Foam mattresses float. Just keep a bottle of water and a hand axe under your pillow 👍

AccuWeather just uses the NWS data. They’d be lost without it.

So… To save lives in situations like this you need to collect taxes to pay for a socialist weather prediction and emergency management system.

Texas: “Taxes and socialism‽ Forget it! We’d rather die. All we need to defend ourselves from weather or anything else is big pickup trucks and guns!”

The Trump administration—and conservatives in general—are treating oil that can only be extracted from fracking like it’s old fashioned oil wells. They’re not the same. The output from a traditional oil well is easy to predict: They have a specific amount of estimated oil and over (a long) time you need to add more well heads to keep the same level of output but in general it’s well-established science. You can extract from them for decades and decades.

Fracking can extract a lot of oil from a tiny area all at once over the course of just a few years. In theory you could extract oil from the same fracking well for 40 years but in reality it’s just ten years. No fracking (for oil) has lasted longer than that as far as I’m aware. You can still extract natural gas from the same site though (I don’t know the specifics on that).

NOTE: What makes fracking wells only last ten years isn’t that you can’t get any more oil out of them. It’s because it takes too much energy to get more oil out of them. Forget how much it costs: There’s an amount no one will pay to extract a barrel of oil from the ground and that is “more than one barrel’s worth of energy”.

Whereas wind and solar power will last forever, fracking is a boom that will only last another 20 years or so. By screwing over solar and wind power Republicans/Trump/conservatives are screwing our future. It takes a long ass time to replace fleets of vehicles and the time to do that is like ten years ago. We need to ramp it up too if we don’t want to get caught in another energy crisis around 2035 (that’s approximately when the output from traditional oil wells drops to the point where fracking can’t make up with demand anymore).

Microsoft is trying to make Xbox into Windows: Where 3rd parties make the hardware and then license the platform from Microsoft. It’s a vastly more profitable model. Especially if they get all those end users signed up for a subscription service.

The problem is that the world thinks of “Xbox” as a console (and a specific kind of controller). To pull this off Microsoft is going to have to re-brand Xbox entirely by making people think of it more like a game-specific app store that runs on Windows and special handheld hardware. It won’t be easy.

There’s a bigger problem with this plan though: No real coordination with the Windows OS team. Windows on handhelds sucks. The past twenty fucking years of Windows development has been almost entirely focused on improving enterprise features with very little attention paid to end users or gaming.

Growth in Windows gaming has come despite Microsoft’s investments. Not because of them. In fact, I’d argue that if it weren’t for Steam, Windows—as a gaming platform—would be a fraction of what it is today.

Don’t get me wrong, though! I love this new Xbox roadmap! Windows gaming has been holding back Linux desktop adoption for far too long. The latest benchmarks that show games on SteamOS vastly outperforming the new Xbox-branded handhelds pretty clearly demonstrates all that bashing of Windows by Linux nerds was deeply accurate.

It turns out that Linux on the desktop really is superior! 🤣

Wait: Are we sure they’re actually people?

Get a tortoise and feed the berries to it 👍

(That’s what we do at our house)

The AI said that trying to reason with you is a waste of precious tokens.

“The universal injunction was conspicuously nonexistent for most of our Nation’s history,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion.

So was your right to vote. Shall we let the executive branch take that away on a whim as well?

More Americans are witnessing people being hauled off as they shop, exercise at the gym, dine out and otherwise go about their daily lives

There was another time in history when this happened. It’s pretty famous. Maybe the news media could make that reference? Nah, that would be too prescient and “too biased.” In the same way the news media didn’t report the same things realistically for the same reason during that other time in history when this happened.

Biden just followed through with what was negotiated with the Taliban by the former Trump administration. If the US doesn’t follow through we lose credibility in all future negotiations with everyone.

What you’re complaining about is the fact that Trump et all made an agreement to pull out the troops within a certain (completely unreasonable) timeline. They had no idea WTF they were doing and obviously didn’t do due diligence or any sort of logistics planning for such a withdrawal before making the agreement.

