I used Swappa to buy my last phone. Not certified, but much cheaper. The condition of phones is “graded,” and the sellers have an incentive to keep their reputation on the platform high. I had good luck, the one time I used it, at least.

I’ve filled out many job applications that require you to paste a link to your LinkedIn profile.

GPU acceleration, true-color, image display, etc.

Yeah, I used aircrack to gain access to one of my neighbors wifi and used it for about a month when I moved into my first apartment. After I got my own connection, I set up a guest network/SSID that was open,

Ideally, children would be educated and trained better to think critically; making people harder to manipulate through emotion. But, pragmatically, yeah, marketing/propaganda strategies are useful and even necessary for progress.

Your article made me wonder if there were any theories about ethically appealing to emotion, and I found this (psychological/political) theory interesting: https://semihcakir.com/blog/the-affective-intelligence-theory/. As I understand it, it posits that when people have low anxiety, their thinking is just habitual, but when they experience anxiety, they open themselves up to new information.

Available jobs are below the worse time during COVID, and I’m pretty sure the number of CS grads has greatly increased (but couldn’t find a good chart).

Used Teams for a bit. Seemed fine, just used it like any other IRC clone. Didn’t use it for video. Windows has a lot of annoyances; death by a thousand cuts. The Windows ecosystem also sucks: to the point where graphic card and mouse driver installers try to install spyware.

Idk, the author of “Civil Disobedience” did it. It’s a valid resistance method, or just a way to keep yourself morally consistent. Every kind of resistance has a good chance of bringing harm to yourself.

I personally didn’t file one year; kinda just kept putting it off because I knew I wouldn’t be able to pay my taxes (was a 1099 worker, and suffered some major financial blows that year); nothing ever happened, but it definitely was a risk. I probably won’t do that as an “act of resistance” next year, but will probably try extending as long as possible.

We let the rich, who aren’t necessarily the smartest people, get too rich, so they gained too much power. Worldwide problem though, as their influence doesn’t stop at borders.

Yeah, that’s how they sell it. Problem is, studies have shown the fraud in these programs isn’t much of an expense, in the broader context. And, Trump has granted clemency to Lawrence Duran, who stole $205M from Medicare, which tells you they don’t really care about that. These programs are actually pretty efficient, and spending funds to investigate small-time fraud would often cost more than just letting it happen. It’s not like tons of people wish to be on our shitty social programs that don’t even supply enough help for the people that absolutely need it.

Kinda depressing that all of big-tech seems to have given up “innovating” (finding applications for publicly-funded research), and have become rent-seeking dinosaurs.

From the people I know, who do depend on these programs and like Trump, they don’t believe they will have their benefits reduced. The think the other people, “taking advantage” of the system will be kicked off. It’s being sold as reducing fraud and abuse. The right-wing has been pushing this framing for decades, and many people have bought into it.

but it turns out all that cash was going toward a workforce of over 700 Indian engineers, rather than an AI.

I doubt much of that cash was going to their workforce. Should have though.

Montezuma’s revenge

Haven’t used it yet, but venice.ai looks interesting; they have a good privacy policy. Right now, I just use ChatGPT with the “improve models” setting turned off, and use “temporary chat” mode. I don’t really trust OpenAI to be doing the right thing though. I’ve used 14B models locally, but they aren’t as good as 72B+ models.

In my limited experience of just living in bad neighborhoods, most gangs I’ve encountered are just small groups of kids that sell drugs, rob, burglarize, fight, and occasionally kill kids in other small groups. From talking to older people that were in gangs (well, they still consider themselves to be in a gang, but the gang doesn’t functionally exist or do anything), things were much different in the 80s and 90s. Guessing it differs depending on the city though (there aren’t really “territories” in my city; drugs are sold through apps/text).

They seem to be trying to emulate Russia, Hungary, or even Nazi Germany. So probably similar things. The US tech oligarchs seem to want something like Dark Enlightenment, while the other politically powerful sect seems to want christo-fascism; all seem to be white nationalist to varying degrees.

And immigrants here legally as well. And because they’re ignoring due process and habeas corpus, I have no doubt, citizens who committed no crime soon (they’ve already kidnapped citizens and looted citizens homes, but haven’t exiled citizens yet, AFAIK).

Edit: Forgot. Yes, they have already started kidnapping and exiling citizens who are minors.

Privacy policy changes are worrying. They also implemented Privacy Preserving Attribution, which sends anonymized data to advertisers, and enable it by default. I personally like LibreWolf.

current large models like ChatGPT model more “neurons” than are in the human brain

I don’t think that’s true. Parameter counts are more akin to neural connections, and the human brain has something like 100 trillion connections.