One… glances to the side hundred… more furtive glances billion… number two giving thumbs up and nodding dollars!

To take this in a different direction, legal or not (considering the “higher power” generally gets to define what is and isn’t legal and might do so for its own benefit rather than in the best interest of everyone, if there even is such a thing), how can it be determined if a subset of a power structure breaking away from that power structure is a good thing or bad thing? What arguments other than “we’ll use force” are there to support a region needing to remain under the thumb of a power they no longer wish to serve?

War in Iran isn’t exactly defense. Deliberations should include the offense secretary.

I like that on Linux I can install the updates and know that the ones that require a restart will just be ready the next time I restart at my leisure. And if I don’t feel like restarting right away, it won’t nag me about it and maybe just restart on its own if it decides I’ve put it off for too long.

And I can’t believe my previous “solution” to that was to give ms even more money for win 10 pro (to get access to the paywalled settings) only to still feel like ms thought it was their computer that they allowed me to use.

Lots of good advice in here for the basics. Only one I’ll bother repeating is to get used to your clutch by slowly releasing it and getting the car moving without touching the throttle at all.

Also never downshift into first. This is a bit of a soft rule since it can be done, but the speed you need to lose before you do is a lot more than any of the other gears. If it’s a 6 speed, this might even apply to 2nd gear to a degree. To figure out when it’s safe to downshift to first, redline it in first and check your speed. Never do it at or above that speed as a hard rule.

For intermediate techniques:

When shifting while moving, let off the gas a bit before pressing the clutch. The idea is to smoothly stop accelerating to reduce the jerk you’d normally get from going from accelerating, clutch (decellerating), back to accelerating once in the next gear. Your passengers will appreciate it if you can get this timing down, though if you’re on your own, it doesn’t matter as much since you can anticipate the changes in acceleration.

On the opposite end of that spectrum, practice speed shifting once you’re comfortable with clutch timing and gear positions. It’s the same motions as a normal shift, just aiming to do it all as fast as possible. It’ll give you better acceleration when you need it (very noticeable if you compare one and the other when accelerating beside another car from a stop light).

For stop and go traffic and traffic jams, instead of maintaining the same distance from the car ahead of you, try to figure out a constant speed you can maintain and let the cars ahead of you do the pull up (away from you) and then brake to a stop (while you slowly catch up to them). If you can find the right speed, you can stay in first gear instead of needing to get in gear, move up, then clutch. The “getting the car moving without throttle” skill from earlier can help here and sometimes you can go a while in a jam without touching the gas pedal. It’ll reduce the wear on your clutch and brakes if you can drive in a way that uses them less.

And an advanced technique:

Clutchless shifting. If there isn’t a lot of force on the gear, you can pop it into neutral without the clutch quite easily. And by force I mean if you aren’t accelerating or engine breaking. Getting into another gear is harder but also possible. The hard part is that you need to match the engine speed with the transmission speed for the gear you want to shift into. If they match, it’ll just slip in. But matching is easier said than done, since the car is decelerating and the engine also changes speed very quickly with no load. If the speeds are far from a match, it will feel like the gear just isn’t there. If they are kinda close, you’ll be able to find the gear but it will grind when you try to put it in all the way. If they match closely, it’ll just slip in as easily as it slipped out to neutral.

Why would you want to know how to do this? Well, for one, it’s very satisfying to do properly. But I was very glad I could do it when my clutch died. I was able to drive for another week without a clutch because I was competent enough with clutchless shifting. Note that if you need to do this, you have to turn your motor off when you stop (unless you’re on a downward slope), put it in first and start it in first gear to get moving again (which feels awful and is awful for your starter and probably not great for the whole drivetrain, so get it serviced asap but this might at least save you from needing a tow).

I think standing near the red things in the middle of the reflection. Look at the size of the forklift in the reflection for reference.

