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  • Arizona has several long-standing laws on the books requiring both public government properties and businesses to provide drinking water without cost or other barrier to access. Businesses can't even charge for the cup.

    Common courtesy unfortunately doesn't go far enough, especially when it matters most, so law is required.

  • Permanently Deleted

  • This isn't exactly the type of work tons of astronomers are doing, nor does it cut into their jobs. Astronomers have already been using ML/algorithms/machine vision/similar stuff like this for this kind of work for years.

    Besides, whenever a system identifies objects like this, they still need to be confirmed. This kind of thing just means telescope time is more efficient and it leaves more time for the kinds of projects that normally don't get much telescope time.

    Also, space is big. 150k possible objects is NOTHING.

  • Problem is that both houses majorities support the lunatic, right now they've more or less given him a blank check to operate.

    Historically, the two party system has meant that Congress either votes with the presidents wishes or against when it comes to legislation, but Congress doesn't directly approve/disprove of executive orders. To oppose executive orders, Congress needs to pass laws that override the orders. That wont happen unless the majority becomes convinced they'll lose elections if they keep supporting trump.

    It'll be up to the Judicial Branch to directly rule for/against this order. But the judicial branch only truly has power so long as the executive complies. We're close to hitting the test of that power balance on some of his earlier orders.

    Fun fact: the law enforcement of the Judicial Branch is technically an agency under the Executive Branch. Not a problem if people are largely operating in good faith with the law, or at least fear repurcussions if they don't comply... But since Trump doesn't fear repurcussion, this fun fact may be the oversight that breaks the consitution.

  • I'm not entirely against LLMs as a tool, but I especially despise the image-based LLMs. They are certainly neat for some fun things. I've used them a little bit here and there for a dumb profile picture or a "I'm kinda thinking about this..." Brainstorm, but even in those cases I noticed the capabilities of the LLM and its tendencies quite literally pidgeon hole my artistic vision and push me in other directions that felt less and less creative. (Sidenote: I feel the same way about coding LLM tools. The longer I use them at any given time, the less creative I feel and it has a noticeable impact on my interest in the code I'm writing. So I don't really use them much. Also I consistently manage to point out coding LLM code in PR reviews because it's always kinda funky)

    I've avoided using AI art tools for a while now. I'll consider some limited use if the cost, billionaire ownership, blatant theft of real IP without compensation, and environmental impact problems are solved. (No, an "open source" model doesn't solve all of these problems, especially since nearly all open source models are not truly open source and are almost always benefiting from upstream theft)

    You know what I do like about AI art? I like the older Google machine learning art experiments from the mid-2010s. They invoked a strange existential curiosity. But those weren't done with LLM's.

    Outside of LLMs, I like that there are some newer tools for editing that can do a better "lasso" select, that can mix and match into brushes as an alternative to something more algorithmic, the audio plugin that uses a RNN to simplify or expand upon an audio technique. Things that are tools that can be chosen or avoided and have nothing to do with LLMs.

    I honestly cannot wait for this bubble to burst and for these tools to return to a cost that they'd need to be for these companies to turn a profit. A higher cost would eliminate all this casual use that is making people worse at research, critical thinking, and creativity, as well as make the art tools less competitive to just paying artists, even for scumbags wanting to cut the artists out. And it'd incentivize non-LLM, non-insanely costly ML techniques again instead of the current "LLMs for everything" nonsense right now.

  • If the split is going to be a longer term thing, I like to run 1 group at a time and have the players who are not in the split group run temporary characters or NPCs. Usually those are something like MCDM Followers/Companions or just simplified PC characters so that there isn't much of a learning curve, but it just depends on the people at the table.

    If the party already has bunch of followers or NPC friends, it's really easy and people seem to enjoy taking the reins of their favorite NPC's for a few sessions. It's also a nice chance for players who like trying our different builds to have a small timeline to try something out with an NPC, and it adds the bonus of shared worldbuilding.

    Once the first group is finished, we swap roles and pick up the second group.

    Its best to keep this limited in scope, make sure its not more than a few sessions per group, and to only employ it occassionally.

    However, if it's only for a part of a session, I go for the A/B storyline in a TV show strategy and tend to verbalize the "camera" a bit more, especially if it makes sense to give some subtle progress hints to the other group so they don't feel the need to worry too much about metagaming. If one group in in combat while the other isn't, I'll switch back to the non-combat group after every round or two. Gives everyone a little more time to get their bearings in a reduced party size and makes the combat action feel a little more intense with some good ol' tension and release.

