The current model has its own issues. The amount of series that are cancelled after the first or second season is ludicrous. Also, and I’m not sure if it’s related to streaming or the constant writer’s strikes, but series have reduced from 16-26 episodes per season from the height of the piracy-era to 6-10 nowadays.

If the reduction in piracy led to this deterioration in quality, then I can’t imagine it could get any worse if everyone started pirating again.

Personally, I reckon it will incentivise the numbskulls in charge that no one is going to pay for 48 separate streaming services and they’ll be forced to adapt (likely via packaging/merging streaming services together).

I promise you that koala is not being pensive, it’s probably just constipated; koalas aren’t really known for their intellect.

Though being constipated is unfortunate because that means its babies are probably going to starve (koalas feed their shit to their young).

They’re really doing everything in their power to destroy their own business model, aren’t they?

Deutsche Geophysikalische Gesellschaft

I’d say there are probably as many genuine use-cases for AI as there are people in denial that AI has genuine use-cases.

Top of my head:

• Text editing. Write something (e.g. e-mails, websites, novels, even code) and have an LLM rewrite it to suit a specific tone and identify errors.
• Creative art. You claim generative AI art is soulless and poor quality, to me, that indicates a lack of familiarity with what generative AI is capable of. There are tools to create entire songs from scratch, replace the voice of one artist with another, remove unwanted background noise from songs, improve the quality of old songs, separate/add vocal tracks to music, turn 2d models into 3d models, create images from text, convert simple images into complex images, fill in missing details from images, upscale and colourise images, separate foregrounds from backgrounds.
• Note taking and summarisation (e.g. summarising meeting minutes or summarising a conversation or events that occur).
• Video games. Imagine the replay value of a video game if every time you play there are different quests, maps, NPCs, unexpected twists, and different puzzles? The technology isn’t developed enough for this at the moment, but I think this is something we will see in the coming years. Some games (Skyrim and Fallout 4 come to mind) have a mod that gives each NPC AI generated dialogue that takes into account the NPC’s personality and history.
• Real time assistance for a variety of tasks. Consider a call centre environment as one example, a model can be optimised to evaluate calls based on language and empathy and correctness of information. A model could be set up with a call centre’s knowledge base that listens to the call and locates information based on a caller’s enquiry and tells an agent where the information is located (or even suggests what to say, though this is currently prone to hallucination).

“Quick! Hurry! Scrum! 5 minute stand up team! We need to sort this crisis out NOW!”

“Joe! The building is on fire! Move! RUN!”

“No! We need to have a meeting first! SCRUM! STAND UP! AGILE! SILICON VALLEY!!!1!!!1!! When is the next sprint!?”

Looking for a passionate, motivated team member to be part of a newly refreshed team created to replace an unsuccessful team (RIP) promoting our incredibly competitive product!

• You must have at least 40 years experience working with Windows 11.
• GENEROUS remuneration package!*
• You need to be able to work 26 hours a day 9 days per week.
• You will need to bring PASSION! ENTHUSIASM! EXCITEMENT! [synonym not found]!, and GRIT!

*as we are a small start up, we can’t afford to pay wages, but when we are successful, we promise to write your name somewhere on an archived version of our website.

Magic. That is the only way they can enforce this drivel.

Absolute stupidity and a waste of taxpayers’ money spending so much time on this nonsense.

These incompetent morons are pretty much guaranteeing that they will lose the next election. In the middle of a housing and inflation crisis this is what these fuckheads decided was important.

I loathe the opposition, but it’s hard to defend the sheer incompetence the Labor Party has displayed their entire term.

My feedback: I wish it was -15 °C… To snuggle up under a bundle of blankets sounds divine. Instead, it’s almost midnight where I am and it’s still bloody 32 °C.

The UI looks nice, though I’ve effectively disabled the Overview and replaced it with the ArcMenu on my setup. I’ve also aligned my common/active applications to the left on my panel rather than centred (so that my pinned applications are always in the same position and don’t budge over when I open another program). Rounded corners doesn’t do it for me, I try to avoid anything that removes screen real-estate, no matter how minimal. I’ve also set the bottom panel to auto hide so that it’s only visible when I move my cursor at the bottom of the screen. Overall, your setup’s pretty nice, though I don’t think I like the bright colours for the buttons in the top right of your windows, they’re a little distracting. Mine’s set so the cross is a washed out red colour, the minimise button is a pale horizontal line, and I don’t have a maximise button.

I’m going to install that Weather or Not extension. Thanks.

I agree, but a couple of programs I use were specifically made compatible with Gnome. It only took me three extensions to make my UI look like KDE though, so it wasn’t too bad.

That’s fair. A couple of programs I use are more compatible with Gnome so I had an incentive to get it working. My desktop is pretty much identical to KDE/Windows with a start menu (ArcMenu extension), a taskbar (Dash to Panel extension) and I’ve removed all keyboard shortcuts to the Overview eyesore and have prevented it from showing up at launch (No overview at start-up extension).

Thankfully Gnome is ridiculously customisable. The native experience is shit, but installing a few extensions fixes all the issues I had with it at least.

These symbols are getting more messy and difficult to decipher… Someone asked me the other day if I had 5g. I looked at my phone and there was no 3g, 4g, or 5g. So, I just said I have VoLTEBlutoothshaky batteryalarmclockkeyupsidedowntriangle62%.

Honestly, I consider myself moderately tech savvy. But I also had issues with SecureBoot when installing Linux. It really doesn’t help when every single BIOS has different settings and they all want to make everything as poorly worded and unintuitive as humanly possible.

“Oh, you want an on/off toggle for SecureBoot? Sorry, no. Let’s just fuck with you until you either brick your motherboard or somehow manage to install Linux.”

My congratulations! You’ve managed to get past the most difficult hurdle.

Time travel

Thank you, this was helpful. I’m also using Pop!_OS, so this reinforces my belief that it’s just a graphical issue. I also see this when checking for updates sometimes.

Yeah, I’ve considered a name change myself. Decided not to bother as it would mean every time I need to prove my identity to a government organisation I’d need to provide additional change of name documentation.

Government is hard enough to deal with as it is without adding an extra thing that needs to be assessed.

It boggles my mind how so many websites and platforms incorrectly say my e-mail address is ‘invalid’ because it has an apostrophe in it.

No. It is NOT invalid. I have been receiving e-mails for years. You just have a shitty developer.

Probably some bureaucrat decades ago making an incorrect assumption that passed down through generations. Happened to my family. No Irish roots whatsoever, yet somehow we ended up with the annoying form-breaking apostrophe in our ‘legal’ name just because it begins with the letter ‘o’.

“Oscar??? Surely, you’re mistaken. I hereby decree your name to be O’Scar!” ~Arsehole circa 1937

I reckon this is probably what the issue is. Maybe it’s of a device type where an icon wasn’t created or where some reference to the icon’s image is broken. Thank you.