Does nobody file their fingernails anymore? God damned barbarians, the lot of you.

If I pulled something like this in my profession I’d be fined and permanently lose my license to practice. And losing my license in one state would likely trigger the automatic revocation in the other states I’m licensed (maybe not WV, they don’t seem to give a shit). That seems appropriate.

No, the music overlay music offered in the app is licensed and can be added. Creators who are performing covers, I believe, generally have the license held by TikTok or have their videos muted/taken offline. Special arrangements are made for intentional or encouraged content . That is a guess, but things like Megan Trainor’s “Gucci” where she is both the original artist and a participant would be a case like this. I would think Grace Kelly and sing alongs on arrangement-bound copyright material like Pentatonix doing public domain carols (or even Roger’s and Hammerstein) are negotiated licensing if outside of their pre-negotiated license.

It’s not code. It’s a matrix of associative conditions. And, specifically, it’s not a fixed set of associations but a sort of n-dimensional surface of probabilities. Your prompt is a starting vector that intersects that n-dimensional surface with a complex path which can then be altered by the data it intersects. It’s like trying to predict or undo the rainbow of colors created by an oil film on water, but in thousands or millions of directions more in complexity.

The complexity isn’t in understanding it, it’s in the inherent randomness of association. Because the “code” can interact and change based on this quasi-randomness (essentially random for a large enough learned library) there is no 1:1 output to input. It’s been trained somewhat how humans learn. You can take two humans with the same base level of knowledge and get two slightly different answers to identical questions. In fact, for most humans, you’ll never get exactly the same answer to anything from a single human more than simplest of questions. Now realize that this fake human has been trained not just on Rembrandt and Banksy, Jane Austin and Isaac Asimov, but PoopyButtLice on 4chan and the Daily Record and you can see how it’s not possible to wrangle some sort of input:output logic as if it were “code”.

My only real gripe is that the SSDs aren't being refreshed as component prices drop. There's no reason for the entry level not to be 256 now, with 512 mid range and 1TB top end. Retail - and I presume wholesale - prices on the parts have dropped by half or more since the deck was launched. There may be contractual issues involved, but - for Valve - it would make sense to make these machines as self-contained as possible. Yes, you can by a SD card, but at this point you probably shouldn't have to. And, lets face it, 64GB on a gaming device is pretty limiting. Just start slotting in larger drives as the inventory breaks the previous price floor and inventory is cleared.

Oh...yeah; not a shadow. 🤣

I’ll do you one better - I’m going to pirate every apple show I watch just do they don’t get my money.

I refer to this tactic by its official name: “How I watch everything already.” 🏴‍☠️

I have no idea if they did or not, but Russia was also accused of using it and most of the videos purporting its use turned out to be magnesium, which also burns white, produces white smoke, and sets pretty much everything it touches on fire.

So far the 40 beheaded babies turned out not to exist. I trust very few non-expert reports of things happening.

There is a great deal of backlash to the Golden Visa programs which were set up in Europe to boost foreign investment and skim more foreign money into government coffers. While it did result in some building and some influx, the impact has been wildly overstated.

Before I’m beset with angry residents, I’ll note that last year, there were 168,000 real estate transactions in Portugal, but there have been less than 10,200 golden visas granted via real estate purchase over nearly twelve years. That’s less than 850 real estate transactions year, on average, or around 0.5% compared to the 168,000 last year.

There are, I’m sure, edge cases where a large residential building was bought, renovated, and then resold mostly to foreign investors- I’ve seen the ads. But as a driver of housing rents I’m skeptical that such a low volume has been the primary driver of rent inflation. I’m seeing ridiculous rents everywhere, and I think it’s a combination of Airbnb-style landlords snatching up inventory for short term rental income (which no private renter can afford nor private buyer/homeowner compete) as well as the condo-bros leveraging their way into tens of hundreds of units for the passive income fad that has swept most of the western world.

Indeed. Flattery by proxy is the key to many sales techniques

It really comes down to the way you use it. As others have mentioned you don’t even need one to get the job done. And it’s true that beyond a certain length it’s sort of impractical; mostly just for show.

In all seriousness, being that they’re using standard C ends, I’m a little surprised they’re going to include one at all.

If you mess with the mouse, you get the ears.