Swordgeek

What’s the endgame for them if their current path takes them to a point where their assets are more or less worthless?

Get too rich, too powerful, burn the earth, and die happy before the consequences of their behavior catch up with them.

As soon as you say “every,” the answer will be no.

Humanity is too varied and unique. Shitty behaviour can erupt spontaneously at any time.

A more interesting question to me would be "What are the chances that the 2028 elections are allowes to be carried out freely (e.g. without the governing powers forcing the outcome they want)?

If he lives to the end of this term, 100% that he’ll try for a third.

By then, it’ll be a battle between Republican Nazis who back him blindly, and Republican Nazis who want a more competent puppet in power. Oh, and people who aren’t actively supporting fascism. I doubt they’ll make a difference.

Don’t.

Develop real AI, don’t rely on bullshit LLMs.

Professor Kitzel.

Your attack was weak, unfocused!

Much like the Gnome user experience! :-D

I don’t say much about it because it’s stupid to argue, but I’ve used a LOT of different desktop interfaces over the past 45+ years (yeah, really!), and GNOME…well, GNOME sucks. When Gnome3 was first released we all had high hopes for it improving on Gnome2 (which for those of us on Unix systems was a huge improvement over CDE), and instead it was buggy, clunky, awkward, and an enormous resource hog. Oh yeah, and it was massively unconfigurable. AND it continued to not improve for many many years, until most people I know switched to KDE or one of the other environments (MATE, Cinnamon, and xfce were very popular).

Gnome 4x added a touchscreen paradigm, whether you had a touchscreen or not, and made the experience worse in the process.

If you like it, great! Use it and love it all you want! I’ll play with it once every year or so just to see if someone has finally designed something that doesn’t suck so badly, but for a functional desktop, no thanks.

I think the fact that most of the ‘fringe’ desktops are well-known in the community because of people trying to escape GNOME is pretty telling.

If you want to learn drums well, skip the gimmicks and toys, and get a solid practice pad (Remo, Vic Firth, etc.). You can learn a lot - and can practice fundamentals endlessly with that.

Drums are more fun. Music is more fun, and will last you a lifetime.

But absolutely make sure you factor in the cost of lessons.

Yes.

Really and truly, yes.

I’d like to see someone finally fix the ‘capitalism’ race condition.

System Shock, the remake by Nightdive.

I’m old enough that I bought and played the original SS back in the day, and it was transformative.

Just search for Slime Rancher.

Hmm. Let’s see here…

Steam: 147
GOG: 174
Epic: 286

I’ve paid for about 2/3 of the Steam games, probably a quarter of the GOG ones, and maybe two or three of the Epic ones.

Salt

We don’t.

We really really don’t.

Consider the attack that Israel carried out this fall by detonating walkie-talkies and pagers. This wasn’t just some illicit code in the firmware or hardware, they managed to hijack the supply chain and hide literal bombs in commercially-produced handheld devices!

Bottom line: If you do not directly control the production chain from chip design and fab to end-user software, you can never be sure.

40 years ago, the legendary Ken Thompsonand Dennis Ritchie accepted the Turing Award for creating Unix. Thompson’s acceptance speech Reflections on Trusting Trust pointed out this same fundamental security flaw.

I encourage everyone to read the article, and spread it as widely as possible. It is terrifying and accurate, nearly half a century later.

Regardless, my point was more to do with whether someone with only $50 to spare a month is truly in a position to invest in anything or whether they might be better off saving it for a rainy day or something like that.

True enough, but short-term or non-locked-in investments are available to most people.

If OP doesn’t have the starting funds to buy an investment vehicle of some sort, then they could put it into a zero-fee savings account and vigorously ignore it. This is, in fact, your rainy day fund.

Then when they have scrounged up the appropriate amount (likely $500 or $1k), they can buy a guaranteed investment certificate or the like, and get better interest rates while they continue to put money into their account.

When the term is up, they can buy a bigger one with their new savings. This way, they have both an emergency fund, and the starting point for a life of investing towards retirement, if nothing else.

(Of course your later point - if they’re struggling to eat - is still true as well.)

None.

Because I hate people.

I guess I shouldn’t be expected to pay for games until my total is over a hundred bucks then?