Thanks! The whole PC had a time (when its age was ~20 years) where it still booted, but with reset BIOS settings, followed by a time where it doesn’t boot up anymore. So I believe the most likely thing is that it leaked and caused damage. Retro computing community thinks that the most likely cause is battery damage.

Here is the exact model from someone else: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/msi-3121-v3

Battery (top-left) already removed, but it shows that this one has leaked before as well. When you look closely, you see battery residue on the nearby 8-bit ISA (?), so it must have leaked a lot at some point and been cleaned up. Unfortunately, it came with a notorious Ni-Cd Battery; even for its time not the best.

I have an old mainboard from 1990 with emotional value and a leaked BIOS battery. And advice for cleaning that?

lol, getting all displays working is indeed my biggest worry for my last Windows PC, migrating next month. It has both an NVIDIA and a Radeon GPU, and that works great on Windows. But a quick test boot from USB did not go so well on Ubuntu, so the truth will only come out after a real install with drivers.

Medical professionals are typically very ethical people who believe that the right for medical care applies to the worst criminals the same as to a president, and they would uphold that belief even if said criminals executed their own FOR helping their fellow humans. (*)

But that is a belief which is hard to understand for a fascist. Who would they trust with their wounded once things escalate into a civil war? Seems unlikely that someone would risk pushing a pillow over a patient’s face, but what if wounds have a higher rate of infection, surgeries fail etc.? Not intentionally, of course, but who could manage to keep operating at perfect precision while staring at the ICE uniform all while having traumatic flashbacks from videos of their coworker being executed?

(*) Also my belief, to be clear; punishment must be lawful following due process. Even Hitler should have been patched up had he survived his suicide attempt, morphine and everything.

When pointed out, the vibe coder will prompt: “How can I stop developer tools from working on my website?”

Challenging, but not impossible. I think the military budget of all other NATO members combined would just be about the same as the US. However, it’s not like every country has its own independent “mix of everything”; they are supposed to work supplemental. What makes things worse is proprietary hardware and software in modern equipment such as planes. I’m not sure to which degree it would even be technically possible to use it to defend against the USA.

Then there is the nuclear weapon problem. France and UK would have to really stand their ground and follow through with nuclear retaliation. That means that even when the USA or Russia just use a small tactical nuke in Poland, Greenland or wherever, they’d have to use one of their few strategic nukes to destroy something big, possibly dooming Paris. The downside of the idea of mutually assured destruction always was that it only works with somewhat reasonable people who REALLY are not willing to take their entire civilisation with them. But since Stalin, there have never been nutjobs like Trump or Putin in charge, neither in the USSR, nor US, nor Russia.

A victorious Ukraine would certainly be an incredible asset to have in NATO, with all those battle-hardened, highly educated people.

But all things considered, might as well give it a try.

I’m reading AI content there, and when I post, I’m getting accused of being a bot / using an LLM. Fantastic.

Unexpected - I thought flying would be by magnitudes safer than anything, but it’s in the same magnitude as bus, and not even train is x10. I always thought that all those safety regulations were unnecessary, just compensating for some psychological factor of how it FEELS dangerous due to overreporting, history and other factors. But apparently, they are needed so it just remains barely safer than other forms of public transportation.

Seeing what happens when the US just stops helping makes me realise: The good they did as a superpower over the decades isn’t talked about as much as the bad. Obviously now, there is plenty of that, too.

In order to change the degree so that it allows studying in many universities abroad (such as Germany), this would be needed:

• functions and graphs, mostly R->R
  • general analysis, continuity, function as a specific type of relation
  • series, sums, limits
  • derivatives
  • integration
    • numerical
    • basic approaches and when to use which
    • a few common “tricks”
• proofs: very basic direct, induction, contradiction will do
• set theory
• Vectors, limited to R³, line, plane, rotation. Very basic matrices
• introduction to imaginary numbers
• stochastics & probability

It’s based on my subjective impression of weaknesses in the few Americans studying in Germany that I know.

The absurd “pizza-gate” suddenly makes sense.

Ideas?