    "OK, as Jimothy unlocks the door and peers inside, it's dark and will take a moment for their eyes to adjust. Swords McGee, watching Jimothy's back, nothing seems out of the ordinary from the perception check, but he does see a flash of orange on the northern wall of the compound where your friends should be at, followed by the distant, unmistakable crack of your allies fireball spell."

    "back to the rest of the group, Bobby Fireballs finished up last round by blowing up the guard station, top of initiative, the guard captain..."

    It doesn't always go that smoothly, but you'd be surprised how easy it can be once you get in the rhythm of when to change cameras. Its also very important to briefly summarize a hook when changing cameras to transition everyone elsewhere.

    If it makes more sense to stay with one party for the entire combat, I'll usually hand over a few monsters to the non-participant players so they have an opportunity to be doing something, if it makes sense.

  • National debt doesn't work like consumer debt bud. Learn some economics. Nor is the trump admin actually using it to pay down the debt.

    Anyway, defunding the NOAA to pay off the national debt is like skipping a coffee, once, to pay down a mortgage on a house.

  • Good to know. I only lost about 30 out of 5000 or so going from Spotify to Tidal. Seems like the catalog gaps for both Tidal and Quobuz have become less of an issue over the last few years.

    The big annoyances were some playlists with orchestral and jazz albums that I had to find again via slightly different album names, but those are a mess on any platform due to re-releases and compilations being chaotic enough in that space as it is.

    I've heard (annecdotaly) that Quobuz is much better for orchestral and instrumental music in general. Spotify wasn't great for it. Tidal is a bit worse, but far superior than Spotify for Jazz at least.

  • Absolutely! It works fairy well. A little clunky since the Linux support is bolted on after, but it's not noticeably worse than the macOS experience. The extra options it offers over what tidal ships to macOS are also nice.

    These non-native electron apps are all kinda junky for native music listening anyway. (This is a problem with Spotify's desktop app as well)

  • Tbh, podcasts through a "storefront" is a poor way to experience them. It's meant to be decentralized via RSS feeds. Tho having some cross-device metadata about what you've listened to is definitely helpful.

    I've been using Pocket Casts for a long time for that more refined experience and ease of use between listening devices. Their new owners are ethically complicated nowadays (Automattic), and the cost for their pro features is a bit high unless you are a podcast fiend (I was grandfathered in from their old mid-2010s pricing scheme that was pay once/own forever), but it's a good app (for now).

  • This is great to see. I ended up moving to Tidal from Spotify, and even though there are some nice to have features missing from Tidal (an equivilant to spotify's sync between devices/speakers as well as a better Android Auto experience), it's a far superior experience.

    Quobuz is also on my radar, but they've traditionally lacked in the music catalog space. I need to give them a try again now that it's been a few years.

    That said, Tidal barely has Linux clients and I don't think I've seen much movement for Quobuz on Linux, unless I've just missed it.

  • Absolutely, it's expensive. Definitely better to share it with family and friends to equalize the cost.

    I only consider it because I listen to a ton of music, my university degree was music, and I spend a lot of money on music generally.

  • Not FOSS, but something I've been considering is Roon. I switched to Tidal from Spotify (which is a legit improvement imho)

    They have a self hostable option and the idea is to mix your personal library, Tidal, Quobuz, and recommendation engines into one app.

  • I think this is pretty easy to BS through though.

    For sure. So far I've only used it for one batch of interviews so I'm not 100% set on it, but we used it as our last round to narrow down between a few finalists and we were already confident they were not people who would BS the excercise.

  • Yup, this is what I've always done for interviews.

    Technical questions are purely to see what background someone has and how they explain or reason their way to some sort of answer. Its also nice to see if someone will say they don't know something but offer their best guess, which is always a good indicator. I'll usually provide the answer right away after they've answered, both to boost confidence for correct answers and because a quick explanation has a tendency to ease tension, especially if they then relate it to some other knowledge they have or suddenly recall the info with a little help.

    The other thing I do is ask questions about disagreements with previous coworkers or managers. If someone starts explaining themselves into being superior to others, it's a red flag. Its nice to get an idea for how someone resolves conflict or what kinds of complications they've run into, but I mostly just want to see how they view themselves compared to others.

    I know my approach is sometimes strange to others doing hiring with me, but it's all pulled from my time as an education major (I switched out after 3 years to another degree) and real world teaching experience. Good teachers ask questions to understand how a student learns and what they know broadly, not to get an exact percentage of points. (State/district testing requirements aside)

    A new thing I've been trying instead of live coding is having people map out a loose architecture for some sort of API data process or frontend data process, then walking us through it. Its more or less a pseudo coding excercise, but it takes the stress of actual language knowledge away. I'm not sure if it'll stick long run, but it's been an interesting experience.