This looks like a classic example of this fallacy.

The author of an article about ditching Discord claims that XMPP has "lots of very mediocre clients out there." What would be high-quality XMPP clients for Windows, GNU/Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android?

considering the NUMEROUS recent cold-weather debacles, solar and batteries are probably the best responses possible. Those are the most cold-resistant things on the grid. (wind is pretty resistant too but I don't think Texas gets a lot of wind?)

For how reliant they were on natural gas and nuclear, neither had been hardened against cold. Batteries are pretty foolproof there. And since they've voluntarily isolated their grid, batteries are the only safety net option available to them.

Climate is notoriously complex set of wild interactions that are unknown at best. Predictions of climate crisis have always been wildly off, because the goal is to scare people into action.

But the boy who cried wolf is a cautionary tale that climate people failed to learn.

don't forget Thing from Munsters

The FAQ does not address why scope was limited to video games within the broader market for downloadable software. If I had to guess: Limiting the petition's scope to video games takes advantage of existing consumer protection laws and norms that address the power imbalance between large corporate merchants and individuals. Because home users have far less power to negotiate terms of sale than businesses have, some countries' legal systems apply more restrictions on the sale of products and services for home use.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought buying a license to download and use a proprietary computer program was a service, not a good. This differs from buying a physical copy of the same program, such as a CD or DVD. What does the "Sale of Goods Act" have to say about services?

I remember my Apple //c booting up in about five seconds, off a 5.25" floppy. I'll never forget the distinctive sound Apple DOS made when booting.
B-R-R-R-R-R-R-R.. chk-chk, chk, chhhhhhhhhk
(I used FaskDisk, which helped quite a bit with disk access speed by optimizing sector interleave)

Times were probably the worst on the Mac Classics, booting off their 2.5" discs could take 20-30 seconds before the desktop appeared, and another 20 seconds of really sluggish user interface while the rest of the bits loaded and launched in the background.

Nowadays a reboot can take about 20 seconds to get to the desktop and be responsive, though MOST of the time I reboot is due to an OS update, which can take 10 minutes to install and reboot a few times.

Fuck me, another person who doesn't know how tariffs work.

Those Alpha Centurions, they're eating the cats! They're eating the dogs!

> "Good enough" is exactly the reason that AI is upending the world of white collar work. It might not replace a skilled and experienced employee, but it's good enough.

I don't necessarily have a problem with that. The problem is, skilled workers only become skilled after being inexperienced for a while and gaining experience. If you cut junior, unskilled workers from the job market, you won't have skilled workers in a few years.

In other words, company that adopt AI to avoid paying unskilled labor are shooting themselves in the foot.

Whether you like AI or not, if your profession is about to be obsoleted by AI, AI Is factually bad for you.

Beyond that, it's up to you to decide if it's worth paying a talented human writer to report on local events in a local rag. Most of those newspapers are strictly utilitarian and simply inform the locals of what's happening in their communities. I've never seen any of them dabble in gonzo.

And well, journalism is like football: most professional footballers play in minor leagues and don't earn much, and only a vanishingly small minority earns top dollar playing incredible matches watched by millions.

High-flying journalists writing for classy newspapers will most certainly keep writing their own stuff. But the mundane will probably be taken over by AI because mediocre is good enough for the money.

True, for workloads that don't involve a lot of web browsing. For web browsing, I've seen a single article on Ars Technica open 40 or more Firefox content processes: one for each origin that is running its scripts in the document.

How is one supposed to build and test a program for macOS on Apple silicon and a program for Windows or Linux on x86-64 without owning a Mac with Apple silicon and a Windows or Linux PC?

It is a feature, not a bug!

But hey, lets claim incompetence and not malice even though they are indistinguishable at this point.