I hate to admit this, but it is about money. Canada at least will not allow Americans to immigrate unless they have enough savings to live for two years with no supports.

Its going to take at least 50 years of good faith, and I wish you good fucking luck with the insane 4 year flip flop political bias your country has.

We Canadians have been scratching our heads over the course of your increasing instability for 20 years, and we aren’t going to forget that over night.

Trump is a sign that the political landscape in the US is so unstable that nothing promised by any political figure can be trusted by your allies.

Only a foolish nation forgets that overnight. We won’t.

Grab two large USB hard drives, have an rsync job to them, switch them out weekly and store the one that is not in use offsite. If you don’t have someone that’s a trustworthy a reasonable distance away, you can just use a storage locker.

Trump should stop breathing

This.

Please consider supporting anyone but Microsoft. Theres Luanti, but I would also highly recommend Vintage Story, its made by ex Minecraft modders who decided to build a better engine.

In many countries it is legal to promise a tax rebate when you are in office. Many cons (oops, I mean conservatives) use this as voting bait for people with no critical thinking skills, and then turn around and give their corporate masters and billionaires huge tax cuts that make those same voters loose critical services that makw them pay out of pocket.

In other words, “Heres $200 to vote for me so i can make your life way more expensive on a yearly basis through medical care, less regulation, less infrastructure repair”.

This is the same grift, but more blatant and obviously something that would never get fulfilled, which is why the number is so big. Bigger numbers make critical thinking fail harder, especially when times are economically tough. It tends to get cons reelected even when they are not doing well in polls, speaking from the Canadian experience in this.

Matrix is the proper space for a privacy focused community. Discord as an application is privacy invasive and requires ID to be provided. This has nothing to do with a public community not being private. It’s the wrong technology choice for what they claim to be focused on and there is no getting around that.

I mean, see where you’re going there. Bread may be a bad example because I can get sliced bread from a local or regional producer that is more conscientious. If any billionaire is pushing me to buy sliced bread its going to be some mass produced crap like Dempsters that I would never buy anyway because I do not support corporate food where I can avoid it as I’ve lived through enough mini crises in the last 30 years to have learned the hard way that when things get tough, its the local and regional creators that keep things on the shelf.

AI however, is only good in the older forms where models were made to do one thing and do it well with reasonable levels of compute. Those were sustanable. LLMs, no matter where you run them, cost disgusting amounts of compute to train and no matter how well you train them will only evey have a statistical chance of being right, and they will never have 100% accuracy without throwing even more power at them.

And, LLMs will never reach AGI. If we want something that really mimics humans, then what we need are many tiny, efficiently trained models for specific tasks with high accuracy, and then interface between all those skills with a very accurate task comprehension model, and then maybe we will get to AGI, because this is basically how humans work.

I still maintain that LLMs are the wrong tech, at the wrong time, and the only thing their proliferation is being pushed for is their questionable capability to enable ths surveillance state we were warned against for the last 40-50 years in scifi. And the CEOs want this because people are getting more and more fwd up with their shit.

All LLMs will bring the world is misery. There is no acceptable use for them and I am sticking to that line in every product decision these days. They were built on the backs of free content that the world created and a ton of copyrighted work that was just blatantly stolen.

My thought it was over blown until I saw them claiming that anyone on Mastodon is “not a user” and them saying that any real users are on their Discord and not complaining.

Uh, OK - Discord was semi-excusable up until 2025, but at this point anyone using it to communicate with their users is certainly not considering how bad that channel is for user privacy. Im a Graphene User, I will not use Discord, and I am not going to continue to use an OS thats supporting the rapid expansion of datacenters through the use of AI.

Using tech that billionaires push makes them richer and gives them control.

Tell me how does not using their crap give them control, exactly?

Just what we needed, a little Minority Report salted into the dystopian salad of this fucking timeline.

I lost a few IQ points reading this ad.

But they love charging for the kidney stone removal.

I’ve had to move a lot over the years. Lived in large and small cities in 4 provinces.

I can say with great certainty that this rental scenario (depicted in OP) is very common in any conservative managed or low income areas. Tends to not be common in nicer neighbourhoods.

Dear lord no.

Agreed, just updated my comment for clarification here. But I’ll add that I still own any game I’ve bought on Steam that was pulled from the store. They tend to be on the better side here.

That said, DRM free for the win.

Agreed.

My use of the PlayStation platform had dropped significantly and moved to PC, and now Steam Deck as well.

And now I’ll just cease entirely.

They really love shooting themselves in the foot here.

And I suppose they will start trying to sue Steam when they fall.

EDIT: To be clear, the Deck can run GOG games with Lutris, and with PC I use a mix of launchers, not just Steam. My intent was to point out that many publishers seem to like going after Steam after they shoot themselves in the foot and lose users.

I have one built, just waiting for winter.