Tesla is one company run by a fascist idiot. He decided to market regular driver assistance features as “auto pilot” and idiots think they can sleep in the car while it drives them off a cliff.

Most modern cars have some form of adaptive cruse and lane assist. My car (not a Tesla) has lane centering where it will follow the lines on the road along with adaptive cruse and makes highway driving way less stressful, but you still have to keep hold of the steering wheel and be ready to take over as it’s far from perfect.

It will sometimes follow off ramps and when lanes split or merge with odd lines it will lose tracking, but as long as you pay attention I’ve not had any issues like some describe with the wheel “jerking hard” to randomly turn. I literally just tighten my grip when I feel it wanting to drift toward a different lane or off ramp and it will keep going straight.

The tech isn’t inherently dangerous if people use it correctly.

As for ICE cars catching fire, they literally do. Not like the movies but an accident that is bad enough and there is a fuel leak that has a high chance to catch fire. Fuel lines can also dry rot or the 12V system can fry itself if there is a fault in a place that won’t hit a fuse.

Also a quick google: https://www.evengineeringonline.com/did-you-know-ice-vehicles-pose-fire-risks-60-times-higher-than-evs/

Gasoline and diesel cars experience 1,530 fires per 100,000 vehicles, compared to just 25 fires for EVs.

That’s from over a year ago, but again goes to show that gas cars catch fire orders of magnitude more often per capita. Oddly enough, hybrid shows over twice the rate of non-hybrid ICE apparently due to them being more complex than traditional ICE or full EVs.

Solid state and sodium ion are better technologies just around the corner

They’ve been “around the corner” for nearly a decade. While the tech is promising, it has yet to really be scaled up for mass market. Also, while I agree lithium has it’s risks, but so do ICE cars and a lot of things we deal with on a day to day. Think of how many lithium batteries exist in the world and how few catastrophic failures there are.

You hear about EVs batteries catching fire because it’s a new technology and corporate media is in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry. ICE cars catch fire all the time, so much so that it’s rarely if ever reported on, and only local news if that. Meanwhile every EV fire is a national story because it’s novel and they want to spread misinformation about the tech.

I hear some data centers are using jet engine turbines

Specifically, Twitter AI/Grok is poisoning Memphis, TN because the local infrastructure cannot supply all the power the data center there “needs” (read: wants). They are illegally running diesel generators that are only meant to be used in emergencies because they are so bad with their emissions.

The local neighborhoods have had countless health issues and people have literally died from them. Musk is killing people so his slop machine can generate child abuse material. Also, the neighborhoods in question are prominently black, which adds a whole extra dimension of racism on top of the “fuck the poor” mentality he has.

why Trump relaxed coal and oil regulations

That’s not why he did that. He did that because he is bought by the same fossil fuel executives. He’s done more damage to our energy infrastructure because he’s killed a ton of projects to get renewables deployed.

He also has a personal grievance against wind power, or as he likes to call them “windmills”, because he didn’t like the few off shore ones that he could see from his golf course somewhere in the UK.

The US was poised to be the leader in renewable energy and instead the corrupt politicians, on both “sides” mind you, decided to stifle the innovation on both renewables and EVs, letting China become the current leader.

He and the rest of the fascist have hindered renewable adoption in the US because of their corruption. Rather than be energy independent we are forced to rely on fossil fuels and on top of that we actually export most of the oil we produce because “free market”, as companies get more money selling it abroad than domestically.

So we import oil they make more expensive by tariffs and illegal wars while they prevent us from reducing our reliance on said oil and allow private companies to profit off of oil we produce by exporting it, so we can’t even be energy independent with our own oil.

Also, they fearmonger about China “beating us in AI”, when outside of Deepseek there hasn’t been any big revelations from China and Deepseek was only a big thing because US companies were not innovating but brute forcing the tech. I’m sure China is still doing research on the tech, but they likely understand the limitations of it and don’t have the private investors inflating a bubble hoping/wishing it can replace workers.

So to recap, we are wasting tons of resources on “AI” because companies want to try and replace workers and they use fearmongering about China to excuse the waste while they ignore the fact that China is kicking our ass when it comes to EVs and renewable energy.

Even if that is the case, I would argue the grid could sustain people charging EVs at various times during the day or setting up off-peak charging schedule than it can sustain all the AI slop being generated 24-7.

Yet the people I hear complaining about the theoretical load EVs could technically put onto the grid have nothing to say about the AI data centers that are actively raising energy costs and demanding more power than the local infrastructure can actually provide.

And really, it could sustain if we would have leadership that would support efforts to do so instead of trying to hinder renewables deployment in favor of more fossil fuels that are also going up in price because of their bullshit.

Depends on the type. Newer ones drill a column and put the loop into that. They have to dig deeper, but it means you don’t have to dig up the entire yard for loops of tubing and means that you can install them in locations with limited yard space.

