Yeah. Calling something a sale at a price that’s not actually discounted under the regular price (with some caveats on how long it needs to be at said regular price), then yeah it’s a violation of the act. Basically false advertising.

Bumping up the regular price to cover what you’d have otherwise saved on tax is dickish but not against any regulations AFAIK

Raising prices then advertising a “sale” at the same/higher price IS actually against the law though. Unfortunately we have terrible enforcement of these laws but they do exist:

https://competition-bureau.canada.ca/deceptive-marketing-practices/types-deceptive-marketing-practices/ordinary-selling-price

So basically, no good billionaires but maybe good former-billionaires?

Except at some point he would have been between the two - an active billionaire giving away his wealth - and presumably still a good person.

Yeah, I’m generally ok if somebody is charging a reasonable rent which covers their reasonable mortgage, so long as they’re still taking care of all the other stuff (repairs, city taxes, etc).

What burns me is people who either a) knowingly buy in a hot, excessively priced market with full intent to charge excessive rents while providing absolutely minimal service or support

b) bought 10+ years ago but have pumped up rents to the same as those who bought at mortgages 2-3x the rate, citing “market rates” and often doing sketchy things to raise rents including renovictions etc, while being shitty - often absentee - slumlords

Maybe I’m showing my age, but there did used to be quite a good number of mom & pop type landlords who weren’t shit, and while the commercial ones cost a bit more there was a decent mix.

Now, the commercial ones are actually mostly a safer bet in small cities. They’ll raise rent every year but consistently, and the decent ones are pretty prompt about repairs and not fucking people over deposits etc. There are bad ones but it’s pretty easy to tell which are which. The problem is of course that availability at the good ones is lower and they do cost more.

Good private landlords are increasingly hard to come by, as the best ones generally end up quitting after either getting too old or after a bad tenant experience, while the slumlords have leveraged their existing properties to finance buying more and more, leading to a market full of increasingly overpriced mould-monsters.

Still waiting for an AI NPC that I can have a real-time conversation with in VR while slaying a dragon on some shit

Meh… I’m not the best woodworker but I’m not terrible. I’d hope by that time I can at least leave them a decent handcrafted stained table or chair or something. No giant frescoes but nice routered edges on solid wood with a good burn+stain and a thick layer of lacquer.

Yeah, I’d tend to agree on that. Even beyond the security issues, nuclear has the potential to be a safe, but it also has the potential to be disastrous if mis-managed.

We see plenty of issues like this already, including what occurred here: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/fukushima-daiichi-accident

Now imagine a plant in Texas, where power companies response to winter outages has basically been “sucks to be you, winterizing is too costly”.

Or maybe we’d like to go with a long-time trusted company, who totally wouldn’t throw away safety and their reputation for a few extra bucks. Boeing comes to mind.

I like nuclear as a power source, but the absolutely needs to be immutable rules in place to ensure it is properly managed and that anyone attempting to cut corners to save costs gets slapped down immediately. Corporate culture in North America seems to indicate otherwise.

This is actually one thing I’ve been thinking AI and deepfake tech can potentially do good. Let’s say you have an idea and can code… You have an idea for music but no instrumental talent, so the best you can do is hum it. You can’t afford voice actors or other professionals.

Or maybe you’re artist with an idea who can storyboard but not code. Maybe you can make 2d designs but not 3D models, or aren’t great at animate.

But… there is software that can take what you say and change it to a different voice. It can animate a model to match the words. Similarly, software that could generate instrumental sounds from humming is possible. An AI can generate interactive dialog. It could also provide assistance in the generation of music, debugging of code, and eventually more advanced 3D modeling.

A lot of game design software is much more a GUI to an environment/model and triggers etc than stuff like writing hardcore backend C++ code etc. AI could take that even further.

Then add VR. Drop somebody into a blank-slate where they can create a whole world with a word, a gesture, and a great idea.

One day, that might be a reality.

If you want pretty good color screen, try the Boox Tab Mini C

Absolutely, and I appreciate that you pointed it out as being the Israeli government (and their military complex/IDF) that continues the atrocities target than the people as a whole. Personally I wish we could bury the lot (Hamas, and the corrupt members of the govt+IDF) upside down beneath a public outhouse.

If anything, it seemed that many had enough of Netanyahu’s corruption and things might change there… before recent events, which to me is rather suspicious as well.

Any training data almost certainly has biases. For awhile, if you asked for pictures of people eating waffles or fried chicken they’d very likely be black.

Most of the pictures I tried of kid-type characters were blue eyed.

Then people review the output and say "hey this might still racist, so they tweak things to “diversity” the output. This is likely the result of that, where they’ve “fixed” one “problem” and created another.

Behold, Homer in brownface. D’oh!

Yeah I had similar issues. My old laptop (back venue I swore off HP, and one of the contributing reasons) had an issue where if you loaded an app and it needed memory that spanned both RAM chips… it would power cycle. Most users at the time reported the issue using Photoshop at the time so HP released a patch… that fixed it for Photoshop.

The actual issue lay in the Northbridge of he laptop and was a defect. HP refused to refund the laptop even though it was fairly early within the warranty period. Best I could do was run with one - slightly larger - stick of RAM than what the thing shipped with.

Given a rant like this I wouldn’t be trusting his code. Admin access to a backend and ability to write to the underlying filesystem+configs are two different layers. Yeah in many cases they may be the same admin, but not necessarily. It also means a compromised admin UI user can modify the underlying system to hide their tracks.

It’s like saying it’s ok to have a hypervisor breakout because it requires you to have root in the underlying VM to exploit and only trusted admins have root…

Still, they’d likely have to separate out impurities from mined sodium deposits as well, so it sounds like a good use of the by-product from the desalination process where possible

Yeah, and also Edge or an older version of Chrome etc just to be sure.

Easy enough to test though. Load the page with a UA changer and see if it still shows up when Firefox pretends to be Chrome

Yeah. I up a DVD set on Amazon and they were fairly believable except for the party where they wouldn’t actually play on i.e. a PlayStation, and the disc title when inserted into a PC ended in .ISO

Money doesn’t come from the users, it comes from the advertisers. The platform is already in the hole but it’s getting worse over time

I hope that in the future, AI tools like this can assist indie game devs, so somebody with the idea for a decent plot and gameplay can generate environments, some models, and voiced characters with a generative engine. These tools could also be a cool evolution for games that use generated worlds already: think Minecraft but less blocky.

I fear that it will be used by big studios to supplant or replace human talent, leading to endless titles of same-same dreck without the spark of inspiration or uniqueness that a human developer, artist, or story-boarder can come up with.

Or to paraphrase how somebody else put it: “We thought that computers would do the boring or unpleasant work so that humans could spend more time making art and expanding culture, instead the computers are making the art and we’re still doing the shit work”

I’ve tried to report up fake sites to Google regarding spoofing well-established business, including that of my employer. All the twists seem to go to a black hole