Lead gen spam in particular is the bane of my existence for the past year. I get 4-5 per day. If you’re so good at getting qualified leads for others, why are you spamming random recipients for yourself?

I use Arch derivatives for all my computers but my media server runs Ubuntu Server because it’s low maintenance. For storage I use a USB 2x HDD docking station (one of those where you just stick the HDD upright in it).

The acceleration is whack out of the box with any Linux distro I’ve used so if you’re trying to get used to it there then good luck.

Yeah, it was acceptable with the Windows the laptop came with, but it is indeed whack with Linux.

I’m a longtime ThinkPad user and TBH I find the trackpoint pretty annoying to use. It always seems too fast or too slow and it’s very uncomfortable.

That’s true, I was being too reductive with my comment. What you’re describing is the Steve Bannon “flood the zone with shit” strategy.

But when I watch a movie, the “black” that I’m seeing in a particular scene isn’t the absence of light, because it’s not actually “black.” It’s a very very dark shade of grey or brown or whatever. And that requires light.

What you’re seeing are the deactivated TV pixels absorbing light. This doesn’t work with a projector screen because the screen is of course designed to be reflective, otherwise you wouldn’t see anything. Point a projector towards a piece of black velvet and you see… black velvet.

Even if there is some actual “black” (spots where no light is coming out of the projector), there will still be a gradient, and immediately after “no light,” you will have a light attempting to project a very dark shade.

This is the contrast I was referring to earlier. It’s basically the accuracy of the projector in defining a limit between the areas it’s lighting up. But if you do this in a room with the lights on and the windows open, the image will be completely washed out regardless of how high the projector’s contrast is.

Is that true? Because I was under the impression that even the darkest “blacks” from a projector, are still made from the light coming from the device

You’re probably thinking of contrast, which is the ability of the projector to avoid bleeding light into areas that shouldn’t have any. But as far as the darkness of the black levels, that’s down to room treatment (and the screen surface, to a lesser extent). After all, a projector emits light, and darkness is simply the absence of light. You can’t “make” darkness, you can only remove light.

That’s a room treatment issue. You need to control light and reflections, because your “black” is just however dark the projector screen is.

What DDG needs to do is modify the G! switch to include “&udm=14”.

You can do this in Firefox by adding Google (in your list of search engines) like this: google.com/search?udm=14&q=%s

the acceptance of marginal information by the masses. Anything that fits someone’s personal narrative is championed and distributed as truth

This is the much bigger issue IMO. The quantity of disinformation is irrelevant if people don’t fall for it, and Americans fall for it in far greater numbers that other western countries. That points to a failure of education and perspicacity at the individual level.

Same. It seems weird not to mention that in the article, since it`s a very popular use case for them.

ChatGPT-ass article. Is all news going to be like this now?

they may inadvertently replicate bad or even illegal practices

“Inadvertently”? Can we please force every journalist in the world to sit through a 5-minute overview of how LLMs work?

This ties into the age-old debate about platforming bigotry in the name of free speech. Bigots don’t care that much about talking with like-minded people — they want to subject others to their beliefs and to feel as though they are a righteous majority. Without their hapless victims they become like a bully standing alone in the schoolyard, impotently yearning for somebody to punch down on.

Does Ed ever miss? I suppose it must be possible, but I have yet to see it.

What’s the value-add over just buying a SFF PC?

That is brilliantly simple. Certainly better than using collector limpets.

That’s true, but what you describe is pretty much the end state of big-box retail. Amazon is essentially the same, if we exclude AWS. It’s all a race to the bottom. The solution, as always, is to buy direct from smaller producers if possible.

I dislike that you’ve put me in the position of defending Walmart, but don’t you find it rather misleading to imply that they made 163 billion dollars in profit when the real number is less than 10% of that?

Yes, but there are many more expenses associated with running their business beyond simply COGS. Their net income last year was 11B, which is pretty average for a company that size.