Trainguyrom

Find somewhere that accepts/generates ewaste and you might be able to score an internal CD/DVD drives. We were doing some reorganizing at work and I saw a literal box full of 5.25" drives

Wow that's quite the revisionism there

Bigger problem is we have these companies with so much market capture that there isn't growth to be found so they find ways to either change the laws to drive down costs or find ways to extract more money per consumer, so either way the line goes up while the majority of people suffer

We need to shift the culture away from investors who expect the line to always go up. Normalize companies just being happy to turn a nice profit doing what they do without growing because they realistically cannot grow any more

You joke but there's a lot of grandma/grandpa gamers these days. Remember someone who played PC games back in the 80s would be on their 50s or 60s now. Or even older if they picked up the hobby as an adult in the 80s

I don't know. In a lot of usecase AI is kinda crap, but there's certain usecase where it's really good. Honestly I don't think people are giving enough thought to it's utility in early-middle stages of creative works where an img2img model can take the basic composition from the artist, render it then the artist can go in and modify and perfect it for the final product. Also video games that use generative AI are going to be insane in about 10-15 years. Imagine an open world game where it generates building interiors and NPCs as you interact with them, even tying the stuff the NPCs say into the buildings they're in, like an old sailer living in a house with lots of pictures of boats and boat models, or the warrior having tons of books about battle and decorative weapons everywhere all in throw away structures that would have previously been closed set dressing. Maybe they'll even find sane ways to create quests on the fly that don't feel overly cookie-cutter? Life changing? Of course not, but definitely a cool technology with a lot of potential

Also realistically I don't think there's going to be long term use for AI models that need a quarter of a datacenter just to run, and they'll all get tuned down to what can run directly on a phone efficiently. Maybe we'll see some new accelerators become common place maybe we won't.

Image handling has definitely gotten better in the last 10 years or so, but realistically you can get everything you want done with Word 2003 today

The sad thing is I've encountered funky compatibility issues just between current versions of word. Going from Office 2022 (I think. I honestly can't remember their LTSC office releases off the top of my head at all) to M365 triggered some minor formatting changes, and going from local word document to one that's shared on SharePoint completely fucked up all of the images in the document and required many hours of rearranging the images because word still sucks for desktop publishing

When I worked at a bank we had a loan officer who wrote in such broken English that the email filter actually started flagging and blocking his outbound emails as a suspected compromise. Worst part is he was handling multimillion dollar agribusiness loans. Second worst part is he's as white American as they come, having had family farming not 20 miles away for generations, so it's not even like he can claim a non-local dialect or second language challenges

They have a $30/ year annual subscription (I'm not certain if that's a purely introductory rate or not). Most of the content is non-exclusive but it's ad-free and many creators remove the sponsor segments or even include exclusive content on their Nebula version. It seems pretty worthwhile to me

My musical awakening was just too late to pull that kind of nonsense in school but I absolutely feel that

I need to poke at their newer stuff. I kinda stopped paying attention to their new releases after Black Market and the one single they released a couple years after that, but there's a few songs that hit that older style like The Eco Terrorist in Me that still go hard. I do respect that even as the sound left my general preferred punk sound, their lyrics remained as complex and literary as always (seriously how often are you looking up words from song lyrics in a dictionary?)

State of the Union has been one of my favorites to the point I honestly forgot it's not a single