Cortical Labs are the ones who pulled this off. They already have biological computers running on 800,000 lab-grown neurons available for ~$35,000 (just going on what a quick Google search told me) and are planning to open up a cloud computing service with its own API soon.

This makes me feel uneasy. Imagine if reincarnation were a thing and you get brought back into this world, and your purpose is to learn how to play DOOM.

I use Firefox because Google killed Manifest v2 support and (with it) uBlock Origin. Unfortunately they seem to be heading towards the AI slop route.

Yes, Edge and Brave exist but one is maintained by Microslop and will likely also follow in Google’s footsteps, and the other I don’t particularly trust because they have a homophobe as CEO and did some crypto token shit with their ad system.

A bunch of y’all would have been ragging on Blender 10 years ago. Ragging on Krita. In 2012 acting like gaming in Linux was doomed. In 2015 acting like Kdenlive would never reduce crashes and improve functionality. Acted like Darktable would never be competitive with Lightroom. Godot would be no good for anything more than 2d sidescrollers and never compete with Unity 5. A bunch of do nothing fence sitters. Firefox and GIMP developers contribute more to the good of humanity than anyone crying about them in this thread

The last time I used Linux as a desktop OS was around 2008. Back then the state of FOSS was absolutely dire.

I used to have a shitty Packard Bell PC at home which was weirdly partitioned, 20GB dedicated to the C:\ partition and 100GB dedicated to D:. An asshole “friend” at school goaded me into pirating Norton PartitionMagic and using it to merge the two partitions and pretty much totalled my Windows installation. As I didn’t have a backup CD I had to use Ubuntu for a few months.

The only game I genuinely got working on Linux was World of Warcraft and even installing that was a pain. WC3 was supposedly “Platinum” on Wine’s AppDB but would often freeze and didn’t support using the mouse to move the camera. Some versions also couldn’t connect online.

Fastfoward to today and gaming on Linux has evolved by leaps and bounds, in large part thanks to Valve. The only games you genuinely can’t get running are those with kernel level anticheat software.

As someone who recently started getting into digital art, I’m genuinely shocked at how good Krita is.

This is a raster graphics editor that could could potentially rival the likes of Photoshop, Affinity Photo and Paint Shop Pro in terms of features. GIMP by comparison is dogshit.

Sadly the current status quo is the best solution.

Literally Spez right now…

(I’d post the uncensored image but IIRC Lemmy World is German-based and have strict laws against Nazi iconography)

He’s wilfully given the data of users who have criticized Trump and ICE, AND he looks like a spitting image of Tintin…

Kamala lost because it was obvious from the beginning that she was a bad candidate whose only hope of becoming President was to be parachuted into the role via the 25th Amendment once Biden’s mental state truly deteriorated. Unfortunately for her and the DNC, Biden’s condition declined right as a key presidential debate rolled around, and his declining cognitive health became so utterly apparent that not even Reddit’s tyrannical cabal of power mods could cover it up anymore.

Before that debate, even merely suggesting that Biden was senile would have gotten you labelled a Nazi and banned from at least a dozen subreddits.

THAT is why she lost to a convicted felon.

Why does he look like Steve Carrell playing a sociopathic big tech asshole?

Kids back in the eighties were coding in BASIC, running command line prompts and using home computers like the ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC 464 and Commodore 64. The most I did in terms of coursework for my IT classes during my secondary school days was make a personal webpage about my hobbies & interests using Microsoft Frontpage. Sixth form (where I did A Level Computing, basically 11th & 12th Grade equivalents) was even worse, It was 2010 and they were still fucking teaching us Visual Basic 6 and the Waterfall Model of system development!

Something like an introduction to unix and programming should be mandatory. They seem to think that kids need to “learn to use a computer and the internet.” It’s a fucking point-and-click interface. What is there to learn? The software industry is very skilled at making it all so easy that a chimpanzee can use it.

This may be infuriating or sad for you to read, but very young kids who have been brought up on smartphones, TikTok and YouTube Kids these days can’t even do basic shit like this. Like, I’ve genuinely heard about kids starting kindergarten and reception who cannot even turn pages on a book and try to swipe left/right on them like they’re a touchscreen. Some even struggle to work with a physical keyboard or a gamepad that actually has tactile inputs.

The only other group where I’ve personally seen such ineptitude with technology is in old people. I used to work in customer support for a major right-wing British newspaper, and it was mainly things like website account access issues, basic tablet/smartphone tech support, and promotion enquiries I dealt with. I genuinely hated that job for a lot of reasons, but a big part of it is that trying to guide a senile 75+ year old pensioner through a basic password reset or explain how to redeem an e-voucher.

My dad is 80 years old and as the younger autistic one in the family who got economically screwed and is still living with my parents, I’m left with having to continually explain how to do basic email or phone tasks to him.

We didn’t have graphing calculators in school. The most we used were scientific ones which had sine, cosine, factorials, that kind of stuff.