They want something like the Star Trek computer or one of Tony Stark’s AIs that were basically deus ex machinas for solving some hard problem behind the scenes. Then it can say “model solved” or they can show a test simulation where the ship doesn’t explode (or sometimes a test where it only has an 85% chance of exploding when it used to be 100%, at which point human intuition comes in and saves the day by suddenly being better than the AI again and threads that 15% needle or maybe abducts the captain to go have lizard babies with).

AIs that are smarter than us but for some reason don’t replace or even really join us (Vision being an exception to the 2nd, and Ultron trying to be an exception to the 1st).

Is there a good argument for why any society not in collapse should submit to any “higher” authority?

That one is particularly rage inducing if it’s the one I’m thinking of (I think ep 1 of the new season?).

Some of the others in the new season aren’t so depressing or rage inducing, though.

Mostly loadwords from dwarvish.

Pelt, melt, Celt, belt, felt (the material), dealt, velt, welt, yelt.

Some of those are past tense verbs, some are me just making the sound and finding real words, one I’m not sure is a word but doesn’t sound wrong, so I hereby declare it to be a word henceforth, if it wasn’t already.

My first seagate HD started clicking as I was moving data to it from my older drive just after I purchased it. This was way back in the 00s. In a panic, I started moving data back to my older hd (because I was moving jnstead of copying) and then THAT one started having issues also.

Turns out when I overclocked my CPU I had forgotten to lock the PCI bus, which resulted in an effective overclock of the HDD interfaces. It was ok until I tried moving mass amounts of data and the HDD tried to keep up instead of letting the buffer fill up and making the OS wait.

I reversed the OC and despite the HDDs getting so close to failure, both of them lasted for years after that without further issue.

Yeah, “I’m busy” isn’t your roommate’s problem.

When things are going well, billionaires make lots of money but people who are comfortable pick and choose what they are willing to sell. They have income so want to hold on to their assets while they pay their expenses using that income. They can also commit to financial obligations while being confident their income will cover it.

When things aren’t going so well, income can fall and force people to sell assets to cover their expenses. And those financial obligations can end up underwater, forcing them to give up assets.

At the end of the day, wealth isn’t money. That’s just the vehicle used to access wealth. Real wealth is things like property ownership, means of production, the resources to feed that production, food and fuel to keep it all going, weapons to protect yours and attack others’, followers to do your bidding (that generally need to be paid in access to the others).

If it’s a topic that has been heavily discussed on the internet or in literature, LLMs can have good conversations about it. Take it all with a grain of salt because it will regurgitate common bad arguments as well as good ones, but if you challenge it, you can get it to argue against its own previous statements.

It doesn’t handle things that are in flux very well. Or things that require very specific consistency. It’s a probabilistic model where it looks at existing tokens and predicts what the next one is most likely to be, so questions about specific versions of something might result in a response specific to that version or it might end up weighing other tokens more than the version or maybe even start treating it all like pseudocode, where descriptive language plays a bigger role than what specifically exists.

Or with cosmic rays, not sure anything would be opaque.

I’m one of the lucky ones with an 8086 that clearly saw the downgrade to 186.

AMD only just recently passed that with their 9000 series CPUs and Intel has only had better ones for a bit longer.

I hope they aren’t the hackers known as 4chan!

A big historic example of this was back in the middle ages, when people didn’t have any idea about how to determine true from false when there were two conflicting views, they’d do a trial by combat because if you were right, how could you lose a fight specifically meant to determine if you were right?

Though exceptionalism does come into play because those who believe it about others seem to think something different is going on when they are the ones suffering. Like maybe it’s a test rather than a punishment, or there’s some complex plan that involves a period of suffering or something like that rather than just accepting that sometimes life isn’t fair.

Society should be all about trying to offset that unfairness, especially in areas like food, housing, healthcare, and (some) things typically covered by insurance.

I’m just saying that’s how I interpreted that bit. They thought it was a false positive because of that. For all I know, the earlier ones might have also been real malware or maybe it was all made up.