If you don't have a CD drive, then you don't get to rip CDs. You'll have to acquire your files some other way. And/or buy a CD drive.

How can I rip CDs to a phone?

You don't. You rip them to your fileserver at home, and run a subsonic-API server on that. The phone connects to it over a VPN, and a subsonic API player plays it to the car with bluetooth.

seats packed to remind your knees that they are trying to maximize the headcount per square foot(see also, seats in blatantly undesirable positions relative to the screen); dickheads making noise or fucking around on their phones, some asshole who decided to bring a screaming-age child, the works.

I went to a couple movies a few months ago, and I didn't see any of that. My fat American ass had plenty of room in the reclining sear, and the next row of seats was a few feet beneath me and seemingly ten feet away. The theaters have become fucking luxurious.

But it's expensive. And I wonder if that's what's keeping the obnoxious screaming kids away.

And you're totally right about the half hour of ads. That's definitely the worst part, these days.

But the seats and space .. omg those problems are over, at least here in the super-wealthy gigantic metropolis of .. Albuquerque.

I've used ChatGPT to write code and Gemini to debug it. If you pass the feedback back and forth, it takes a couple iterations but they'll eventually agree that it's all good and I find that's about 90-95% of the way to where I need it to be. Earlier today I took a 6kb script that had been used as something fast and dirty for years - written by someone long gone from the company - and completely revamped it into something much more powerful, robust, and polished in both its code and its output. Script grew to about 20kb, but it's 10x better and I only had to make minor tweaks. Between the two, they found all sorts of hidden bugs and problems with it.

Look, I know "nuclear device" is correctly generic, so that RTGs and things like them, legitimately count. But let's be serious: right around the very same time this real stuff happened, some really great fake stuff happened too: the movie Goldfinger.

And once you've watched Goldfinger, "nuclear device" is just a euphemism for a bomb. So don't go calling RTGs "nuclear devices," please.

it is pretty clear trump would pardon or vacate any fine against a right winger org.

The president does not yet have pardoning power over civil judgements. Maybe a constitutional amendment to do that is coming, but we haven't had a vote on it yet.

Some good has come from promoting more user speech online, but also a lot of bullying, harassment, echo chambers, doxxing, stochastic terrorism, and so on.

You make it sound as dangerous as a 1775 soap box that people like Sam Adams would stand upon and shout from, or a pamphlet-printing-press that someone like Thomas Paine might use, where in both cases the goal was often to rowse the rabble into protest and action.

But is the internet really that dangerous?

"The platforms" are, at best, a percent of the internet.

Sign up for a linode, put up any sort of website you can imagine on it, and explain why you would choose for the algorithms you write or install, to work the way that you fear.

It doesn't have to be as bad as you say, unless you want it. That's essential freedom.

This would result in suppression of anti Trump opinion

It will result in suppression of all anti- power/wealth opinion, i.e. all criticism of government or big-pocketed business.

This change is sponsored by litigious motherfuckers. Trump is only the instance-du-jour, a few percent of the overall threat, though very much a shining example of it.

With one important difference, this reminds me of the 1974 Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act, which established a national speed limit of 55 MPH. States had to either adopt a state speed limit of 55 MPH, or else lose out on funding, i.e. get punished.

Of course, that was a law enacted by Congress, not an Executive order. I guess, traditionally, they say that for first quarter millennium of America, Congress held the purse strings because some inky piece of paper said they were supposed to, as if Congress could ever handle that much responsibility! Can you imagine?! Anyway, we've decided Fuck That Tradition, let's try something new and put a thieving tool in charge of the purse.

NO! This is an outrage! [slams table]

Our religious war should be about reader's choice vs writer's choice!

Ok, but which of those things came with the new law? A lot of what you're describing (I suspect all of it) was already in place. What changed for non-banned users?

Oh, so they're doing it the same way I take "good" photographs: by taking a fuckton of mostly-shitty photographs and trawling through them for the rare few which actually look decent.

Vaporware. If this feature doesn't make it into the Open Source driver so that I can know where my computer is, then I'm not going to buy any Nvidia hardware!

If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant

It was good enough for us!