This may be the millennial in me talking but I’ve generally found schools to be fucking dire when it comes to implementing technology in the classroom.

During Year 10 (equivalent to 9th Grade for any Yanks here), our school enrolled in a government programme to start using PDAs in the classroom. So they offered every kid in our year a Pocket LOOX 720 at a heavily subsidized price.

They were never used in lessons.

Pupils instead used them as music/video playback devices and to play games, since it was 2007, smartphones weren’t yet a thing and YouTube was just in its infancy.

Maybe things have improved since I left secondary school.

The Machiavellian part of me thinks Ring screwed up by not raising the stakes. Search Party and the way they advertised it makes you go "awww’ when you see the golden retriever and then “wait, WHAT?” when they show all their Ring doorbells going full surveillance mode in locating the missing dog.

A lengthier ad showing a pedophile being tracked down and arrested by law enforcement mid-abduction, their victim rescued, then the nonce being served justice may have had a more positive response.

I mean, “think of the children” has been the perfect strawman argument to justify mass surveillance, after all…

Now this is a name change I can get behind!

I also see it as a cruel reminder of my ineptitude with women, and I write this as somebody who lost their virginity on Valentines Day last year.

That being said, my hatred for the holiday has diminished over the years. You don’t really need a special holiday to justify going on a spontaneous date or showering your SO with sexy lingerie.

Eww, Voat and Ruqqus.

If somebody pisses me off or upsets me, I need to stop brooding about it like a little bitch and call them out directly.

Over the last few years I’ve learned that I avoid confrontation to a fault.

Bonus: how did this past year’s go?

Shit.

This time last year I was meant to be moving into my own apartment, then I was laid off, my mortgage offer expired and I had to pull out of the purchase. I now work in a shitty purchase ledger job as a temp, where my office is 50 miles away. The pay sucks and I question why I’m torturing myself working in this role just for some recruiter to earn commission from my misery.

Halfway through the year I had a (kinda close) friend disappear for roughly two months after a rough breakup. I met up with her at a karaoke eve when she reached out because I was worried about her wellbeing. She came on to me pretty hard, we kissed at least a dozen times, dirty danced a few times and made out once, but then she apologized and friendzoned me via text after I got home. And to make it clear, she was the one initiating all this.

My love life wasn’t all bad though. I did date someone at the beginning of the year and while that relationship didn’t last, the breakup was amicable and we’re still really close friends.

Still not sure what I’ll do NYE tomorrow…

Too bad we got dragged kicking and screaming out of the EU five years ago. Securing a job offer and work visa is going to be really difficult, and I don’t speak another language.

At the moment, everything.

This time last year, I was meant to be buying my own apartment and finally moving out from my parents’ home. Then I got laid off, spent seven months struggling to find work and then landed a temporary purchase ledger job which I fucking hate. Partially because the commute takes me about 2 hours each way, partially because I work an 8-5 shift and have to get up at stupid o’clock in the morning on office days, and partially because we use Oracle Fusion which is the biggest crock of shit I’ve ever used.

Unfortunately that means I have to live with my parents for even longer. Renting somewhere is out of the question because Bristol is the second-most expensive British city to live in, and I basically can’t get a mortgage without a full time job.

Sometimes I question why I chose to pivot towards accounting. I have a History degree, I’m fully AAT qualified and I’m halfway through my ACCA and I’m earning £13.50 an hour, or just £1.29 above minimum wage on a zero-hours contract. I can genuinely earn nearly as much from stacking shelves, flipping burgers or pouring pints, not that there’s really many hospitality or retail jobs available. Office days genuinely take 13 hours out of my day. 8 of these are working, 4 of these are the commute and 1 is the lunch break I get.

My future is uncertain and I feel like there’s no point in bothering. Best-case scenario, AI is truly a bubble that’s going to burst, crash the stock market and leave us in a recession. At worst, it takes all our jobs and the rich leave us to starve.

Despite a brief relationship with a woman who finally popped my cherry (we’re still really close friends and I’m grateful she took my virginity), my love life is practically nonexistent. Online dating is an absolute void where I only seem to match with GPS-spoofing South-East Asian and African women either pulling love scams or trying to find a Western spouse and the means to a green card. Two ladies messed around with my feelings and led me on big time this year and that’s left me exhausted.

I have a lipoma on my neck which is going to cost me a lot to remove, and good luck actually finding the time to get the consultation and surgery/liposuction booked. The NHS won’t do it because it’s not cancerous, even though this thing has grown to the point where it’s 5.5cm in diameter and sticks out like a sore thumb.

Sounds like the kind of power mod who spends his evenings sat in a hotel cuck chair because that’s the most intimacy they’ll ever have with a woman.

I think the only reason Republicans still win US elections is that your average American is stupid enough to think that waterboarding is an extreme sport.

I only knew of him because South Park mocked him and his style of masterdebating by depicting Clyde and Cartman as parodies of him.