I have to wear slacks and a button-up shirt to work.

Nearly every phone made in China comes with backdoors. They’ve also been found to actively send data back to servers in China. I wouldn’t want my devices made in China you have no idea what chips they are attaching to the board.

I don’t mind if the phone is a bit thick. Current phones are too tall to fit in my pocket.

How did Google make the Pixel 8a larger than the Pixel 8? The whole reason of the “a” series is for it to be smaller! Did Google outsource the design of the 8a to Somalia, or is this just how incompetent their engineering team is?

I swear to god most people are NPC’s and they spawn into reality with a phone in their hand. These 6.5" and 7" phones don’t fit in pants pockets. Yet I don’t see any guys out there wearing fanny packs or carrying purses around with them like women. Where do they stick them? Are they all sticking their phones up their butts?

No. They have to not be real. I am surrounded by millions of NPC’s. There can’t be that many people sticking their phones up their butts.

You can downvote me, NPC’s. But I know what you are. You don’t exist in reality when I can’t see you. Like Agent Smith computer programs, you only exist in cyberspace when I’m not immediately nearby.

I’ve spent hours using the phone finder at gsmarena and not being happy with the less than 20 results I get.

Closest is maybe the Samsung S25 but it’s still too big. Also I don’t want to drop $500 on a phone. Anything over $200 is too much.

This is just miserable.

Stroehmann white bread. It’s super-processed, light and airy plain white bread. The same fluffy cloud bread that my parents used to make PB&J when I was a kid.

I have to use smuckers PB and some orange marmalade though. I can’t stand cheap PB and cheap grape jelly. It was fine when I was a kid, but just isn’t appetizing now.

Absolutely yes. One of my favorite anime is GATE. It has a portal open from a alternate world at Roman level technology with legions and classical architecture, but it has dragons, elves, and magic and they send an army through to invade modern day Japan. The counter-attack is insane. Do a google search for “massacre of alnus hill”

No that’s not how it works. AI models don’t carry a repository of images. They use algorithms. The model itself is a few gigabytes where as the training data would be petabytes - far larger than I could fit on my home desktop running stable diffusion.

It actually is close to how humans do it. You’re thinking “it’s copying that image” and it’s not. It’s using algorithms to create an image in a similar style. It knows different artistic styles because it has been fed a repository of millions of images in that style and can generate similar images in that style.

As for copyright, it was recently all over social media that AI could copy studio ghibli’s art style. To the rage of social media and their fanbase, this is allowed. Studio Ghibli can’t copyright an art style, and that’s why AI image generators continue to include the option to generate art in that art style.

It’s not an issue to me, and is completely befuddling to begin with. Training an AI on copyrighted material doesn’t mean the AI violates that material when it generates new artwork. AI models don’t contain a copy of all the works they were trained on - which could be petabytes of data. They reduce what they learned to math algorithms and use those algorithms to generate new stuff.

Humans work much the same way. We are all exposed to copyrighted material all the time, and when we create new artwork a lot of the ideas churning inside our heads originate from other people’s works. When a human artist draws a mouse man smiling and whistling a tune, for some reason it’s not considered a copyright violation as long as it doesn’t strictly resemble mickey mouse. But when an AI generates a mouse man smiling and whistling a tune? Suddenly the anti-AI crowd points at it and screams about it violating Disney IP.

It’s not an issue. It never was. AI training is a strawman argument manufactured by the anti-AI crowd to justify their hatred of AI. If you created an AI trained on public domain stuff, they would still hate it. They would just clutch at some other reason.

This is a good question. I live in the USA and most fundraisers are for clubs, sports, and extracurricular activities. But we spend so much $ for our kids schooling, and I believe in other countries like Japan the school will actually give clubs money to spend on supplies, so they don’t need to do this. Why are our schools so expensive and give so little back to the students?

Also our teachers are underpaid for the work they do. So are the support staff. Cleaners, IT, all underpaid.

Do you know who isn’t underpaid? The administrators. Our schools have district offices with lots of overpaid administrators. I work in IT at a school and I make the same as the cleaners do. I can’t afford a car, and live in a trailer park. During the last round of contract negotiations, the superintendent negotiated a 7% annual raise on top of his already six-figure salary. My group? We got 2.5% which was less than inflation. It was during COVID and inflation was about 7%.

Where is all the money going? Look at the district offices. We have a problem with corruption in this country. Everyone wants to be a feudal lord and rule over the serfs. All our money is going to create and prop up an aristocracy, which has so far managed to hide itself from public view. We need to shed light on the aristocrats.