That’s kinda what I’m trying to get at. Like yeah, it sucks to see, but between being worried about this v.s. an additional 10% tariff globally, one of those will impact my life much more substantially.

Gotta be real chief, I’m gonna oppose the crowd here and ask it: What’s the big deal here?

Like, its definitely not a good look, but is this really significant enough to devote any mental energy to?

Edit: okay it took a crapton of digging, but there’s a better link now.

I do gotta admit too, this’ere was the first time I’d heard of a Surface Linux. Is it basically just like a scaled-up Linux phone, or are there some quirks to it?

This is probably it, but it’s just so unfortunate that there’s a constant loop that can be solved by just not entrusting a single centralized company to it:

> Find a good service > Good service turns sour > Find a new good service > Good service turns sour

Like man, I’m just now getting some people to selfhosted Stoat + Matrix, but I just know once some investor-backed competitor arises, some of 'em won’t even give Stoat a chance for development to catch up.

I’ve been going down the Linux/FOSS rabbit hole for a year at this point and hot dayumn does it just keep getting better. I seriously wonder how/why self-hosted forms of social media and apps haven’t become the norm.

As an add-on, I really like VrChat, and really want to verify, but its largely because I can’t trust that service that I’m being held back from doing it. I know eventually that investor capital must be returned, but surely Persona isn’t the best of the options, is it?

I don’t know anywhere near the full scope of this industry, but what seems to’ve been the case so far is that Lithium Ion battery recycling isn’t really happening because not enough batteries have died yet, to sustain a company in that industry. Which y’know, bit of a good problem to have, but it’s also a problem that Lead-Acid batteries had toward the early phases of their use. As was the case then, it took time for enough batteries to die to sustain an industry in battery recycling, and even moreso exacerbated with Lithium car batteries having a longer lifespan.

The interesting part is that once we have enough batteries to sustain the market, a very small proportion has to be manufactured from raw materials to makeup for product lost in the recycling process. This has Lithium in a weird state where we currently heavily rely on its extraction, yet as far as the auto industry is concerned, it won’t be too terribly long in the future when we’d have the baseline supply we need.

Anyways, no clue if that’s truly their approach or not, but we’re at a point that I feel it wouldn’t be entirely unjustifiable to consider.

That’s swell that someone outside the DOJ/FBI can see the names and all, but functionally that sounds about as useful as nobody having seen the names at all. What’s a lawmaker going to do? Those aren’t rhetorical questions, I really wanna know what can be achieved outta it, because I don’t see any gain.

They can’t make copies or show their own staff, yet they’d be functionally expected to comb through everything on their own. All multimillion files, and through layers of added burecracy that make it difficult for anyone to view. We know lawmakers aren’t exactly known for being the most thought-out, so I don’t forecast they’ll do much more than Ctrl + F.

On a side note, the ABC News article on this subject says Epstein killed himself. Completely irrelevant to what the post is about, but dang nabbit ABC, y’all are better than this.

As far as my applications for open-sourcing goes, AI has actually done a good number on assisting it.

I’m a DIY sort of person, and use a lot of software for things like ESP32 boards to complete niche tasks. The problem is that very many applications just didn’t have some preexisting code made for it, so it took a much larger load for me to try programming it by hand. In recent years, I’ve had a much easier time finding software for things, and sure enough, many of these projects have some mention or disclaimer about AI.

I know AI brings its own problems with it, namely that of code produced with lesser-optimized techniques, but the alternative I had to deal with was simply no premade code at all.

That being said, many of these projects did die out after AI was implemented, but not because the community was less interested, or the developers were less caring. These projects died because they reached their end goal, they did exactly what you needed it to do, no more or less. Far as I’m aware, that sounds like a successful outcome.

I have pondered this a little, as to why this seems to be the route the administration is taking. The best explanation I’ve had is that Trump is taking a card from China’s playbook.

Several years back, China weakened their currency with the goal of creating an environment that’s more embracing to external companies wanting to setup manufacturing plants in their borders. With how this administration is speaking about boosting manufacturing, I can see these two narratives being in conjunction with one another. The problem I see here, though, is that those jobs were spurred on by lower wages as a result of that weaker currency, which I don’t quite see as a goal the US should be striving towards.

Yes, given enough time, it’ll pay itself back off, but this still seems like a subpar avenue, especially as one of those American workers that’ll feel the impact. Whether that’s truly the result or goal is anyone’s guess, best I can do is speculate.

Not certain right yet since one of the lads are ill, but I’m trying to see Zootopia 2 with 'em! Likely gonna be having a drink with them after, our New Year’s seem to’ve really mellowed out throughout the last few times, one of the bad parts of growing up is that it seems harder to party like I used to.