• CO2 tax - if it’d be high enough to completely pay for the damage, this shit would stop pretty fast. But even less than that would help. Alternative: Certificates without loopholes. Some use would survive, e. g. an IT professional would still use $ 50 worth of energy per day if it gives a 10 % productivity boost, but models would start consolidating and use all tricks to keep it efficient, rather than push out whatever they can. Only works when imports from regions that refuse to participate are taxed when imported, or outright banned.
• Huge advantage of machine learning: The “when” is completely flexible. Could just use excess power from renewable peaks, or even nuclear & coal nightly production. But as long as it’s cheap enough to just make more power around the clock: Why should they? They won’t do it voluntarily. Solutions could start with a “green” label for consumers, but that would probably not do that much. It also won’t help when we force them to use 100 % renewables and nuclear, and then they just buy all solar panels and wind turbines off the market leaving us with higher costs and trouble switching to net 0
• Evaluate the market and identify the bubble. Does an AI focussed company make conservative use of existing capabilities, without overhyping them, or put their money on likely near-future developments, or depend entirely on optimistic future capabilities?
• With such measures in place, we’d still have the models they trained so far. They’d eventually plateau anyway (or already have). When training of new models stops, as we make it too expensive to spend a lot of power for a tiny improvement, a good part of the power waste stops.

Not tough enough for a true wakeup call. Wipe it all off, and replace with:

• Your friends think you’re stupid!
• All the other kids are staring at you!
• Mommy and Daddy fight because of something you did!
• You walk funny!

No, it was also quiet. More quiet than the < $ 100 cheap sweep robots with rotating brushes that actually attempt to capture dirt in a compartment inside.

Sad end, though: One day, it decided to just roll away and we never found it again. We thought it’d be under something, but when we moved out a few years ago, it became clear that it decided to find a new home long ago.

tbf, getting shot in the face IS one of the better interactions you can have with Dick Cheney.

I mean, which one would you pick?

• waterboarded at home
• sent to allied torture prison abroad
• accidentally groped during family Christmas photo
• he jumps awkwardly onto your presidential campaign train last minute and you lose it
• shot in the face

My best buy ever was a $ 20 “dumb roomba”: It was just a little ball with a battery inside that made random movements, and you could put it in a little “cage”.

It did a horrible job, like a 5 year old half-assing it, put hey - $ 20, 0 effort for a little help? Everything was slightly less dusty and hairy, and it pushed most of it into the corners. Saved like 3 minutes per day.

Dick Cheney was among the worst in an administration that disrespected human rights, international law, honesty, trustworthiness and set the US reputation as well as the fight against global warming way back.

Usually, that probably would have been my last thought of him.

Except, we have this crazy timeline. This timeline, in which he was able to stand out just by pointing out that he is still in favour of free elections. At least that was still a given in his time, even though the decision about the loss of Al Gore was considered controversial by some back then.

A low bar, a low bar indeed. But here we go, on this positive note: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6Nq9SpGzic

Great cat. But a little disappointed - I was expecting legendary mischief stories.

Could be even worse, look at what happened to Stauffenberg’s family.

Arguable whether he signed up for that.

Fight and die in defence of a NATO ally? Yes. Same as the aggressor, if the elected government decides so, such as in Iraq? Also yes.

Risk having his wife, children, grandchildren taken away and put in Sippenhaft (collective punishment) or put in a reeducation orphanage? Not sure there is a moral obligation to that. Safety for his family was one of the things he got out of all this.

His risks for resisting beyond what he already did are higher than they would be for the average citizen. On the other hand, he also could do more than the average citizen.

A tough call, and I would not judge.

A simple police operation done by the books is not newsworthy. That can give a skewed impression.

In my opinion, the overall image holds that the US police doesn’t do as good a job as police in countries with 2.5 - 3.5 years of training, different screening / application criteria and better pay.

Part of “fixing” the problems specific to the US would be to provide such training as well as a payment that makes it an attractive job for people who would also succeed in a different career. Only way to do that would be to raise taxes significantly for the 1 percent or 0.1 percent.

It would also be necessary to hold them accountable. A “few bad apples” are one thing, but when the system covers for them, it’s a systematic problem, regardless of the number. There need to be real consequences for criminal behaviour on the job, all while having a measured response (retraining, warning, …) for faulty actions that can happen to anyone in the heat of the moment.