What’s the value-add over just buying a SFF PC?

There are a lot of ways I’d refer to her before “Former Langley MP candidate”.

That is brilliantly simple. Certainly better than using collector limpets.

An ironic Freudian slip coming from the Conservatives. I’m sure they’d just love to see MiGs and Sukhois over Ottawa, restoring the “traditional values” of homophobia and wife-beating.

That’s true, but what you describe is pretty much the end state of big-box retail. Amazon is essentially the same, if we exclude AWS. It’s all a race to the bottom. The solution, as always, is to buy direct from smaller producers if possible.

I dislike that you’ve put me in the position of defending Walmart, but don’t you find it rather misleading to imply that they made 163 billion dollars in profit when the real number is less than 10% of that?

Yes, but there are many more expenses associated with running their business beyond simply COGS. Their net income last year was 11B, which is pretty average for a company that size.

Not really — it’s because nearly everything they sell is highly fungible, and they compete on price. Nobody is willing to pay a premium to shop at Walmart. Twenty years ago you’d have been correct, but they’ve pretty much saturated the market at this point. They’re trying to find profitability in automation rather than adding tons of new stores.

Slim profit margins my ass. Walmarts gross profit for the twelve months ending July 31, 2024 was $163.786B,

Not to sound flippant, but do you know what gross profit means? They aren’t pocketing all of that. Walmart’s net profit margin is 2.66%, which is minuscule. They make up for that by having enormous volume.

What if I take a screenshot and make an NFT out of it?

This happened to me years ago (the .com of my full name). I kept checking in at expiry date for 3 years and they eventually let it expire, so I bought it back for normal price.

Don’t worry, we can fall back on our #1 driver of GDP… real estate!

I just tried this one in my band’s group chat and they told me to leave the dad jokes to them.

I’m not aware of the US selling their subs to anyone. They had a partial tech-sharing program with the UK a while back.

Why would the US not be happy about this? It takes us closer to our 2%, and guarding the Arctic is easily the most natural role for Canada to fill.

Very cool. Korea 's MIC is absolutely killing it lately. It’ll be interesting to see their role on the global stage once most countries have taken delivery (like Poland’s absurdly large order for tanks)

I expect any porn model trained on a sufficient diversity of adult actors could be used to make convincing CP even without having it in the training data.

I know I’m wading into the danger zone here, but let’s also remember we’re talking about teenagers. A (for example) 15 year old’s body type will be closer to an 18 year old’s than a 5 year old’s, so the perfectly legal porn model would work just fine for that, uh, purpose.

Whoa, meeting with manufacturers? We’re getting new subs, not somebody else’s obsolete garbage?

I don’t think the models are trained on CP. They’re likely trained on widely-available porn.

There’s a simple answer:

Yeah, but it’s still surprising. Most Trump diehards are pro-Russian. I almost have to respect Luckey for being driven by money above all else; at least this makes him a known quantity.

As for your other comment, I can’t even begin to imagine how that stands up logically. Russia could steamroll whoever they want if we weren’t armed.

I’m actually surprised he’s pro-Ukraine, given how much of a right-wing scumbag he is (Trump supporter and all)

Also, the whinging about weapons is unhelpful. Ukrainians can’t defend their country against Russian aggression with hopes and dreams.

These closing lines… FML

She described the coastal flooding simulation as “scary,” but also inevitable.

“It’s there. We have to deal with it. Climate change is a fact of life and those of us with properties on the water have to be sensitive to it,” Scales said.

“Would I buy another waterfront property? Probably not.”

If you need more than one domain there’s also a business plan that gives you 3 for less money than the top-tier individual plan.

Remember that this was YOUR family’s company. Family businesses writ large definitely don’t have a good reputation as far as their non-relative workers are concerned. At least with a megacorporation you can expect some guardrails that will limit their abuses.

Can’t wait for an AI toaster that asks me to prompt it on toastiness levels

For example you can’t adjust spacing between paragraphs at all. I think that’s because it’s unsupported in the SVG spec rather than an Inkscape issue, but still. Adding printer’s marks is also a total shitshow.

I will say however that Inkscape vs. Illustrator is the closest matchup of the three Adobe design apps. I like Inkscape and use it whenever I can to avoid firing up my Windows VM.

I couldn’t paint to save my life, so I didn’t know about that aspect. How does Krita stack up?

The only apps I’ve used that come even remotely close are those by Serif/Affinity, but even they don’t have feature parity. They were also just bought out by Canva and will likely become fully enshittified soon.

If you just want to crop and adjust levels, GIMP is fine. If you want to clone stamp or replace backgrounds etc (or of course work with motion graphics) then there’s no comparison. Nondestructive editing has been a huge drawback for GIMP since its inception but they are finally adding that, which is good. I’m not even sure if they’ve added CMYK support. Text editing is also godawful. I could go on, but for real work, it just isn’t the same at all.

People who say they are interchangeable is like saying an e-bike is the same as a pickup truck. If you just need to commute downtown, they can both work. But if you need to move a half ton of crushed stone, they are not comparable.

Time to switch to Linux 😁👍 (there are plenty of Adobe alternatives for it,

Unfortunately this is not really true. I think people who say “just use GIMP” have only ever used PS to open and crop images. Inkscape is also nowhere near Illustrator, and Scribus feels more like QuarkXpress circa 1998 than a viable InDesign replacement.

Careful, don’t cut yourself on all that edge.

Real royalty are constrained by a comprehensive legal framework. This nutcase is not. Quite the opposite, in fact — she is actively undermining the actual government.

You might have missed the news, Affinity sold out to Canva.

Oh FFS, I had no idea… Can something not be turned to shit by big tech for once?

I know what you mean — it’s like a 90s design paradigm that doesn’t take current conventions or best practices into account at all.

Yes and it does help tremendously, but I much prefer Krita. What I’d really like is Affinity Photo on Linux, even if it isn’t FOSS…

I think the UI and lack of non-destructive editing is holding it back more than the name, but IDK

Thanks for this - I was doing some reading in the meantime which confirms what you’re saying about power capacity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_electric_vehicle

As of 2010, the best ultracapacitors can only store about 5% of the energy that lithium-ion rechargeable batteries can, limiting them to a couple of miles per charge.

Yeah but I doubt that’s actually the case based on the physics involved. We need fast charging cars way more than fast charging phones.

Could you have a bunch of them and draw from them in sequence?

Never mind phones, what about cars?

Great read - the part about meeting Bowen was powerful.