For those, like me, that are curious how they decide who’s eligible…

https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-culture-communications-and-sport/publications/basic-income-for-the-arts-pilot-scheme-guidelines/#eligibility

Who are you calling buster, buster?

I can only imagine the utter chaos this would cause in a cube farm.

But, the only place where talking to your computer at length makes any sense whatsoever is where you’re alone in a private office and nobody outside of the office can hear you. Nobody wants to hear other people talking to their computer, and nobody wants other people listening to what they’re doing on the computer.

My spouse and I both work from home and keep our office doors open so that the cats can come and go. We have absolutely no interest in hearing each other work. I know couples that share a home office. It’s like these fucknut executives at M$ think everyone either lives alone or has a private office in the east wing of their McMansion.

And all of that is ignoring the fact that you shouldn’t need AI to interpret what somebody wants a computer to do. Discreet commands for discreet tasks have been a thing for as long as computers have existed and there’s no reason for that to change, regardless of the input method. Making commands fuzzy and open to interpretation is not an improvement.

You don’t need to know why anyone wants to do a thing to advocate for their freedom to do it.

You don’t know why they might want to do this thing. I also don’t know why they would want to do this thing. The difference is, I 👏 Don’t 👏 Care 👏. My opinion of their reason to want to do it is irrelevant to my advocating their freedom to do it.

And that’s all I’m going to say on the subject. If you can’t understand that basic fact, then I don’t know what else I can say.

what reason would anyone have

That’s none of your business. You don’t need to know why anyone wants to do a thing to advocate for their freedom to do it.

Just because you lack the imagination to think of reasons someone might have, doesn’t mean that they don’t have a perfectly good reason. But, they shouldn’t need to justify themselves to you.

Why do you need to know how other people use software to understand why arbitrary limits are arbitrary?

Why would anyone need to turn it on or off 3 times in a year?

Why would they need to limit you?

No, that’s illegal. They’ll make it out to the Trump Presidential Library

I can’t decide what’s more depressing.

A) The subject of the linked article, or

B) The fact that an article on World Socialist Web Site is linking to posts by Amnesty UK and Defend our Juries (three organizations that should all know better by now) on Xitter.

Jesus

At an absolute bare minimum, the last two should be cross posting everything to Mastodon, and the first should be linking to the Mastodon accounts whenever available.

Oh, look! Amnesty UK has a Mastodon account that they’re not fucking using, apparently never have.

[Edit: spelling]

UG Solutions (UGS) defended its employees’ qualifications for the job, saying it does not screen people out for “personal hobbies or affiliations unrelated to job performance”.

I had to submit to a background check for a job sitting at a desk writing code and had absolutely nothing to do with security or carrying a weapon. Pretty sure that being a member of an anti-Islamic biker gang would have disqualified me.

No. My memory is that the English language article was a bit unclear on the details and had several indications that the author didn’t actually understand the technology, but someone said a Japanese language article did a better job of explaining it.

Brine and fresh water doesn’t make any sense, because you’re spending energy to create fresh water with the brine as the waste. Just turning around and recombining it to make evergy again is stupid. You can’t even get back as much energy as you used to make the fresh water.

But, spending the energy to create the fresh water, letting people use that water as normal, collecting their waste water as normal, treating the waste water as normal, and then, instead of just dumping the treated waste water into the sea, recombining it with the brine to make energy makes a ton of sense.

There was an article the other day about a new plant in Japan that takes the brine from a reverse osmosis plant, and reverse osmosisizes [?] it again back into treated waste water to generate electricity. As I recall, it’s not full scale and meant more as a test/demo/proof of concept, but apparently it works ok for a first attempt.

Some of these devices have even been known to look for other similar devices within WiFi range, and phone home that way (i.e., send analytics data via a neighbor’s connected TV as a proxy).

Ummm, wut? I’m going to need some quality sources to back this claim up.

Value Valve

That makes a lot more sense than sea water and fresh water.

Friggin hell. Thanks.

I think the article author is completely confused and doesn’t understand what’s happening. There are hints of what’s happening in this paragraph.

Fresh water—or treated wastewater—is placed on one side of a membrane. On the other side is seawater, made even saltier by concentrating leftover brine from a desalination process. The difference in saltiness pulls the fresh water across the membrane, increasing the pressure on the saltwater side. That pressure is then used to drive a turbine, generating electricity.

I don’t think any fresh water is being used. I think what’s actually happening is…

Very salty wastewater (from the desalinization plant) is placed on one side of a membrane. On the other side is seawater. The difference in saltiness pulls the wastewater across the membrane, increasing the pressure on the saltwater side (or maybe the other way around). That pressure is then used to drive a turbine, generating electricity. The waste then is just water that’s saltier than sea water, but less salty than what came from the desalinization plant.

So, then why are you confused about what’s using power at night?

Do you go to bed at sunset?
Do you turn off your heat at sunset in the winter? Maybe you do, but most people don’t.

Also, most people with an electric car and a garage to park it can just use a cheap Level 1 charger to trickle charge it whenever it’s in the garage and always have plenty of range for their commute and errands. This means all of those cars are charging. … at night while the owner sleeps.

I can hear your Mom all the way from here telling you to clean your room.