i would much rather have a chinese ev with that long range battery tech and framework than an american car company’s ev option not including tesla which i don’t even consider a car company. they’re a shit tech company that makes shit cars shittily.

i know absolutely nothing about investing. so this is a lay take:

before today i would invest in these ai big tech companies because ai is the next big thing, and there’s no other real competition around and any coming up might be ready in 3 or 4 years maybe.

after today’s news, why would i waste my money investing in companies that are building wasteful, energy consuming, and most importantly proprietary components when there’s a new generative ai that is just as good, if not better, than what’s available now, that runs on far cheaper components that is totally open sourced? i’m better off taking that money i was going to use to invest in big tech and putting it towards hiring some programmers to take the completely open sourced ai and modifying it to better suit my specific needs.

typical white liberal guilt performative bullshit.

stop protesting to bring awareness of an issue as if it was going to do something and try, I dunno, ACTUALLY FUCKING DOING SOMETHING. like well before election day for example.

didn’t see a bunch of black people in pictures taken. I wonder why he said rhetorically.

I don’t drink coffee, so this doesn’t affect me any.

I’m okay with this policy. commercial places should be for people who want to conduct commerce. from what I can tell this doesn’t affect anyone who needs to run to the bathrooms, this is for the people who take their macbook airs and just sit down occupying space working on their manuscripts taking advantage of the free wifi and not buying anything, or for an extreme example that old pictures of a guy who set up his entire desktop at a mcdonald’s monitor and all just for the free wifi.

if there are people who are really upset about that, the wifi signal extends outside the walls. no one says you can’t sit in the car and use the starbucks wifi.

voting is absolutely worth the squeeze when you do it. however voting also is heavily dependent on a voting base that is both highly engaged in the process and is knowledgeable about the issues.

so when you have elections where:

1. a third or more of all eligible voters do not vote
2. laws have been passed to make it harder to vote for some people
3. a majority of the people who do vote have only paid attention to campaign issues for at the most the two weeks directly before the end of voting and
4. voters are not given the facts about each candidate by a press that is more interested in manufacturing a close race for pure financial gain rather than accuracy in telling the truth about the candidates

voting completely defeats the purpose. because the end result is not one based on actual facts, it’s an outcome manufactured by vested interests with near infinite resources given the petina of legitimacy by playing on the fact that people were freely given a choice. more times than not there’s enough people who are paying attention to overcome that deficit in the ability to message. but the times when it does not it goes really wrong.

voting

i used the android app “reddit is fun”. i had stopped using reddit well before the api and public offering drama so i had absolutely no idea it was going on. i needed to get an answer to a question and the google search led to a reddit link. typically i normally chose web links, but this time i said, what the hell, and opened the link with rif. then i read the changelog of the app. that pointed to a lemmy instance for rif (which does not have a lemmy version btw) and that’s where i caught up on all the bullshit i missed during the intervening 3 years.

ps i also have a .ml account. it was the easiest one to create an account with at the time. if i could transfer all the stats and comments i made with this account and transfer it to one that allowed swearing (for instance you can’t use the word that describes selling one’s self for money or other favors that sounds similar to a garden tool called a hoe) i’d do it.

this is another reason why I hate apple. other tech companies would rather follow apple than forge their own design path.

I also hate the tech reviewers who reinforce the belief of apple design superiority that pushes this false belief that encourages those bad design changes.

latin, a little bit. it was a required 7th grade class. it’s been 25(!!!) years and I’m neither a lawyer or a catholic clergy so my retention of it is almost non existent. the things I do still hang on to are from my exposure to spanish and french at work where I can remember a few base words.

let’s hope so.

somebody used my email address to order stuff from temu. the only reason I know about this is because paypal sent me a notice saying they were tracking my order.

fortunately for me, my paypal information (other than my email) wasn’t breached. after I notified paypal they told me they would monitor my account for suspicious activity and they hadn’t noticed any. and as it turns out neither was my email. I’ve got 2fa turned on and never got a suspicious notification.

if it’s that easy to use any email to order stuff these companies are showing they have no security and need to go.

the profanity flies frequently at my place of work. we do give writeups if our employees are saying that in front of customers.

except for me, because I don’t curse (out loud). in fact if I start doing it everyone around me would actually be worried if I was okay.

any images I upload are either already found online or if they are images I took scrubbed of location information in the metadata plus I don’t put my face online. my face is on my fb page and a few pictures have my face in them but as far as I’m aware there’s less than 10 pictures of my face online.

I honestly don’t think twitter will ever go away until all of a majority of all major sports teams and leagues, a majority of legislative body members, and major news and wire services have a sustained and active presence on bsky. it right now is literally coasting on everything that made it useful pre 2022 and every stupid fucking thing elon has done to make the twitter experience worse hasn’t done enough to cause a critical mass of people to jump.

once you see major popular twitter accounts like rex chapman, mark hamill, taylor swift and the like (and I say this not because of their politics but because of their massive follower base) regularly post on bsky you can probably start closing the book on twitter.

probably not.

unless the planet is water all the way down, I don’t think it’s possible to have life or even submerged landmasses that don’t have the chemical elements that can create salts. dead things would dissolve in the water and chemicals in rocks will leach into water over time.

now if this water planet is far enough away from the sun to freeze, sure. the frozen ice should be all fresh. I’m not aware of any salts that stay in frozen water ice. the stuff underneath the frozen stuff most definitely will be salty.

not a chemist or chemistry major but I’m using the word “salts” deliberately. there’s more types of salt than NaCl.

my 2011 toyota camry.

it’s also the best car I’ve ever owned, probably because it’s the only car I’ve ever owned.

EVERYONE out pizzas the hut.

pizza hut is bad chain pizza.

this has been my opinion since the early 90s and nothing during that time has changed my opinion.

meanwhile domino’s has gotten markedly better since 2000. if I’m traveling and don’t want to think about what to eat, I’m getting domino’s because I know they’re everywhere. them or papa johns depending on what deal is going on at the time.

i had to login for some functions at work. i believe the minimums were 8 characters, 1 caapitol, 1 number. and we all hated it, because the passwords had to be changed every 90 days, and you couldn’t reuse passwords. eventually you are going to run out of things you can reasonably use that you could remember and then would be forced to use some sort of password manager. but OOPSIE you couldn’t install any software on the office computer so you would have to resort to writing them down somewhere. it was a mess.

fortunately corporate decided to just change the entire system adopting most of these rules, min 15 characters, no special character, no hints, no forced changing passwords unless you think you have been compromised or just want to change it. we do have to use 2fa to access some things if you aren’t sitting at the office computer but other than that people are much happier about passwords now.

there are too many points of failure for me to ever be comfortable using the cloud as a primary storage option.

i’ve always maintained this opinion when “the cloud” started being touted as being the future. and yet more corporations (including mine) are reliant on it. i mean sure, i can log in on my home computer and have some access to stuff as though i were physically at the office but that convenience ain’t worth the headache if the main storage site crashes.

you’re going to get that when

a) western media and journalists are deathly afraid of being labeled antisemites for reporting on what the secular government of israel is doing and

b) cable news viewers skew overwhelmingly republican and conservative who are already antimuslim and pro israel to begin with.

these are the people who are keeping the current administration from telling it like it really is. because I honestly don’t believe that bibi would be as empowered to do what he’s been doing in gaza if the us government isn’t actively publicly condemning in plain language what has happened already.

there’s so much different I’d almost consider them related and not an adaptation.