I don’t know why they don’t use geothermal cooling, especially with the footprint these things have. Compared to everything else it wouldn’t increase the cost that much, depending on how they do it, and even if it didn’t cover all the cooling needs it would cut down a lot of it.

Come to think of it, you would think power generation would perceptively increase the temperature in the surrounding air and while I have heard of nuclear plants making bays or rivers a few degrees warmer near the plant I don’t think it’s even been described as this bad.

As someone who grew up with Fahrenheit, it’s an arbitrary scale. 0 is the “coldest thing” that he could create in a lab at the time, basically a bath of ice and salt water, 100-ish was supposed to be the temperature of a healthy human body. They are unrelated things. It has nothing to do with “what we feel”, people only think that because they grew up with it. The same can be said for all imperial measurements because there is no other way to say that 12 inches to a foot and 3 feet to a yard is “intuitive”.

Celsius putting freezing at 0 and boiling at 100 (at sea level) are related to each other because it’s measuring the temperature of water the entire time and then setting that as a the literal metric we use to measure other things.

I switched to Celsius for a couple of years and after going through a couple of seasons or two I had an intuitive feeling for what a value would feel like. It made perfect sense. I only stopped using it because my phone switched back one day for some reason and I was tired of having to convert to freedom units to avoid getting odd reactions from people.

At the rate things have been going, we are certainly headed that way and we get there by accepting this kind unnecessary privacy violations.

While I don’t like the idea of having to clean up all the slop his crap is generating I like the future job security.

LLMs have a use case, it’s just really limited and the vast majority of what companies, and people broadly, use it for is either not the best case for it or not even something it can/should do.

If you know how to use them they can save time. You still need to validate everything it gives you, but as a developer I can use one to generate small code snippets or give it documentation and ask questions as a quick reference.

But these are not automation tools. They are not worker replacements. and they aren’t replacements for research even if they can get you started on research…

LLMs, and neural nets in general, can never be AGI no matter how much companies wish it could be.

The point is that this is not the first time that Valve has been singled out for things widely done across the industry and they’ve also been falsely accused of doing things that the rest of the industry is doing.

If they wanted to go after Valve specifically for gambling they should not have linked it to kids. It’s invoking “think of the children” BS while diluting what they claim is the core argument.

Gambling is also harmful for adults. They are M rated games. If a child is playing the game that is a parental issue, not a state issue. It’s not illegal for kids to play M rated games, nor do I really think it should be as that is something parents should decide. The issue is that a lot, if not most, parents have no idea what their kids are doing online.

The argument that “mostly kids play these games” is unsubstantiated at best. Might have been true in the 90s and early 2000s, but there are people in their 50’s that have played games for the majority of their lives.

Also, PC gaming tends to skew older. They might have more of an argument if they were talking about Call of Duty on a console, but an M rated game is still not targeted to that age group.

Again, if they want to go after Vavle for gambling, then do that. But they are jumping around with what exactly the accusation is which makes it seem like they are grasping at straws at best or trying to hide the real reason at worst.

That we have all the age verification crap happening at the same time is too much of a coincidence to ignore. Like, How about going after anyone implicated from the files if you really want to protect children? They can come back to this after they develop a coherent argument and include any other gaming companies doing the same thing.

I don’t care how “unique” anyone claims valve’s situation is. Paid loot boxes are gambling across the board. The claim that people can buy hardware to resell for cash is irrelevant to that.

I do have occasional buzzing/whine from easyeffects and have to restart it.

It depends. The old ALSA system was flaky from what I remember. Pipewire seems more stable, but can have issues with multiple devices but that might be more a bluetooth problem.

I’ve also had constant audio problems in windows, including every update shuffling all my audio devices and making a random one default and switching to the wrong device when connecting a new one.

None of this is exclusive to Valve. Yeah, people can technically buy hardware and sell it, but they can also gift games or whatever and people were already using third party websites to sell their items for cash.

And MMOs with random drops have historically always had an RMT market that is against the TOS where people sell in game currency or items for real currency.

I’m not saying that valve should be let off the hook when it comes to loot boxes, but this lawsuit kind of stinks because it is all over the place and again, valve isn’t the worst example of what they describe.

The fact that it’s framed as “protecting children” and claims that valve is intentionally targeting children despite the games in question being rated M and old enough that I seriously doubt there are that many minors playing is putting a ton of red flags up for me. They also add the 90s era “violent video game” rhetoric that was always nonsense.

The conspiracy part of me thinks this is going to eventually lead to more age verification BS and they are targeting valve because it is the only company that is complying in a way that still protects user privacy.

Which actually makes in simple to me. They are throwing things at the wall to see what sticks while also muddying the water as if they are trying to hide something.

They are throwing very convoluted logic around for this, and I immediately distrust anyone in government who makes wild leaps to “protecting kids”.

First off, I don’t like loot boxes. Specifically paid loot boxes, because if you don’t signify that something like this could effect any game with random drops.

