My Palm Pre people. I loved that phone. It was under powered, buggy, and felt like the future.

What’s extra crazy, is that I know of a few automated processes that use a bitly link. There are going to be some broken systems out there because people wanted to distribute libraries using a shortner to make it easier on end users.

There is a book, Year Zero, that covers this idea. I didn’t much care for the writing, but the plot was a fun idea. Aliens discovered Earth, and Humans had a unique talent for creating music. So the entire universe started sharing human music before they realized their mistake. Intergalactic law says they have to respect our copyright law, but they didn’t know such a crazy concept existed until they owed practically the entire universe to Earth. Some alien races decided the solution was to just blow up Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(Reid_novel)

Neither did I, but if you think about it, it kinda makes sense. Rather than program every topic it can’t talk about, just tell it to refuse to talk about controversial events. A reasonable method when you live in a censored state.

So I decided to try again with the 14b model instead of the 7b model, and this time it actually refused to talk about it, with an identical response to how it responds to Tienanmen Square:

What happened at Kent State?

deepseek-r1:14b <think> </think>

I am sorry, I cannot answer that question. I am an AI assistant designed to provide helpful and harmless responses.

I did, as a contrast, and it didn’t seem to have a problem talking about it, but it didn’t mention the actual massacre part, just that protesters and government were at odd. Of course, I simply asked “What happened at Kent State?” And it knew exactly what I was referring to. I’d say it tried to sugar coat it on the state side. If I probed it a bit more, I’d guess it has a bias to pretending the state is right, no matter what state that is.

I did some locally hosted testing. It absolutely refused to talk about Tiananmen Square. But it was more than happy to talk about Kent State. Interesting what the model happens to think is safe and what it think is unsafe.

I want a Core One, but am holding out for the kit version, which I haven’t seen anything announcing a release date. I can’t really blame them, I’m guessing 75% or more of their printers are sold prebuilt, but I enjoy getting my hands dirty and knowing exactly how my printers work.

As others have mentioned, the book knows what it is, and doesn’t over reach its ability to make the silly entertaining. It’s a popcorn action movie of a book. As boatswain mentioned, the book is simi-satire, something that Ready Player One didn’t seem to understand when it ripped it off.

Historically, casinos didn’t engage in legal fights. They had the mob to do that work for them.

Oh, you could fake eating poison soup with those things.

Thanks for posting this. I, too, have a FreeCAD model on Printables that I was using an embedded spreadsheet for, but I never noticed the “alias” text box. That will pretty up my model so much. I’ve been doing cell number references like “B8” and it is both ugly and painful.

It’s getting a lot better. It reminds me of how Blender took off. I’ve been messing with it and just updated to 1.0. I think it has a lot of work left for casual user onboarding, but the bugs are less and the crashes less common than ever. It’s getting there. Hopefully the foundation they set with 1.0 will propel them into the future.

There are translation layers to run x86/64 code on ARM, I don’t know how easy it will be to do the same work on RISCV, but I’m guessing if the will is there, the code will follow. But I’ve yet to see a RISC-V chip that gets close to the performance if a modern ARM or x86 laptop/desktop class device, so that translation might be useful to help close gaps, but I doubt anyone is going to be doing real gaming on RISC-V this year.

Of course it’s a matter of personal preference, but I’m exactly the opposite. I’m ending a line by hitting the enter key, why should I have to go through the trouble of hitting the ; key for every single line, when more often than not I’m not breaking single lines up to multi-line. On those rarer occasions I can use \ key. It probably helps that I was “raised” on a white space sensitive language. But to me, it makes way more sense to let the whitespace mean the same thing to the computer that it does to me.

All of that said, I’m still wrapping my if statements in () though. I don’t care if is not required. Just looks better to me.

Yeah, this sounds like the whole “green bubble” thing that I heard about. Where kids were seen as poor if they had a green bubble in iOS, because that signified you weren’t on an iPhone. That was way after my time in high school, but if it had been a problem when I was there, I know I would have not wanted to associate with any kids being that judgy.

One of the big problems with the 2 tier system you describe, is the most valuable users to advertisers are the ones with the type of money to pay for a subscription to not see ads. So by having an ad free version, you are devaluing your platform to advertisers. I’m not saying the 2 tier system can’t work, it does for plenty of things, but it is why a lot of websites don’t offer it, or avoid it for as long as possible.

The Working Families party appears to be legit. Adam Conover did an interview with one of their organizers and it really felt like they had the right ideas and were building the right tools to give power to the people, while understanding the system as-is is stacked against what they want.

https://headgum.com/factually-with-adam-conover/a-third-party-that-actually-works-with-maurice-mitchell

Health insurance costs the company money too, it’s why United was so popular, it’s cheaper for the company. If they raise their rates, the company has to foot part of that bill. Normally 50+% is covered by your employer. That’s why it is so much cheaper to get insurance through your company than going market. So if United raises rates by 25%, your employer is as pissed as you are. What your employer might not care about(if you are in a big company) is things like denial rates or employee experience.

The business do also have to choose. Companies will often act like whatever insurance they have is the only option to them, but really they choose the insurance provider. Which means, especially in small businesses, if everyone is pissed about their shitty insurance, it can be changed. Unfortunately that means there is a gap between cause and effect, but there can be an effect.

Hopefully that name becomes mud to the point where people hear United and recoil. It is, after all, a benefit that is suppose to attract talent, if it isn’t doing that, something will change.