Sane individuals cannot easily stop thinking about the ongoing and impending consequences of a corrupt regime with every similarity to the Third Re!ch rising anywhere in the world, and most of us live in the same country where it's happening. There is nothing more important for us to be talking about right now. Some of our lives depend on it. Your "political bullshit" is my "existence at stake."

This goes back to what the top comment in this thread said, though. Starbucks coffee is terrible specifically because it's roasted specifically to be good for making sugar bombs. Think about a latte, where even with a double the coffee taste is subtle. When you put as much sugar and milk into a drink as Starbucks does, the only way you can taste the coffee is if it's burnt to hell.

IPAs as a body are very different from Starbucks. Yes, there absolutely are crap ones which are essentially the same thing, just throwing ingredients which produce big flavors at the beer, but there's also IPAs which have many subtle flavors which resolve on the palate over time. In its heyday, the Russian River Brewing Company's Pliny the Younger exemplified this; I was living in Lake county at the time, and I'd go enjoy them regularly. Another potentially great one, although it's very variable so it's not always amazing, is Black Diamond's Rampage. Weirdly, Sierra Nevada actually has several excellent IPAs all of a sudden, which is very welcome because IME Lagunitas Brewing (which was my prior goto) has become fairly insipid. They do still have one great beer called "A Little Sumpin' Extra!" but I never see it. These days I am mostly drinking Sierra's "Hazy IPA Pack" 12 packs, of which my favorite is probably "Hoppy Little Thing IPA". They also have or had another mixed 12 pack of IPAs where my favorite is "Dank Little Thing IPA", that's probably my favorite Sierra of all time.

You don't have to like IPAs, I'm not mad about it or anything, but I do think IPA hate is silly. I've been to dozens of beer festivals (I stopped going when they got expensive, but I went to basically all the ones even vaguely nearby for years) and tasted somewhere between hundreds and thousands of beers, so I like to think I've got a fairly educated palate in this department, and I still enjoy IPAs the most. Shitty ones are shitty, but that's true of all beer styles.

Yes, a long commute eats up your life painfully. My longest commutes have been 30 minutes, and that is more than enough for me. My shortest have been about 5 minutes on foot, for example when I worked for IBM/Tivoli in Austin I lived on one end of the Arboretum parking lot, and work was on the other. I actually have a 30 minute commute now, but when we had a major remodeling project at work (a roof repair) I was offered the opportunity to go remote full time during the repair (everyone who could work independently was offered this) and I took it; then I was offered the option to continue to WfH 4 days, and I accepted that as well. 30 minutes is still irritating, but only once a week :)

When I worked for Cisco in Santa Cruz we had an intern who commuted from San Francisco 5 days a week. It's a beautiful drive along the 1, but that's still madness, especially since he did so much of it in the dark.

Yes, I really do wish social networks would start using it to create alt text, and stop asking me to do it. Ideally they would recognize scaled or slightly cropped images and reuse the text from the last time so they don't have to reprocess reposts.

But as you just said, the AI can turn an image into text — which you can use as a prompt. The AI can't generate the exact same image twice, but the artist probably can't replicate their works with exactitude without having them in front of them as a reference. With that as a standard, the AI can simply copy the source image, and do a better job than the artist at that task. Reproducibility is not the soul of art.

Yes, of course it is. Creating models and then animating them can be considered as just the way you give the rendering engine instructions on what to draw for you.

You're certainly telling us a lot about yourself, here.

What? Yes, of course they did. Tons of people have asked for generative AI of many kinds.

Yes, but the AI lets you generate thousands of results in the time that it takes to make one image with less automation, so this is not an indictment against the technology.

KBB says some are up to 55 miles on a charge, so you're close if you're talking about the best case. But some do as little as 14 or 15 miles, and AFAICT the average is around 20-25 somewhere.

In the USA, the average commute takes 30 minutes, so let's call it around 20-25 miles. You could get to work, but you couldn't get back unless you had someplace to plug in there.

Maybe, but it was still an incredibly dumb thing to say.

However, only series hybrids get to do that trick, like the i3 with range extender. Most hybrids work in parallel, and the electric motor is small and can't do primary acceleration alone, so the motor doesn't run at optimal RPM and you don't actually get that advantage.

The i3 with range extender is different from most hybrids because it's a series plug-in hybrid. That means that the electric motor is sufficient to move the vehicle at all speeds and levels of acceleration. This isn't true of parallel hybrids, so your i3 is not generally representative.

You think they don't use internal combustion engine generators?

More of the power put in goes into the food, so watt for watt, they are better at heating everything.

I don't disagree, I'm just not in so much hurry that I can't wait another minute.

I had a mediocre drip maker from Proctor Silex, it made okay coffee but the carafe could only be poured at a very narrow range of speeds or it would piss all over the table.

It died, but it lasted OK before that, so I bought another one. They managed to make it even shittier. They "fixed" the pouring problem so it would pour okay at low to medium speeds, which actually was an improvement. But the new unit could only be filled with water through a hatch, and you could only fill it very slowly. And then the water came out too quickly, so it made shitty weak coffee.

I returned it and got a $100 espresso machine, which I get a better result from than going out to a chain.

Most cheap espresso makers aren't really espresso makers. They don't make enough pressure for full extraction. However, there is now a ~$100 DeLonghi pumped unit which does a fine job. Sadly it has a stupid milk steamer, but it's otherwise pretty good.

We can have 220/240V outlets in the USA. We have standards for them at a variety of current carrying capacities. I've installed the 240V@20A outlets (on new circuits from a subpanel) before. Then we could slap a US style plug on one of your kettles and run it just fine.

However, my inverter microwave does a fine job of heating water, to boiling if I want. Also, an espresso machine is available for $100 (from DeLonghi) and produces a better result.

The decision as to whether something is copyrightable doesn't depend on whether it's art, or whether the person who wrote the prompt can be called an artist. The copyright office has no involvement in that argument at all. It's based on whether there is sufficient human input for it to be considered a work by a human, because the purpose of copyright law is ostensibly/allegedly to protect the creators of works. What they're saying is that he cannot be considered to be a creator, not whether he is an artist. It's not only artistic works which are eligible for copyright protection, so that argument doesn't matter and he's wasting his time by having it unless it makes his art sufficiently notable to make it worth something.

One definition of art is anything which is designed with aesthetics in mind, by which definition LLM graphics output can obviously qualify. And the common definition of artist is someone who creates art, so by a reasonable definition he is an artist. But that still doesn't make any difference in whether he can get a copyright on LLM output.

Yes, two important things have happened since it was good. One, it was sold to DICE which was indifferent, and sold again to B!zX which is malicious. They put "Nazi" in the word filter to protect Nazis from being insulted; they eventually took it out but "Re!ch" is still in there, so they can protect the institution of Nazism even if they don't protect individual Nazis. Two, Donald Trump became president. Perhaps you missed one or both of these occurrences.

Thanks. The 2A guys have been a lot quieter since Trump went full fascist and they failed to respond, so maybe we have a shot at solving at least one of those things. Trump also said he wants to take away the guns first and look at going to court later, but the ammosexuals seem to have blocked that out, so unfortunately we won't have their help removing the trump tumor from our body politic.