Second, all the games in question are rated M. They are very much not targeted at kids. Obviously kids still play them, but that is on the parents.

That they also added “violent video games” nonsense that could have come out of the 90s is absurd. Is it about gambling or violent media? If it’s about violent media, why not go after any of the other shooters that are likely going to have way more kids on them. Counterstrike is old enough that I would be surprised if it isn’t a majority of millennials and gen X. At the very least I seriously doubt there are a ton of minors playing.

If it is actually about gambling targeted at kids, The Pokemon trading card game is probably the best example of “gambling aimed at kids”. Sure, digital loot boxes can be more insidious, but that isn’t how they’ve framed this and if you’ve seen how TCG players buy packs it’s very much looks like gambling.

The framing of this is very suspicious because it doesn’t make sense to go after valve exclusively for any of the things they are claiming. And the 3x fine is ridiculous. I’m all for fines actually being based on profits, but you can’t tell me they would do the same for any other company.

And part of me feels this is a strong-arm tactic because valve is not publicly traded which lets them be very pro user/consumer and is the one company that is complying with age verification in a way that still protects user privacy.

Assuming that they are seems like a leap, but since we don’t really know exactly what consciousness is,

Which is no different that trading card games and also not valve’s fault.

I have no love for loot boxes, at least when real money is used to get them, but from what I’ve seen across the board Valve is far from the worst with them. Valve also doesn’t allow you to sell the skins you get for real money, only steam credit. That is still real-world value, but they are also not the only company that does that.

Outside of real-world money for loot boxes, most of the issues with the skin market are not anything Valve did. It was third party sites popping up that allowed people to sell their skins for cash.

Valve have even made changes to their side that crashed the market and caused a ton of “value” to disappear.

The fact is that this lawsuit is pretty obviously not actually about gambling. If it was there are far worse companies they could go after.

And I do want something to be done about them across the board, but this is not going to do that.

Look, I don’t have any love for loot boxes in general, at least when it’s real money. But there are far more egregious examples that would work just as well if not better for going after the practice of loot boxes than what steam does.

There’s a reason they are singling out steam, and they signal why in the statement, saying this “teaches kids to gamble and makes them violent”, repeating 90s BS about “violent video games”, when the games in question are rated M, meaning if a child is playing it then that is 100% on the parents… and still not illegal anyway.

They are most likely singling out valve because they refuse to play ball with the privacy violating age checks. Valve did the bare minimum they had to: basically clearing anyone with a credit card registered as being over 18.

Valve is also not a publicly traded company and is very customer focused, even with the loot box thing. Which has been the driver for other lawsuits that only single them out.

I have ADHD (diagnosed) and also likely autism (undiagnosed), so I understand.

I ended up figuring out a specific way to write online because people seemed to intentionally assume the worst interpretation of what I said, usually adding meaning I didn’t.

Unfortunately, because the way I write is semi-formal I now regularly get accused of using or being “AI” I guess it’s because I “use words” and “know things”.

One of the goals of Cachy is to take the pain out of Arch. I’d tried to use various Arch flavors before and I just never had a good experience. Vanilla I had no patience for, Manjaro is known to break more than vanilla with updates (something that happened to me), and Endevor just didn’t feel right for some reason.

Arch purists aren’t happy about that because it goes against the “ethos” of arch, but they don’t seem to like when a distro comes with a desktop environment.

Cachy has been pretty painless and I’ve been running it on multiple machines. There are regressions that sometimes happen since it’s still arch and gets the latest updates, but that stuff is usually quickly fixed or rolled back if there is a bigger issue that needs more time to fix.

The only real issue I had was it revealed a hardware problem with the newer Ryzen CPUs getting unstable in the new lower power CState 6 when idle. Disabling the CState fixed the issue.

Which is exactly my point. A biological brain, human or otherwise, is incredibly efficient for what it does. It’s also effectively infinitely parallel which is impossible to do with the current tech.

In order to even attempt or approach a system that could be remotely considered “conscious” we would need something that is way more efficient just because of logistics. What they are trying to do with the current hardware has basically reached the practical maximum of scalability.

Hardware footprint and power are massive constraints. The current data centers can’t even run at full capacity because the power grid cannot supply enough power to, and what they are using is driving energy costs up for everyone. On top of that, a bio brain is way more dense. We would need absurd orders of magnitude more hardware to come close with the current tech.

And then there is the software. Nerual nets are a dumbed down model of how brains work, but it is very simplified. Part of that simplification are static weights. The models do not update themselves during execution because they would very quickly muck up the weights from training and basically produce nonsense. They don’t have feedback mechanisms. We train them on one thing. That’s it.

In the case of LLMs, they are trained on the structure of language. We can’t train meaning because that requires unimaginable orders of magnitude more complexity to even attempt.

If AGI or artificial sentience is possible it will never be done with the current tech. I would argue the bubble has likely set AI research back decades because of how short sighted and hamfisted companies are pushing it has soured public perception.