I absolutely think that privacy within your own mind should be inviolable (trusting corporations and even government to agree is laughable). Iain Banks’ Culture series explores some of these implications, as well as who should be in control of your mental state. It’s messy and hard, and is one of the reasons I currently wouldn’t get a brain implant. I might change my mind if I had ALS, for instance.

I likely had undiagnosed depression for decades before I got treatment, from a GP, no less, after being dismissed by a psychiatrist. If you have concerns about your health, keep trying to get help, as long as you’re able.

“What am I without my legs?” “What am I without my eyes?” “What am I without my arms?”

What counts as “the real me” has been evolving for decades, if not centuries. I’m not volunteering for brain implants, but I’m not writing off the idea sometime in the future. As for AI, this is going to be more of the ML variety, not the LLM variety. Think more of “neurochemical levels have been trending in a certain direction for too long, release opposing neurochemicals to halt the spiral” and less of a little voice inside your head giving quite possibly incorrect answers to whatever you’re thinking of.

This is absolutely risky stuff, but less risky than recurring electroshock therapy? Hard for me to say. Note that the article is from nearly 2 decades ago, but there are articles in the news from just the last couple weeks.

I have one of the models affected by this recall. My serial number indicates it isn’t affected. It’s been working fine for years. I have other products of theirs and my biggest complaint is that my earbuds didn’t work after being lost in the snow and found months later in the spring.

Does my anecdote beat yours?

If it makes you feel better, I do that off of Lemmy, too.

Yeah, I’d be happy if they had an unsupported version, but I get that could cause negative publicity for those who couldn’t accept that unsupported means exactly that.

Sadly, SailfishOS is region locked. Being from North America, I can’t purchase their phones, or use the trial/emulation option, which really sucks because I like a lot of what I’m seeing there.

There are absolutely jobs where hiring the most qualified person for the job is critical. There are a lot of jobs where the threshold for good enough is far below that, and most companies are at least as concerned at getting the cheapest labor that can fulfill the position as they are at getting the best person (at that lower rate). Adding additional constraints like diversity isn’t going to affect those jobs any more than the company’s desire to save a buck.

So if a company traditionally had 10 men employees and now has committed to having gender equality, you see this as 5 jobs where men are no longer considered, rather than it historically being 10 jobs where women weren’t considered?

Buying prerelease is always a big gamble. Buying before there are reviews from trusted sources is also a bit of a gamble.

Buying games 7 or 8 years after release is generally a pretty safe bet.

The deck is pretty awesome. I think my big upgrade for it will be some AR glasses like the XReal Air. The idea of a big screen to play on pretty much anywhere really appeals.

I just have to see if I can wait for the next Valve VR offering.

I don’t get nearly as much gaming time as I’d like, but I just finished Dex and am playing Drova: Forgotten Kin. I have a bit of a completionist attitude, so I’ll be on Drova for a while.

If I’m looking for a round with a clearly defined goal I’ll put a session into Hardspace Shipbreaker, and I usually log some hours (4 to 20) into Elite Dangerous every week.

I already don’t have time to play all the games I want to play. Narrowing that list somewhat isn’t going to change that for me, so why not Linux?

Pretty sure this was me the last time I tried Linux gaming before buying the Steam Deck. One more problem solved before I upgrade Windows 10.

I don’t remove responsibility from the people, but don’t pretend that companies don’t spend piles of cash on marketing when it has absolutely no influence on their customers’ purchasing decisions. Also, don’t pretend that marketing isn’t pandering to appeal and not function.

So what you’re saying is that marketing provides a sober, unbiased presentatiin of the benefits and drawbacks of the products they’re trying to sell, and people make rational, informed decisions? No, like you said, most people behave little better than monkeys, and marketing caters to that, further skewing the norms and pushing people to buy things based on perceived benefits while ignoring the real drawbacks. Next you’ll tell me the prescription opioid epidemic wasn’t exacerbated by the claims that the new opioids were less addictive and pharmaceutical companies incentivizing doctors to prescribe them more than necessary, a lot of words that boil down to ‘marketing’.

You also ignore the role marketing has to play in convincing people that they need those things. Most people don’t need an SUV, let alone a truck, yet I see plenty of people driving these, and even thinking they’re safer than sedans. But they cost more money, which means more profit, and why would it be surprising that people who sell something with a relatively inelastic market want to maximize profit dollars per sale?

Space is almost free, and it’s a good cue to what you’re going to find. It’s how I tell my PerfectDark posts apart.

Looks like we found someone who believed it was financially necessary for the manufacture of the shuttle to be spread across the country.

Performance is really a key factor, and gives rise to now being a time when truly competitive handheld is possible. Like this chart shows, there was a quadrupling of power between 2016 and 2020, but only a doubling of power between 2020 and 2023, with stagnation for the last couple years, largely due to technical limitations. RAM and storage have also seen massive boosts followed by stagnation, as well as a closing of the bandwidth gap between RAM and storage (from about 6 orders of magnitude to 3 orders of magnitude difference with solid state storage). The GPU front is still increasing in performance, with more watts and/or transistors giving more power, with raw performance increasing by a factor of 8 over 10 years.

Now you take those base values for performance, and a few things come together. First, storage has become low-energy, and is more performant, especially in the mobile market. Second, lower power CPUs are reasonably competitive, which means longer battery run time at an acceptable performance level. Third, while there is a bigger gap on GPU performance, smaller screens mean fewer pixels to drive so something a little older and less power hungry can still give satisfactory results. Put those all together, coupled with the steady and constant improvements in battery performance over the last 30 years, and you can make an acceptable mobile computer platform with decent results that’s able to play all but the most demanding of games from the last few years. Certainly, you can’t compete with the power of a desktop gaming PC, but you can get good enough. And then, with a few design tweaks, you can get a little better.

So, until and unless serious changes happen in the CPU or GPU market, mobile PC gaming has a chance to be good enough for a lot of people. I currently do over 90% of my gaming on the Steam Deck, but I’m also aware that I have little interest in playing the newest game as soon as it comes out so the Steam Deck is particularly suited to my tastes.