Zink

I know I am not alone here, because Lemmy and all, but holy god damn does that little AI sparkle trigger me more than any other AI term or image.

As somebody who (1) loves the beauty of the natural world and (2) lives in the USA, I'm hearing that NZ might be a most excellent place to retire, or even move to earlier.

Yeah the "shopping around" aspect isn't even close these days. I remember ~25 years ago using price aggregator sites to pick up individual PC parts from all different websites.

Today the situation is flipped. It isn't difficult to find a really good price. If you buy all your parts from the same retailer, you'll be way closer to the minmaxed optimal price than in the past.

The problem is that right now the "good" prices are crazy.

I just received all the parts for the high end gaming PC I'm building for my son for xmas. And I'll have some uses for it too.

I didn't really feel like I could delay it arbitrarily because teaching him real computer stuff (including games because I'm a fun dad) matters a lot more to me than however many hundreds of dollars I might have eventually saved.

And man it HURT. The RAM isn't anywhere near the most expensive part, but it somehow stings the most. I like to err on the high side with memory and have never regretted it. But, this 2025 build is going to have the same 32GB memory size as my 2018 build did, and the prices for the kits was very similar for both purchases.

I'm tempted to splurge and swap for a 64GB kit before I start building, but it might be cheaper and easier to just wait a year. Or honestly never. The added memory would probably only help with my video editing, and that's not a big part of my computer usage.

It sounds like you're the unicorn with a healthy WoW habit, lol!

But I totally get the feeling of being attached to it because of personal relationships that are WAY more important than doing the Right Thing when it comes to not sending money to a vendor that you don't think deserves it.

In many cases I don't think they are even intentionally tailgating. They just suck at driving and they're used to following way too close at all speeds.

It seems to me that the combination of AI + engagement stats + advertising rates is probably enabling historically massive fraud.

But if the perpetrators of the fraud are tech giants worth trillions, and the companies selling the ads are the same tech giants worth trillions, how are individuals and small companies supposed to make good decisions about their ad budgets or do anything about the fraud?

I'm not going to shed any tears for the advertising industry, but I'm not looking forward to the side effects if the AI bubble pops and vaporizes $10 trillion of tech market cap. (all the big players would still be worth a trillion dollars but people would lose their shit)

I'm pretty sure the leopards won't eat the faces of the DOGE employees. Musk said so on his personal website!

~/s~

I was just watching some informative stuff about jet engines the other day, so I appreciate what you're saying even more than I normally would, lol.

So a king but you can't say you're king in this country because of our countries historic animosity to kings.

I think it goes further than that. It takes the cultural tendency to pretend things are great while covering up issues (something that's especially strong with conservatives). Giving king/dictator an intelligent-sounding pseudoscientific name makes it very easy for their base to stop digging right there.

Look at Sweden over here punching above its weight class!

(going strictly by population size)

"I'm sure this is Constitutional," said no one ever.

It sure sounds a lot like something the president would say! Or, it would be something he'd mindlessly repeat to the cameras after Miller or whoever wormtongue'd it into his ear beforehand.