The irony of the two stories being together on the front page, "More Screen Time Linked to Lower Test Scores For Elementary Students" and "Microsoft to Provide Free AI Tools For Washington State Schools" is just too good to fail to mention.

And so I'm replying to the both First Posts with it.

The irony of the two stories being together on the front page, "More Screen Time Linked to Lower Test Scores For Elementary Students" and "Microsoft to Provide Free AI Tools For Washington State Schools" is just too good to fail to mention.

And so I'm replying to the both First Posts with it.

It's not that long ago that I found myself with a box of 8" floppy discs from a legacy product and no way to read them. Yes, the software on them was long obsolete. But I would have liked to be able to preserve a bit of company heritage.

The product in question (Glenayre GL-3000) had been updated in the interim to use 3.5" floppies, though with a bespoke format. I figured out how to use Linux and creative parameters to dd to write disc images. We packaged this as a bootable CD for customers to write their own disc images. After a sharp drop in floppy quality around 2005 I discussed other storage options with my boss (e.g. USB) but the business case just wasn't there.

...laura

Wait, you are saying you need a permit to burn tires? ,/EM>

If you don't want to dump all the burning toxins into the air, yes. Or don't you breathe where you come from?

I doubt Trump wants war, he's a businessman, not a soldier.

Yes, you are correct. The draft dodger is not a soldier and has little regard for the military, criticizing Gold Star families and mocking those who died.

However, the reason nothing will happen while he's around is because he admires Putin. Remember when he held up a picture of he and Putin after the Alaska meeting and said he was going to sign it and send it to Putin? It's the same reason he has not put real sanctions on Russia despite the Senate having the bill to act as a sledgehammer. Trump himself said back in July that Putin has 50 days to make a deal. Here we are 88 days after that statement and nothing has been done. He then followed up with a statement in the beginning of August where he said, "We have about eight days. ... We're going to put sanctions," he said. And yet, here we are, two months later and nothing.

Anything that would make Putin look bad, Trump won't do. He wants to do business in the country so any sanctions or military activity is the last thing he would do. His usual word salad is all we'll get.

Correction. A small price for accepting genocide.

In my experience it is, how effective it is is directly proportional to preexisting project complexity when the commands are run. The bigger the project, and the more parts that are interfacing together, the worse it performs. But for small, simple projects and creating frameworks, it can be amazing.

I'm not sure what "Building the Metaverse" is supposed to even mean anymore. Is he still obsessed with Ready Player One fantasies?

I mean, if he's just talking about generating 3d assets and the like, then maybe? AI 3d model generation is pretty useful if you don't care about every tiny detail matching up to some specific form. For example, I used an AI tool to make an image of an ancient mug with cave-art scrawled around its edges. It got the broad shapes of the model right, but had trouble with the fine engravings, making a lot of them part of the texture rather than the shape, but overall it was good enough that I just left off the engravings, had it generate a mug without them, then re-applied them with a displacement map. It got all the cracks and weathering and such on the mug really nice, and the print came out great after post-processing (cold-cast bronze + patina & polishing).

(I ended up switching from cave art to Linear A, because I also plan to at some point make a Linear B mug so that I can randomly offer guests one of the two mugs, have them rate it, and thus conduct Linear A-B Testing)

It's a cute "attack", but not practical in the real world. The "poison" stands out like a sore thumb on your loss graphs.

It's so easy to get tempted into feature bloat these days. You need a microcontroller for some simple set of features, like doing PWM control on a fan and handling a rotary switch, so you get something like a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32S3 that's the size of a thumbnail and costs like $10, but then all of the sudden you have way more processing, memory capacity, pins, etc than you need, and oh hey, you now have USB, Bluetooth, and WiFi, and surely you should at least do SOMETHING with them, right? But the hey, for just a little bit of extra cost you could upgrade to a XIAO ESP32S3 Sense, and now you have a camera, microphone, and SD card, so you can do live video streaming, voice activation, gesture recognition... .... it really creeps up on you, because there's so much functionality in cheap, small packages today.

The irony though is that nobody really seems to bundle together everything one needs. Like, could we maybe have such a controller that also has builtin MOSFETs, USB + USB PD charging, BMS (1S-6S) functionality, and maybe a couple thermocouple sensors? Because most small devices need all these basic features, and it's way more cost, space, weight and effort to integrate separate components for all of them. The best I've found is a (bit overbuilt) card that has USB + USB PD (actually 2 of each, and reverse charging support), BMS support (1-5S), one thermocouple sensor, and a small charging display - but no processor or MOSFETs.

It's not just for Microsoft anymore

The role of middle managers is to execute the plans of upper management. Without middle management the upper management would have to deal with the workers and all the minutiae while at the same time trying to keep the company running.

As Forbes said, middle managers are the overlooked leaders who hold the organization together.

Sharper Image was never that great. Just overpriced Chinese-made products made to look nice.