If in doubt, you can always play the old “Chosen One” card to hand waive that sort of thing away.

Mr “highest midichlorian count in history” Skywalker might get a free pass just because he’s magic.

Which on balance probably means it was pretty lucky he did a redemption arc before he died, otherwise they’d have been stuck with an evil maniac in their immortal ghost club.

Every single time. I know how I’m supposed to read it, I know what it means and where it comes from, but I physically cannot read it any other way.

Worst name ever.

I hosted a meeting with about a dozen attendees recently, and one attendee silently joined with an AI note taking bot and immediately went AFK.

It was in about 5 minutes before we clocked it and then kicked it out. It automatically circulated its notes. Amusingly, 95% of them were “is that a chat bot?” “Steve, are you actually on this meeting?” “I’m going to kick Steve out in a minute if nobody can get him to answer”, etc. But even with that level of asinine, low impact chat, it still managed to garble them to the point of barely legible.

Also: what a dick move.

That’s a really interesting read (and worth much more attention than the pithy one-liners of people who just want to read the title).

On reflection, I think my take away is that Bluesky will always by necessity of its design be hosted and controlled by a single centralised company. But what their architectural model does allow is the possibility of a wholesale migration from one centralised provider to another. That is, it would be possible for a suitably resourced and motivated company to host its own mirror Relay and other components and have essentially a fully functional Bluesky clone. In the event that Bluesky ever “does a Twitter” and go into terminal decline, in theory this might mean that a successor/competitor could emerge and take on the network without loss of existing content.

I’m not sure that’ll ever actually happen, but it’s an interesting thought.

Strangely, I used to work for a bank in their “bereavement services” department; that is, the department that dealt with dead people’s accounts.

If anyone notified us of a death of an account holder, and provided any proof (death certificate, coroner’s report, police letter), the first thing we’d do is freeze the account. All payments out stopped, all cards cancelled, all withdrawals blocked. This was a legal requirement, because once somebody dies their money becomes the legal property of their “estate”, and it’s unlawful for anyone to remove money from the estate without following proper process.

There’s no need to stop each payment individually. In fact, the bank really doesn’t want you logging in to their online bank using the deceased’s credentials and messing around with things for the same reason; unless you’re following proper procedures, it’s not yours to mess with.

Possibly it’s different in different jurisdictions, of course.

Murder rather than suicide, but dead is dead.

Seems like a bit of a waste to launch an intercontinental missile at a country next door, on the same continent. Isn’t Russia supposed to have plenty of short and mid range ballistic missiles? I guess they must be running low.

I was under the impression that ICBMs weren’t all that great for conventional warheads. Their payload capacity isn’t enormous and their accuracy tends to be relatively low- which matters not a jot if you’re firing nukes (which do a lot of bang per kilo, and where a few hundred metres either way isn’t likely to be critical), but not so great for dropping normal munitions.

For me it’s MATE.

For some reason I’ve never really gotten on with XFCE. Tried it in earnest many years ago, and have dipped into it a few more times over the years, and for whatever reason it just doesn’t gel with me. Always feels like I’m fighting it to get it to do what I want it to do.

MATE has the familiarity and comfort for anyone who spent serious years running GNOME 2. It’s pretty much as lightweight as XFCE these days, but feels more polished and intuitive for it.

Ubuntu MATE is still one of my go-to distros for limited hardware (even though that project specifically seems to have stagnated somewhat in recent years).

The thing to remember about investing (forex or otherwise) is that it’s an enormous global industry. One of the largest and richest there is. If you’re a normal person, with a normal day job, tinkering around in the evening trying to pick stocks or write algorithms, just remember that there are countless thousands of professional, experienced, trained analysts all over the world doing the exact same thing 40 hours a week, week in week out.

There are no easy bucks to be made. If it was easy, it’d already be done.

and/or EU

I can’t see the EU revoking access to Galileo just because Trump says so.

It seems insane to me that the US system lets you literally specify the exact judge (that you’ve already bought and paid for) as the only judge that can hear cases against you. And that the system is basically OK with this.

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Bridgy Fed is pretty straightforward. You just follow the account and away you go.

It doesn’t make your bridged posts particularly attractive-looking (essentially you appear as a bot under a subdomain of a server), but it’s searchable and discoverable in the target network.

I’m now mostly using Blue Sky, but I bridge to Mastodon, so all my posts form part of the content that’s available to fediverse users. For little old me that’s not all that important, but if every big organisation or journalist or celeb did that too, that’d do a lot to build vitality into the fediverse network.

Speculation in the sense that the article says it’s "suggested’, and the source cited is “Mac Rumours”.

Not sure why you’re being so weird about it.

Apple made the transition a little easier for those who weren’t ready to give up on their wired headphones by including a $9 adapter. However, it looks like it could now be confined to the annals of history, as the Lightning to 3.5mm jack adapter has sold out in the US and other countries, suggesting Apple may have quietly discontinued it

It says “sold out” and “discontinued”. The latter is currently just speculation.

BSD is BSD-like

It certainly is that, yes.

I don’t know why I forgot this, but there is of course already a solution for this; mbin/kbin, which has both Lemmy-like and Mastodon-like interfaces on one platform.

Not that I’m actually suggesting anything you understand. Just recalling that this is a thought process someone’s already had at least once!

A plastic nob is cheaper than a touchscreen, yes. But if you’ve already got a touchscreen as part of the design anyway (for things like satnav or car maintenance data), it’s cheaper to not include any other buttons or inputs and to bundle them all up into one interface.

All of the uses so far are bad, and I can’t see any that would work as well as a trained human.

I’m no AI enthusiast, but this is clear hyperbole. Of course there are uses for it; it’s not magic, it’s just technology. You’ll have been using some of them for years before the AI fad came along and started labelling everything.

Translation services are a good example. Google Translate and Bing Translate have both been using machine learning neural networks as their core technology for a decade and more. There’s no other way of doing it that produces anything close to as good a result. And yes, paying a human translator might get you good results too, but realistically that’s not a competitive option for the vast majority of uses (nobody is paying a translator to read restaurant menus or train station signage to them).

This whole AI assistant fad can do one as far as I’m concerned, but the technologies behind the fad are here to stay.

BSD is more UNIX than Linux is, to be fair.