Haven’t digital price tags been used for decades? I’m sure these will be more high tech, but I remember ones like this at least 20 years ago

I think that’s been a fair description of the AAS space for a long time, which is fine. If you want innovation, go indie, if you want big budget, go AAA

Cloudflare Zero Trust is also great for that (and free for less than 50 users)

Yeah, I just did a quick test in Python to do a tcp connection to “0.0.0.0” and it made a loopback connection, instead of returning an error as I would have expected.

I’ve heard the sentiment that change and convenience are killing society before, and I’m sure I’ll hear it again. I prefer to shop online. I get no sense of community from stores where every interaction has a hanging financial incentive around it, I get it from local organized runs, other frequent visitors of the dog park, etc. To me, that line of reasoning feels almost like lamenting how good the pipes in your house are, because you don’t need to call a plumber and get to interact with them.

Shopping online gives me more options, more reviews, easier ways to look up additional technical details without feeling weird taking space in an aisle while researching on my phone. It’s also more efficient in terms of total driving; one person making deliveries for everyone in a neighborhood requires less total driving than all those people making individual trips to a store. And it frees up more time for me to do things I actually want with the people I enjoy.

Half the time? Either something is wrong with that store or you need to learn how to use it properly. I have issues maybe once a year.

The Brewster’s Millions genie

Right, that’s what I’m saying

I believe it was the Tea Party. Man, haven’t thought about that in a long time.

Minor aside, I really dislike when things use life expectancy for things like this instead of adult life expectancy. Child mortality drastically skews it so much it’s useless.

More detail on the topic https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/money-and-elections-a-complicated-love-story/

How strong is the association between campaign spending and political success? For House seats, more than 90 percent of candidates who spend the most win.

…

Money is certainly strongly associated with political success. But, “I think where you have to change your thinking is that money causes winning,” said Richard Lau, professor of political science at Rutgers. “I think it’s more that winning attracts money.”

…

Instead, he and Lau agreed, the strong raw association between raising the most cash and winning probably has more to do with big donors who can tell (based on polls or knowledge of the district or just gut-feeling woo-woo magic) that one candidate is more likely to win — and then they give that person all their money.

…

Money matters a great deal in elections,” Bonica said. It’s just that, he believes, when scientists go looking for its impacts, they tend to look in the wrong places. If you focus on general elections, he said, your view is going to be obscured by the fact that 80 to 90 percent of congressional races have outcomes that are effectively predetermined by the district’s partisan makeup

…

But in 2017, Bonica published a study that found, unlike in the general election, early fundraising strongly predicted who would win primary races. That matches up with other research suggesting that advertising can have a serious effect on how people vote if the candidate buying the ads is not already well-known and if the election at hand is less predetermined along partisan lines.

…

Another example of where money might matter: Determining who is capable of running for elected office to begin with. Ongoing research from Alexander Fouirnaies, professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, suggests that, as it becomes normal for campaigns to spend higher and higher amounts, fewer people run and more of those who do are independently wealthy. In other words, the arms race of unnecessary campaign spending could help to enshrine power among the well-known and privileged.

Looking completely realistic and being able to discern between real and fake are competing goals. If you can discern the difference, then it does not look completely realistic.

I think what they’re alluding to is generative adversarial networks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network where creating a better discriminator that can detect a good image from bad is how you get a better image.

It is, and it does provide improved performance at the expense of complexity. Both India and the US Air Force actually used clusters of PS3s to create supercomputers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor) has some more details as well

Why would you suddenly add in the “hundred” when you didn’t do it for any previous ones?

Except when you do https://writingcenter.uagc.edu/apostrophes

Apostrophe when making a number plural is not uncommon.

Not necessarily. If your phone uses usb-c, and if you get a usb-c flash drive, you can make a bootable USB with your phone with the flasher app. The reviews are pretty mixed for it for whether or not it works, but could be worth a shot.

Ah, that makes sense, like summa cum laude.

sometimes it’s a matter of means & availability, sometimes it’s a matter of controlling their paid-for content (like people who actually buy switch games but want to run them on their steam deck), and sometimes it’s basically a hobby

Very little of that justifies it to me. For means & availability, this isn’t a mother stealing baby formula. Pirated content isn’t a need (though I’d make an exception for things like school books). There’s plenty of content made to be free and available, as well as libraries. And I’m completely fine with people pirating copies of paid-for content; there’s an argument to be made that that isn’t actually piracy and is personal archiving. It probably doesn’t need to be said that “hobby” is not a justification in the least, just like people who shoplift for the thrill.

I see supporting a service hostile to users as immoral - it’s like enabling an abuser, however slight, you’re contributing to behaviors that are a detriment to others

To me the real crux is that you believe that not doing something immoral is the same thing as doing something moral. Me sitting here is moral because I’m not murdering someone. Yay me. I’m also not blackmailing, gaslighting, stealing, etc. etc. Me sitting here might be the most moral thing anyone has ever done.

To me the case for the absence of activity actually being moral is it requires some amount of sacrifice to continue to do the right thing. Avoiding going to Walmart to support a local business, even if you pay more and it’s further away. The difference between not wanting to see a movie and boycotting it. There’s nothing moral about not going to a movie you didn’t want to see. But I think it is moral to avoid going to a movie you wanted to because of labor practices; you made a sacrifice in support of your beliefs. If you then go and pirate said movie, it’s indistinguishable from selfish behavior.

As I’ve said in other spots, if it’s genuinely about not supporting hostile services and not about self-interest, donate however much you’re saving by pirating to a union or charity. That’s completely fair. But if not, all I see is people acting in their self interest and trying to justify it by saying that they are doing a bad thing to bad people so it’s okay (and maybe they’re doing a little bad to some good people as well, but that’s a price you’re willing to have them pay for you).

The problem is when people claim they were never going to buy an awful lot of content. If someone spends a significant amount of time playing, or consuming, pirated content, I call bullshit. They would have bought at least some of it if they weren’t getting so much stuff for free. Considering the rewards and lack of consequences, I doubt the vast majority of people pirating are being really honest with themselves about what they “would never have” paid for, and instead use it as a simple excuse for bad behavior.

And rejecting a service you don’t consider worth it isn’t moral. That’s just basic capitalism and self-interest. That’s the standard decision to not buy something, which is a decision people make literally dozens of times when they go in the store. And pirating that content anyways certainly doesn’t make it any more moral.

Which is my point. People do things which are cheap and convenient because it is in their self interest. They stop pirating for selfish reasons just as they were pirating for selfish reasons.

Which is why I can’t stand self-righteous pirates who try and convince themselves and everyone else that they aren’t actually doing it selfishly, they’re doing it for some fabricated moral good and we should be thanking them for their service, that they’re fighting corporations somehow, and pretending that they aren’t withholding money from the people who spent the time making the things they enjoy.