If you think that sounds like bullshit let me ask you this: Does Trump ever do due diligence on anything? During his first administration nearly all his executive orders got thrown out because they were deemed arbitrary and capricious and during his second administration it looks like we’re getting the same exact situation.

They don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know how to govern. If they didn’t have several powerful right wing media empires backing up every stupid decision they make Trump would never have been re-elected and he’d have long since been impeached in this administration.

Correction: Education is not OK.

AI is just giving poor kids the same opportunities rich kids have had for decades. Opportunities for cheating the system that was made specifically not to give students the best education possible but instead to bring them up to speed on the bare minimum required to become factory workers.

Except we don’t have very many factories any more. And we don’t have jobs for all these graduates that pay a living wage.

The banks are going to have to get involved soon. They’re going to have to figure out a way to load up working-age people with long term debt without college being involved.

Just hoof it down to your nearest library and ask the librarian. They know how to horse around 🐴👍

Future news story: Trump wanted to use nuclear bomb on Iran but couldn’t figure out how to read the codes in the nuclear football.

“No matter how many times I asked no one brought me a football. They just kept handing me a briefcase!”

Something tells me that the MAGA base won’t be too happy about this. They want the deportations to happen in their communities.

“Sorry Texas: Because you’re full of MAGA people we’re cutting your ICE resources.”

To me, this is like saying, “4chan has turned into a cesspool!” Yeah: It was like that from the start. YOU were the ones that assumed it was ever safe!

You’re posting stuff on the public Internet to a website for adults where literally anyone can sign up and comment FFS.

If you want good moderation you need community moderation from people in that community. Not some giant/evil megacorp!

There’s all sorts of tools and platforms that do this properly, easily, and for free. If you don’t like Meta’s websites move off of them already!

Apparently billionaires do give a shit. A lot of it. An entire island of shit… Trickling down to the next layer down of hell rich people.

Mods on Xbox only exist for games where the game itself officially added mod support. I mean, sure it’s great when a game maker does that but usually it’s not as good as community-made mod support because community mods don’t require approval and can’t get censored/removed because the vendor doesn’t like it.

Remember: Microsoft’s vision of mods is what you get with the Bedrock version of Minecraft. Yet the mods available in the Java version are so vastly superior the difference is like night and day.

Console players—that are used to living without mods—don’t understand. Once mods become a regular thing that you expect in popular games going without them feels like going back into the dark ages.

All the fun of Windows gaming with the locked-down ecosystem of a console (no mods). What could go wrong?

It’s Windows Mobile all over again.

The courts need to settle this: Do we treat AI models like a Xerox copier or an artist?

If it’s a copier then it’s the user that’s responsible when it generates copyright-infringing content. Because they specifically requested it (via the prompt).

If it’s an artist then we can hold the company accountable for copyright infringement. However, that would result in a whole shitton of downstream consequences that I don’t think Hollywood would be too happy about.

Imagine a machine that can make anything… Like the TARDIS or Star Trek replicators. If someone walks up to the machine and says, “make me an Iron Man doll” would the machine be responsible for that copyright violation? How would it even know if it was violating someone’s copyright? You’d need a database of all copyrighted works that exist in order to perform such checks. It’s impossible.

Even if you want OpenAI, Google, and other AI companies to pay for copyrighted works there needs to be some mechanism for them to check if something is copyrighted. In order to do that you’d need to keep a copy of everything that exists (since everything is copyrighted by default).

Even if you train an AI model with 100% ethical sources and paid-for content it’s still very easy to force the model to output something that violates someone’s copyright. The end user can do it. It’s not even very difficult!

We already had all these arguments in the 90s and early 2000s back when every sane person was fighting the music industry and Hollywood. They were trying to shut down literally all file sharing that exists (even personal file shares) and search engines with the same argument. If they succeeded it would’ve broken the entire Internet and we’d be back to using things like AOL.

Let’s not go back there just because you don’t like AI.