There are valid uses for AI. It is much better at pattern recognition than people. Apply that to healthcare and it could be a paradigm shift in early diagnosis of conditions that doctors wouldn’t think to look for until more noticeable symptoms occur.
Since the economy/inflation are already on a rebound trajectory after the pandemic, he’ll likely have a better economy at the start of his presidency than Biden, which will be credited to Trump’s “day 1 dictator” policies.
If the economy declines further in the latter half of his presidency, once all of the tariffs are more widely felt and income inequality continues to worsen, that decline will be attributed to a probable loss of the Republicans’ Senate or House majorities (or both) come 2026.
And if you read that and come to the realization “Don’t you mean in 2027, when the newly-elected folks actually begin their terms?” Just consider how much of the US’ poorly-planned pandemic response in 2020 was attributed to Biden…before he took office in 2021.
I don’t think Europe has much conviction regarding Ukraine, unfortunately. Most of the larger EU member states are trying to slow their own Russia-backed right-wing movements but appear to be losing ground by the day. It’s only a matter of time before the “appeasement” stance becomes widespread and we end up with a situation mirroring the 1930’s.
Conservative religious beliefs and ignorance often go hand-in-hand.
Until they change the name and voice and have a whole fleet of elderly AI chatbots.
Microsoft had a lineup of games this year?
Depends on how one frames it. It’s not the Stallman-defined “GNU+Linux” pureblood OS, but it nevertheless is built from a modified version of the Linux kernel.
And like any OS it can be made private and secure with the right components…or it can be cracked open like a data-farming egg without them.
I guess I can just take the low-hanging fruit and invoke Ubuntu as an alternative example, which was once something of a Linux entry point but has become more than fine collecting user data.
Ironically a Linux-derived OS.
It’s always good practice to be careful who you trust with your data. Open =/= private. More choices helps, though.
TSMC hates this one easy trick!
I realized this idea long, long ago, when Rare made Banjo-Tooie.
Banjo-Kazooie was a fun game. You unlock worlds, go to the world, collect 100% of all there is to collect, then continue.
Banjo-Tooie, its sequel, wanted to be bigger and better in every way. Sprawling open world hub, much larger worlds with more sub-zones, interconnectivity between worlds, more things to unlock, more things to do, etc. etc.
And I think, despite having so much more, it was a worse game for it. You go to a new world but find there’s a lot you can’t do yet because you didn’t unlock an ability that comes later on. You push a button in one world and then something happens in another, but now you have to backtrack through the sprawling overworld and large world maps to get there.
And this was just a pair of games made for the Nintendo 64, before the concept of “open world” had really even taken off.
But it demonstrated to me that bigger was not always better, and having more to do did not make it a better game if it wasn’t as enjoyable.
Early open world games were fairly small, and the natural desire for people who have seen everything becomes “I wish there was more,” but in practice it ends up typically being that they take the same amount of stuff and divide it up over a larger area, or they fill the world with tedium just for the sake of having something to do.
When looking at the collectibles and activities on a world map like Genshin Impact, it’s basically sensory overload with how much there is to do.
But almost all of that is garbage. And this is just a fraction of one region among several. Go here, do this time trial, shoot these balloons, follow this spirit, solve this logic puzzle, and then loot your pittance of gatcha currency so you can try to win your next waifu or husbando before time runs out.
And don’t forget to do your dailies!
If a game has a large world, it needs to act in service to its design. It needs to be fun to exist in and travel through, not tedious. It needs to have enough stuff to do that keep it from feeling empty, but not so much stuff that it makes it hard to find anything worthwhile. And it needs to give enough ability for the player to make their own fun, to act as the balance on that tightrope walk between not-enough and too-much.
Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom are the most recent games that seemed to properly scratch an open world itch for me. While they weren’t perfect, the way they managed to really incorporate the open world as its own sort of puzzle to solve, in ways that Genshin Impact failed to properly emulate, made them more enjoyable as an open world than most other games in that genre I’ve played in recent memory.
But then those sorts of countries usually have law enforcement that likes taking large amounts of “financial incentives” to do whatever a company like Nintendo wants them to do.
I’m skeptical she would have done anything differently than Biden in terms of Gaza.
Likewise, but I also think there is a reason why we are seeing Israeli politicians talking about potentially annexing North Gaza and the West Bank now, after the election, and not 6 months ago.
Despite the multiple “lines in the sand” that have been crossed, I feel like Harris and Biden still had a breaking point with Israel, and maybe that breaking point could be moved closer to reason with continued pressure. I don’t know, I hate working in maybes.
But there aren’t even any maybes with Trump. He simply couldn’t care less what Netanyahu wants to do. Had he not been elected, and had Israel felt their ongoing support was a bit more conditional, I’m not sure we’d have these same sorts of plans being made by them. At least not so overtly
Taking a look at their website, I don’t think so (thankfully).
It’s an all-boys center based on how it’s described, but it doesn’t seem to make any mention of conversion therapy in explicit terms, nor does it imply that it is a type of program they offer. It doesn’t seem to display any overt religious messaging, either.
I see that they are also accredited by the Joint Commission, which is more reassuring on that front. Not to say there might not be some hidden skeletons they keep from the accreditors, or that they don’t have rogue staff who might try to push their own agenda anyways, but it means there are industry standards they are following well enough to pass accreditation, which most conversion camps would not even put in the effort to attempt.
Given that it’s a mental health facility for troubled teens, I’d guess this was most likely a tragic but otherwise unsuspicious suicide.
Well…you’re not wrong.
It’s the specialized tools you’ll also need to do all of that that’ll get you, though.
Just build one, cheaper to boot.
In a world that is controlled almost entirely by heteronormativity, policing straight representation in a queer-friendly game made by a queer developer does not seem like an equivalent situation at all.
For just a bit more context. NYC currently requires that all new buildings must incorporate bird-safe glass, but has not made any moves to address what should happen with all of the existing buildings.
Birds see reflections of the sky or plants, or maybe they see someone’s plants inside through the glass, and they think the window is somewhere they can fly through or land on and end up smacking into it at full speed. The bird safe glass adds patterns to windows which are visible to birds and lets them know it’s not something they can fly through, though it isn’t a perfect solution.
Tragically, even when they may be stunned at first and fly away shortly after, most birds that hit windows will still later die of their injuries.
Fat, sugar, and salt are also “nutritious,” insomuch as they are components needed for survival. Too nutritious is probably a better way of looking at it. It’s a meaningless buzzword.
Nestle, PepsiCo, Unilever, and maybe others (they used the term “including”)
Nestle was the only company to comment, saying how they planned to increase their sales of more nutritious food. Always gonna spin it to fit whatever narrative they want to sell to their consumers and shareholders.
Tough question.
I do doubt that the US would allow a foreign entity to buy it given the volume of domestic infrastructure/organizations that are reliant on Chrome. It would carry an inherent national security risk, as hypocritical as that is for the US to say.
The other problem for an independent Chrome company is that Chromium itself is an unprofitable FOSS project, and Chrome only derives value from integration with Google services (as Edge does with its Windows integration).
It’s not impossible, looking at Mozilla. But it would mean Chrome would have to become a very different kind of browser.
The Edge relationship also makes things interesting, as presumably without continued investment from Google, Microsoft would end up becoming the primary maintainers of the Chromium project.