Explicit types are just laziness, you should be catching exceptions anyways.

A while ago I read the book Swarmwise by Rick Falkvinge about the process of starting a political movement in Sweden, and some aspects of how their democracy works seemed comparatively impressive to me, and better capable of genuine representation because the barriers to getting started are not so insurmountable. Still, I’m not convinced overall of the narrative of changes to the structure of government being generally positive. You used a technology metaphor, but it’s been a clear trend for tech platforms to actually become worse over time in terms of user agency, privacy and exploitation, something that to me seems mirrored in government. A lot of what people see as solutions to problems take the form of an increase in centralized control and a weakening of barriers to that control, and I see those barriers as the ideological core of how the US was originally designed to work. A specific law might be shown to have positive results in itself, but be achieved by an unsafe concentrating of power. In particular, I think the way the executive branch has been expanding over the last century is very concerning especially with stuff like the Patriot Act and everything associated with it.

Basically, especially right now it’s clear that a lot of the people in power are malevolently insane, incompetent and demented, and it’s really important that we maintain and improve protections to keep them from doing too much damage, so I am skeptical about ideas for major reform especially when the idea is to take the shortest path to policy goals.

Can you give any specific examples

The police believe that the motive behind this hacking was to reduce network-related costs, as torrent transfers can be costly for internet service providers. KT, however, claims that it was merely trying to manage traffic on its network to ensure a smooth user experience.

Sounds like they admit it but object to the negative tone lol

So the metaphor here is lewd the AI, got it

Total water absorption doesn’t matter that much because the significant thing is surface texture. If you’re going to dry them anyway you might as well instead wash them without directly pouring water on them.

This assumes you’re going to fry them. If you want raw mushrooms in a salad, it’s going to be a lot more noticeable.

Running mushrooms under water makes them soggy, that’s just reality. You can get them just as clean wiping them with a slightly damp paper towel or cloth without that happening.

Microsoft hasn’t detailed ESU pricing for consumers yet, but the company did previously reveal it will offer these extended updates to consumers for the first time ever

They’re actually gonna make us pirate security updates huh

If there are two or more cell towers within range of the phone and they have access to those towers they can triangulate the location of the phone already.

Yes but only if it’s actually secure and safe ie. fully open source

No, I mean, I’m saying I doubt they even really need the trucks, except maybe as an explanation of how they got the data legally.

I don’t buy that they don’t have direct access to the cell towers themselves

Was this “Unmoderated” in the sense of the classic Reddit move of first banning the moderators so they can ban the sub without saying why?

They poked fun at themselves for it in the article so probably it was a flub

a question that inelegantly ignores the elephant in the room

I think framing this as “refusing” to use AI is kind of weird. They believe in doing things the traditional way, great, I think games that use all hand-drawn nondigital art are also cool for going against the grain like that, and making a point of supporting artists is laudable, but it isn’t like anyone is trying to force them not to.

One unified interface I’ve been enjoying is Stability Matrix, which lets you conveniently switch between different image generation frontends without having duplicates of the model files.

Text generation: LM Studio seems the most user friendly IMO

Voice transcription: I’ve been using AllTalk TTS, was a little frustrating to set up but works

you can’t withdraw it from their ecosystem

They changed that a while ago

So, you’re saying that if I use Coinbase, I could withdraw the keys and have full custody over it after I buy it? Then where’s the custodial catch that I always hear about with Coinbase?

Yes. Idk what specific criticisms you’re referring to but probably just related to how it is a centralized exchange, which does have some genuine drawbacks like reduced privacy, for instance they don’t sell Monero or other privacy coins. The reason I also mentioned Kraken is that it is the only fiat gateway exchange that does sell Monero, with other ones if you want to be private you would have to first buy some non-private crypto, then send to a crypto to crypto exchange to buy a privacy coin and go from there. Also there are a lot of people that just buy crypto on Coinbase and never withdraw it, so for them it’s custodial all the way.

If you are comfortable with PayPal you can buy crypto from them afaik, though I am fairly sure you will have to provide additional KYC info than name and credit card, most of the cryptocurrency community obviously hates KYC and there would absolutely be centralized non-KYC options for buying crypto if it wasn’t blatantly illegal to offer that.

isn’t Coinbase custodial? I will not use custodial exchanges

That’s totally fair but consider that if your intention is to purchase crypto and immediately withdraw it to a personal wallet, there are zero practical drawbacks to an exchange being custodial because they are only holding your crypto in custody for the brief period of time between when you click the buy button and when you click the withdraw button. A DEX with escrow is going to be less custodial than that, but I would call it still a little bit custodial, since even if the escrow person doesn’t have the option to take your crypto for themselves they could still potentially collude with the seller and send it back to them, which means there is a brief window when the crypto you have purchased is not truly under your personal control. You can have a crypto to crypto dex be perfectly non-custodial (ie. Uniswap), but you can’t have a fiat to crypto exchange be perfectly non-custodial.

The reason they need it is because of the law making it illegal for them not to collect it, though that doesn’t make it any less of a barrier that they have no choice. I would say at this point Coinbase and Kraken are at least as reputable as something like PayPal/Venmo (which I think you can actually also buy crypto from); iirc Coinbase is a publicly traded corporation, has various licenses with governments to operate, is handling custody for major financial institutions now that some crypto ETFs have been approved, it’s not like the early days of crypto where even the biggest exchanges had little real claim to legitimacy.

As for difficulty of using DEX for non KYC trades, I have heard a lot of anecdotes about that confirming your experience that it does not work well. However I would keep an eye on it, there’s significant recent changes with the shutdown of LocalMonero, the launch of Haveno, progress in the development of atomic swaps. I expect that it’s going to improve significantly in usability for the average person, so long as there aren’t major efforts by governments to criminalize it.