At 43 that’s probably a little earlier than the OP expected and if their daughter wasn’t planning on starting that early it’s going to affect school and job prospects.

That’s not too say it can’t work. One of my in-laws had their first at 18 and now as their last leaves for uni they are still fit and young enough to enjoy the empty nest experience.

To be honest I think windows work better as sun traps. Even in the winter a good sunny day will make a noticeable difference to my bedroom with large south facing double glazed units.

If you are using MakeMKV when ripping you can override the filename template. So I name them for example “Show s01e04+” based on the disc I’m ripping. Then once encoded it’s relatively quick to rename the files with the full episode number. I personally use dired in Emacs because a macro makes short work of the renaming but I’m sure other solutions are possible.

I have a sneaking suspicion a lot of the posts there are just engagement bait anyway.

The western nations had a similar problem with debathification in Iraq. When a system invades and takes over a state how do you keep things running while ripping it’s influence out?

There’s a scene at the end of Band of Brothers where the guy from Easy company is taking to a German who’s recollecting the countries he’s visited while at war. It’s a reminder that not everyone in Germany was a Nazi but it was hard to sit it out in a nation committed to Total War. It might be easy to say you’d never sign up to the party but if the choice was between staying in the civil service or being shipped off into the meat grinder? Where else could you go?

We never really have the luxury of tearing down whole societies and rebuilding from scratch in a more prefect form. Generally the countries that have gone through such radical changes have paid for it with a lot of suffering.

The Oculus is too tied into being part of Meta’s data collection enterprise. I think VR will survive as a niche gamer feature and I suspect companies like Valve/Sony will be the ones iterating the designs.

I recently joined the ranks of 3d printer owners. The first thing I printed where a pair of risers for mounting some hall effect sensors on my garage door mechanism. Very simple shapes but super handy.

There have been a number of documentaries about HMP Broodmoor which is where our criminally insane prisoners tend to go.

I would not want anything that requires a cloud connection to be responsible for securing my house. The security record of these smart locks also isn’t great.

The final question you need to ask yourself is how they fail safe? There have been Tesla owners trapped in burning cars. If, god forbid, your house caught fire can you get out of your door secured with a smart lock?

Once we summit the peak of inflated expectations and the bubble bursts hopefully we’ll get back to evaluating the technology on its merits.

LLM’s definitely have some interesting properties but they are not universal problem solvers. They are great at parsing and summarizing language. There ability to vibe code is entirely based on how closely your needs match the (vast) training data. They can synthesise tutorials and stack overflow answers much faster than you can. But if you are writing something new or specialised the limits of their “reasoning” soon show up in dead ends and sycophantic “you are absolutely right, I missed that” responses.

More than the technology the social context is a challenge. We are already seeing humans form dangerous parasocial relationships with token predictors with some tragic results. If you abdicate your learning to an LLM you are not really learning and that could have profound impacts on the current cohort of learners who might be assuming they no longer need to learn as the computer can do it for them.

We are certainly experiencing a very fast technological disruption event and it’s hard to predict where the next few years will take us.

Morpheus made it very clear to neo that taking the red pill was a one way trip to enlightenment. Cypher references the red/blue pill test when talking to Neo so we can assume he did the same with him. I think Morpheus is pretty clear there is no going back.

I run stock on a pixel although I do have droidify installed and prefer that too the play store for most things. Especially for the freeze app where all my corporate stuff is run from.

There are certainly open source models trained on public data sets that you can run locally.

So a network version of an acoustic delay line?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory

For context watching South park?

Directors have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders and that includes a legal liability if they don’t do their job. That said if the chairman has a controlling majority of the shares they can run the company into the ground if they want to as it’s their money to waste.

Generally if you want to bring investment into a company it will come with strings attached like nominated seats on the board of directors to prevent this sort of thing. Voting shares can be different normal shares or there can be several share types with different levels of voting rights. However the structure of the shares will be disclosed to the board and for a publicly traded company this will be public.

Well Trump had a go in his first term but unsurprisingly didn’t get far.

Are you familiar with the Korean war? There was a massive conflict which got drawn out into a stalemate and everybody agreed a temporary ceasefire was preferable to even more destruction.

Trying to topple a regime that has nothing to lose and a highly indoctrinated population is not an easy ask. We can only hope that like most authoritarian regimes they eventually succumb to the weight of their own opression. It’s better than torching the whole continent in the name of freedom.

I can second the alcohol free beers. The modern ones have excellent taste and hit the refreshing hoppy spot for me and are much better than juice or sodas when it comes to calories. I’m not totally dry, I drink 2-3 units a week, but I’m certainly feeling better for not having alcohol every day.

Ah is that what had broken my horseshoe graph? The custom graphs come up a unrecognised types whatever form I try.