Those are like the most superficial layer of propaganda. The real danger of propaganda is that it doesn’t look like it, it looks like other regular people making you support their interests without you realizing it.

Do you like engines? Do you dislike electric vehicles? Do you like guns? If so, when and where did those ideas come from? You weren’t born with them.

I think the real problem is, people don’t know how to manage their emotions, and those end up swaying them left and right. Opportunistic antagonists will take advantage of those triggers.

Stop thinking with with your gut, take a pause to analyze your body response to emotions. Are you sweating? Are you afraid or is it actually warm? If you’re afraid, what specifically do you fear? Etc.

Propaganda, echo chambers, peer pressure, and even vicious cycles of self-pity, anger, sadness… will have a weaker hold on you.

Feel, but don’t stop thinking.

Plex is more polished, but I love Jellyfin’s subtitle search; it blows Plex’s socks away.

Also, Jellyfin doesn’t nag me every effing time to enable DRM in Firefox for some unfathomable reason.

But Plex definitely wins on performance, IMO.

Take HomeAssistant for example: you’re free to use it self-hosted, but as soon as you want to expose it securely through the Internet, there’s need for infrastructure that has costs, both in materials and labor. In HomeAssistant’s case, it’s NabuCasa that does it, and costs money, and helps fund the work of HomeAssistant’s developers.

Having things free (libre) and open source is a blessing, but we have become used, entitled, even spoiled, to enjoy the work of very specialized people for free. That’s not always feasible.

Another example, Zabbix, is totally open source and free, they only charge for support and training if you ask for them. It has worked for them for many years, but if they start to struggle with funding, I’d understand if they charged for it.

It also assumes the masses behave rationally, which they won’t ever.

We’ll just get the cheapest shit with the limited information we are given, unless it is life-or-death, where we will pay any price out of fear.

I’ve always suspected these are attempts at stock manipulation. Release scary news, make the stock go down, buy, stock rebounds quickly as the scaremongering dissipates, sell.

The most mentally-challenged businessmen love pump and dump (and the reverse in this case) because it doesn’t require any talent whatsoever, just insider trading.

Dude, tell me you haven’t been in a management position without yadda yadda etc.

They’re not genius or more valuable, their workflow is different. In development I could solve the same problem for days, and know the ins and outs of it; as a manager. When I pivoted to management, I understood I have people who know their shit, so I don’t have to worry about the details while I make sure they have everything they need to accomplish our compromises.

I had to learn to let go of the tech work so I could be more effective as a manager. I’d love to talk about Postgres optimization during dinner, but I can’t devote much time to that during the work day. That’s someone else’s job. I’ll just give them the resources.

This. OP is mistaken if he thinks all people had to carefully read all email. We techies love to explain things too much, but executives are administrators, they don’t delve into technical details unless needed.

My technique to get busy executives to answer my emails is being direct and brief.

• Subject: As concise as possible, and then more
• In bold, one thing I need from them. Asking three things is a sure way to get two unanswered things.
• Two line breaks
• In bold “Details”, another line break, and a bullet list of any info they might need, but not necessarily read.

That’s it. If they need more, they will ask you. If you need more, send three emails, or make it very clear in the first line that you’re asking three things, and make them a bullet list.

Also, this works surprisingly well with people other than executives.

Tell me you’re a NRA fan without telling me you’re a NRA fan.

It was one of the jailbreaks, LLMs are just too eager to help.

Because most people are not online while pooping, right?

Right?

It’s not that great anyway. Your local toilet will surreptitiously grab and analyze your poop, dispose of it so you don’t need to flush, and have the remote toilet extrude an identical copy someone else has to flush.

I’d wager it’s the multilevel dependency of countless prebuilt components when devs are only going to use a small fraction of their capabilities.

You know we’ve reached peak bloat and stupidity when JavaScript web apps have a compilation step, and I don’t mean JIT.

I think the epic songs and 4K textures are missing in my MS Office.

There are telltale signs of AI generation in images, much in the same way image editors leave fingerprints of its use. As image generation improves, its detection will too.

It’s not much different than the arms race of spam or malware, for example, tools like wasitai.com have a pretty good detection rate right now.

Darth Vaders’s main power was not lightning, but telekinesis. I’d bet he would have a greater output spinning one (or more) industrial generators.

Adult mayflies don’t, they don’t even have a digestive system or even mouth. They just reproduce and die.

Sponges, IIRC don’t have organs, hence no anuses. Can their excretions be called poop?

I don’t recall reporting any comment today. Can I fix that if I reported it somehow?

Edit: shit, I see I used report instead of reply. Im sorry.

Also, IQ tests are a learnable skill. You can become surprisingly better at them without actually increasing your intelligence, by becoming familiar with the exercises.

A smart non-native English speaker would likely score even lower the first time because many old tests tie reasoning to English proficiency and western culture.

Last but not least, being intelligent is different from being smart. I’ve seen intelligent people get left behind by regular people because they took unwise decisions and wasted their potential.

Date away, worrying about this is like worrying about dating someone stronger or taller than you. It’s doesn’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things.