I was hoping it was an April Fools joke but now I’m just disappointed for two reasons.

We are discussing what someone would use when writing about a hypothetical person.

And that changes it how? It’s insulting to misgender someone, though I can understand how you’d think that there’s no harm in insulting someone hypothetical.

I suggest you do some research on the history of language

Per your suggestion, “they” has been used to refer to a singular person since the 14th century. “He” is currently masculine-only. I apologize if you misunderstood my use of “never” to refer to things around the 18th and 19th century (when it apparently was considered bad to use “they” in the singular) when I presumed that there was an implicit limit to modern usage of English.

Someone with undetermined/unknowable gender would use the pronouns they/them, never he/him.

This sounds like open weights but not actually open source (which requires an open training set), but we can only hope they are true to their promises when they actually release it. Bonus points if they also release how much energy they wasted to train it and how much energy it wastes to run it.

Ticketmaster is doing their very best to make paper tickets unusable with refreshing barcodes. Funny thing is that “anti-theft” feature is needed because of their own systemic failures. I do like tickets that are just sent to my email or similar (e.g. as an attachment that I can save to my phone) though, it’s better than wasting paper when I know my phone won’t fail me.

Regular smart watches are such a luxury good that I’m surprised they’ve been growing up until last year. Realistically most people don’t need a smart phone that’s more than like $300 and I can’t imagine spending more than that on a smart watch which just duplicates most of the features of a smart phone (and adds a few more sensors if you’re lucky).

The rise in kids smart watches is a bit alarming to me, though. If the reason for it is truly that parents want to track their kids more, that’s really bad for the kids for two big reasons. First being that kids need to learn how to behave without their parents always watching, and second is that if the parent can see where the kid is then probably so can the company who made the smart watch. Maybe they’ll make a smartwatch which sends location data over something like the Signal protocol to mitigate 3rd party tracking, but I doubt there’s a big enough demand for that for any of the major companies to do that on their own.

Just don’t host it with a USA company.

(Self-promo: https://git.ngni.us/mirrors/Ryujinx is still up, hosted in Canada)

I do almost the same thing as a(n unpaid) hobby that I do as my (paid) job. I’m a software developer who writes open-source software on the side.

I’ve also seen a few of my other hobbies grow into serious industries with real employees. The (hobby) drone industry and the 3D printing industry are quite large and growing (I assume).

If you thought about the planet you wouldn’t be using smart devices at all, especially not completely unnecessary ones.

Twitch Plays Pokemon is still better

Interestingly the article about steganography does not mention the term even once.

Relativity would prevent this. If the train moves at the speed of light, then nothing inside it will move because time will stop. The amount of trains inside trains doesn’t really change much except the effect of time dilation (slowdown) on each train. You can’t actually accelerate to the speed of light.

While light bulb sockets don’t change much from region to region, they definitely aren’t all the same. For the bulbs (not the bars), there’s two large categories: Edison screws and bi-pin. Edison screws also come in a lot of sizes. When compact fluorescents were rolling out, they got a new bi-pin connector from the USA: GU24. My whole home has GU24 fixtures (not by my own choice), but my lamps are Edison screws.

They may have mixed up the British commonwealth. Canada has a similar population to California

If they go into influential people’s houses or into important businesses, I can think of a few reasons to bribe them to do things for you.

If the US government didn’t work with the US military that would be crazy

I just sat down to do my annual donations, so I’ve got the list ready to go:

• local food bank
• local safe injection site
• Signal
• KDE
• OpenMedia (closest thing to EFF in Canada)

A few places I couldn’t afford to donate to this year, in case anyone needs more ideas:

• archive.org
• EFF
• miscellaneous software projects I’m using (mostly Steam Deck plugins because I’m in that community a lot)
• Gnome

I also give a bit to Tor and The Beaverton monthly.

Your first example only works for goods that are completely optional, which is very rarely the case. For example, smartphones. Nobody technically needs one, but almost everyone in western countries has one. If every company that makes a smartphone increases their prices, people will still buy them because they basically need them. I believe this is the principle of inelastic demand (or low elasticity) – car fuel is a more traditional example.

Your second example doesn’t work when the cost of entry into the market is really high. This is very common in high tech. Take semiconductors for example. There’s basically one big name in chip manufacturing (TSMC) and a few runner-ups (Samsung, Intel, etc.). The latest node is infamous for being very expensive and low capacity. Why aren’t there new competitors constantly breaking in to the market?

UBI is a great idea and will help things, but it’s not perfect so we shouldn’t expect it to just completely fix capitalism. The best way to fix capitalism is to get governments (which are all in charge of capitalism) to fix it with regulations. UBI will be a major regulation/step in the right direction.

Honestly, I try not to think about them. It’s an inherently selfish and self-serving class and they’ve got enough money to pay people to think about them, so I’m not going to do it for free.

Victims are all SOL, in more ways than one