The point of a gift isn’t its material worth.

When I’m picking out a gift for someone I specifically try to pick something that I think they will like and use but is also reflective of my own personal quirks. I’m a bit more tech and DIY inclined then most of my family (clearly, I’m on Lemmy) so most gifts from me tend to be tools or computer related or electronics. Sometimes that’s a miss, sometimes it’s a home run and I get them a gift that never would’ve occurred to them on their own, but they end up using regularly.

The goal is something that fits into their lives while also carrying an element of me that using the gift will remind them of. It’s personal, it’s meaningful, and it exhibits a degree of thoughtfulness that makes the gift special.

All that said… I’d never turn up my nose at a gift card. I’ve received many, I’ve given several. Sometimes you’re just not sure. Sometimes a person has everything you’d think of wanting to give them. Sometimes you just don’t have the time. Sometimes the entire gift-giving ritual is just too much to deal with.

That’s perfectly fine. I will never begrudge someone for choosing a simpler path at a time that’s already fraught with expectation and other assorted stress.

This definitely varies by person. I never found it bad at all to take that first breath, and even found myself with the opposite problem. Once I was used to SCUBA I had to remind myself not to breathe while swimming without gear.

Additional “fun” fact about lung over-expansion. The pressure difference necessary for it to happen is startlingly small if you, for some insane reason, completely fill your lungs. You can do damage rising single digit numbers of feet.

I mean, sure, if the writers wanted to put the chip in something else they could write different lore about what it does, granted. In the same spirit of “How do you kill a vampire? However you want.”

The chip specifically interacts with human brains on a biological level. It’s not a “normal” AI.

I don’t think they could. The chip isn’t a normal program that any old computer can run.

It was used to kill the bees.

They’re all paying each other. That’s literally the point this image is trying to express.

What’s especially insane is that the companies that are actually providing the service to end users, i.e. Coreweave et al, are not the ones seeing massively inflated prices, contrary to your point about the monthly fees justifying the higher evaluation.

This isn’t probing though. Probing would be like… mentioning some anime that featured fan service of questionably aged characters and gauging the response.

This is just straight up announcing yourself.

I would be ashamed of myself and be tempted to leave the industry in disgrace if setting up DDNS and allowing a single port through a firewall took me 45 minutes.

Same. I use it very occasionally for parenthetical phrases because I just think it’s the most appealing way to do so.

Reddit had no monetary cost.

It’s much easier to stick to a boycott when it requires a layer of active acceptance and payment to acquiesce.

Reddit is just… there. A query on basically any search engine is going to serve you up reddit links, and clicking one of them costs you nothing.* Since you don’t have to commit to the decision there’s far less resistance to backsliding.

*Yes, I know, there is a privacy and personal content/traffic cost. We both know that’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m sorry, did you just “no actually” someone who was espousing books as disconnected entertainment?

VAC bans are manually reviewed and supposedly get reversed when they are false positives.

That’s not a complaint specific to discord though. You just don’t like large chatrooms.

Encryption and hashing are different things. You can’t get the original back out of a secure hash. They’re used only to confirm that whatever piece of data you have now matches the one that was provided originally, because they produce the same hash. You can’t store hashes for any data that you ever want to be able to read.

Wow. I hadn’t thought about movie bob in years. Thanks for ruining that.

It’s also really bad even for AI.

Not only would it have been really, really easy to find a non-AI image, it would have been similarly easy to get better results from image gen. It’s like they went out of their way to find the worst slop possible.

I know that sounds ridiculous, since I can “simply not use them,” but I want to spend my money on an appliance, not a consumer data collection tool.

For what it’s worth you’re actually spending the manufacturer’s money (or at least some of their profit margin) on a data collection device that they won’t get to use.

Smart devices are cheaper because the data collection subsidizes them.

I won’t stand for this PowerShell superhero comic erasure.