last I checked, are substantially higher than anywhere else I’ve looked. I’m hoping the same is true of their music sales but I’m sure half of that is dependent on the labels, which likely have something to do with their not being on Bandcamp… or maybe that’s just my cynicism. I know little about how things work in the industry I just want to pay artists for their amazing work.

It’s also ok if you are using it in an effort to make workers obsolete and upend the entire economy.

The situation is actually quite awful. I remember when TPM was palladium and there were apocalyptic talks in tech conferences about it being the end of general purpose computers. The idea that your computer could veto what it was used for.

The backlash only set them back a few decades apparently. Everyone forgot and now it’s a literal requirement for the latest Windows and in two months they’ll stop supporting the old Windows…

Our union is pretty strong and they were obligated to defend him. This dude also lawyered up for everything - it was like a second job for him. Anything added to his record would be challenged, amended, or argued that everyone else also did something technically similar so they should all be written up, etc. Also didn’t help that he knew exactly how to piss of my boss and my boss lost his cool once and cursed him out. I think that added another 12+ months to the guy’s employment since now he could argue my boss had something out for him personally.

He loved the power it gave him and he virtually scammed every system to “legally” (again, nothing obvious enough to get caught) get rewarded for it in most cases. Most organizations will eat this cost of giving in to these shitbags just to get rid of them in the moment.

It seems Tidal is streaming only. There is Qobuz but I hear them mentioned by people looking for Hi-Fi. Their streaming service seems to pay higher than average.

I guess I’ll just have to assume the compensation is decent for digital purchases as well. Having Hi-Fi audio quality doesn’t hurt - I can always transcode it if I need to stream or convert it if I need to cram it in a small storage device.

Random question - anyone know a good site to buy digital music that pays the artists somewhat decently? I’ve got a few artists I need to get albums from after bailing on Spotify and they aren’t on Bandcamp and don’t has album sales linked to their official sites. Hell, even physical copies of some albums are hard to come by in the US.

I saw “7Digital” mentioned somewhere but I see there multiple listings for the same album at different prices (literally the exact same album, exact same quality) which makes me suspect it’s not as legit as I had hoped.

Honestly, financial and now political stress have been stifling. It’s hard to get in the mood when an authoritarian christo-fascist party is in charge of the government, constantly making headlines with their movements to destroying everything me and everyone I love cares about.

Only tangentially related, but I used to have a decent boss and then a particular coworker arrived. He would find loopholes and cracks and breaking points of literally every single bit of flexibility we had. Eventually, we lost almost all of it. We had a strong union and this new guy knew how to abuse that. He didn’t get caught breaking any rules, but it was obvious that he was using any flexibility to avoid it being provable. Took like three years before we got rid of him.

I think it would be infinitely better for an LLM to walk a user through the use of the formula in their specific use case rather than do it for them… but that won’t sell as well because most people don’t want to learn to use a spreadsheet they just want to do a thing and move on to something else. This is how it is sold and this is why it is used, in most cases. It’s not a hammer that people misused despite there being nothing in the sales material about it’s usefulness as a bludgeoning device against other humans. LLMs, spreadsheet copilot included, is commonly packaged and sold as a magic solution that will just do the work for you, with an asterisk and fine print stating that it’s for entertainment purposes only and that whoever isn’t liable for any false information or whatever bullshit clause they come up with. People use it as it is sold to them and that’s what worries me.

another optional tool at users’ disposal.

I just had my place of work upgrade me to Windows 11 this week. In order to install office, I was directed by Microsoft to download the “Office 365 Copilot” app which downloaded the office installer. Copilot is not subtle. It may be technically optional but good lord does it want you to know about and use it for everything.

And no, I didn’t try it yet. I will likely be trying it and Gemini soon out of curiosity. Last time I tried to use it I was given hallucinated nonexistant python modules and powershell commands that wasted my time. It’s been a year or so though.

it’s not a replacement for a human brain, it’s an assistant.

This is what I think AI and automation is generally good at and should be used for - mitigating unpleasant or repetitive work so that the focus of the user is productivity/creativity.

This is what this integration is for - it’s not a replacement for a human brain, it’s an assistant. As are all LLMs.

The context is something we disagree on wholeheartedly. Those funding and fundraising for AI and an enormous subset of those using are not looking to use AI in the way we are talking about. The prior are hoping to use AI to extract value from it at the expense of people who would otherwise need to be paid, or they and claim it can do anything and everything. Those using it, many of them, do not have a sufficient understanding to comprehend the solution. They are basically “vibe coding”. Tell the LLM to do something they aren’t knowledgeable about, then keep telling it to fix the problems until they don’t see problems anymore. Yes, spreadsheet formulas are likely simpler than an app but I know people who use AI for Google Sheets and they rarely test any results, let alone rigorously.

Anecdotal, sure, but I don’t have enough faith in humanity to presume everyone else is doing something wildly different.

Edit: To expand, LLMs specifically, are what I consider to be the worst side of “AI”. You can use ML and neural networks to create “AI” (self altering, alien blackbox algorithms) to become proficient in analyzing information and solving problems. LLMs create a situation where the model appears intelligent because it knows how to mimic language… and so now we pretend like it can do whatever people can do.

I think the concern is that you can come up with a number of formulas that will get correct answers for some combinations of values and not others.

If you do not understand the logic of the formula, and what each function does, how do you verify they are correct and will always give you the results you think they will? Double check every result in its entirety?

I feel you. I’m fearful of being so open about my diagnosis though. These days I “wear so many hats” for my job. Unfortunately I have to be support for a number of related systems, script automations, and a tons of other stuff. Recently I’ve felt like this last project has taken forever and I’ve been hard on myself because of it.

Only in the last week or so did I realize that I’m writing scripts far more complex than ever before and I don’t get into a flow state until everyone else goes home but then it’s time for me to go home. Half of my normal work time is trying to get back into the mindset I need to continue building the project. Then I have to focus on different project for a few days and WTF was I doing with that first project?

people not willing to integrate

This is the only “issue” I can think of from my own experience in the US. I imagine some resentment can form if a country has a lot of what I’ll call “culture” for simplicity’s sake. An influx of people with different “culture” might feel like an attack on your own culture. I frankly don’t understand but that’s why I mentioned the base population of the US being large and diverse. Perhaps we’re already such a “melting pot”, at least in the densely populated cities and suburbs, and having so many pockets of cultures is just what I’m used to. I want to better understand but it still just sounds like ignorant fear of a different culture.

Hell, it’s a well established statistic, that many people pretend doesn’t exist, that criminality is lower among the immigrant population. Any population will have some bad apples, but the incoming population is thinning them out if anything.

Can you link me to some credible sources on legitimate problems caused by immigration in Europe? I’m in the US and I don’t see the downside of immigration. Most of the folks angry about immigration here are just being sold a scapegoat.

Admittedly, we’re much more culturally diverse to begin with, harder to get to, and have quite a large base population so maybe I’m comparing apples and oranges.