Almost everyone who has never been poor has no clue how violent poverty is.

Anyone who is not an insider is a loser.

And certain AI have been demonstrated to play spontaneously, albeit in limited ways.

On the flip side, only sapients demonstrate sufficient curiosity to ask questions. We’re asking questions as soon as we’re old enough to string words together, but in all the sign language experiments we have ever done, no great ape other than humans have ever asked a question.

AI has never demonstrated the curiosity that drives spontaneous question-asking.

And I think that this critical limitation - a lack of curiosity - is why current AI will never be able to exceed human creativity.

It can ape it, certainly, but it’s just the ultimate note-cribber. It imitates, it pattern-matches. It’s not actually being creative.

And that’s kind of sad.

For the first time ever I am frightened more by the company than by the AI.

Up until now I only saw the company as gangs of madmen looking to herd cats. Now it’s clear that they are less sane than their wildly hallucinating products.

I mean, sucks to be those people. But I say let them have the day they voted for.

As another commenter has said: it’s not if, it’s when.

I guess the authors have never heard of domain washing?

Because IME a majority of domains from serious and large-scale spammers are not new - they are abandoned domains, where the spammer is counting on that domain’s prior reputation to bypass any filtering.

Shame, that. They seemed so promising.

Modern industrialized agriculture absolutely depends on manufactured fertilizer. It’s gotten to the point where demand is almost perfectly inelastic - farmers literally cannot grow a successful crop without it, and in the amounts needed. They cannot just “tighten the belt” on fertilizer usage - fall beneath a certain level, and the entire crop becomes unsellable.

And yet, a good 60% of all Urea - a critical fertilizer base component - comes out of the gulf states via the Strait of Hormuz.

We are going to see the opening scenes of this crisis over the winter, as the southern hemisphere countries start reacting to fertilizer price spikes as supply gets massively constrained.

And next year through the fall time will be the major acts, as northern-hemisphere crops cannot be grown.

Remember: it takes time for products to be manufactured and move through supply chains. The southern hemisphere countries will be in the process of fertilizing now through the fall, depending on crop. Northern hemisphere countries will be fertilizing from late fall through next summer. We could easily be looking at severe shortages of fertilizer lasting into 2027, leading to a catastrophic yield collapse of agriculture for two years running.

And this can and will also impact meat production - every species that ends up on our dinner plate is also supported by industrialized agriculture, as that provides the food that it eats.

I really hope y’all all have functional vegetable gardens to fall back on.

Exact same fibre optic lines. Exact same fibre modems. Exact same Dmarc points. Exact same networks.

But business users, who frequently run servers on their connections, don’t get IPv6.

Make this make sense.

Thank you for your honesty.

If you are wanting a laptop for business work with Windows-only apps that are niche enough to never get support from WINE, I would honestly recommend Dell business-class laptops.

The downside is the price: these are built like tanks, somewhere between consumer and toughbook standards, and as such, are commensurately expensive. The ones I am talking about are the “pro precision workstations”.

Before the AI price spikes (mid 2025), it was not unusual to spend $2k CAD on a midrange model, $8k CAD with all the bells and whistles. But as a result, running one for 6-8 years is not uncommon.

And since last fall, it seems that prices have jumped by $2k CAD on the midrange machines to as much as $14k CAD on the high end thanks to RAM, SSD, and GPU prices. Like JFC, plumping out to 128Gb is now +$8k CAD all by itself, and +$3k CAD just for a decent SSD. The top end machine went from something around $8k to $22k CAD, and even dropped the options for 256Gb and 512Gb RAM.

You can even graphically drag-and-drop column order from within SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio), although it’s always seemed sketch AF to me, and I wouldn’t want to do this with a large table unless I had backups and the site/app was set offline due to maintenance.

Even Entity Framework (DotNet) has the ability to define column order, but only on table create (for sure). I cannot remember if an EF migration can insert a column anywhere into the middle or not.

Pro tip: once you have committed, you can get a hard-coded DVORAK keyboard from UNICOMP, who make modern versions of the IBM Model M buckling-spring keyboard (which is often called a “desk yacht” due to its massive size). This allows you to have DVORAK without having to mess with your system’s default keyboard, and allow you to type on other people’s systems by just dragging your keyboard along.

You need to add a customization to your order and specify DVORAK, but the keyboards are absolutely spectacular and last for many years. Be sure to also pick up the keyboard protector if you are not keen on breaking it down twice a year just to clean it. The plastic protector is low-end lame, as it is not exactly form-fitting (vacuum-moulded instead of form moulded), but it is better than nothing.