Aceticon

This is totally different from my experience.

I use headphones, which cover the full ear so I don't get any "tired ears" from those. Maybe you're using a totally different model (no idea if BOSE have earphones and if they're any good - I avoid any earphones exactly because of getting "tired ears" with them).

If you're using headphones, maybe you have the QC 3 (which are widelly seen as shit)?!

I have had over the years the original QC, QC 2.5 and QC 3.5 and still use the QC and QC 3.5 with none of those problems (funnilly enough, the oldest, an original QC, uses a single removable AAA battery, and I use rechargeable ones and even that will last around 3 - 4 days, whilst the built-in LiPo in the QC 3.5 lasts even more than that when using bluetooth, and even more when using an audio wire).

Yeah, the process by which the ultra-rich came out ahead of that was that in the aftermath of the Crash the politicians they owned made sure all large asset owners were at least indirectly (and at times even directly) saved with public money, all of which was then paid with Austerity for those whose incomes don't come from asset ownership (i.e. people who work for a living).

I was in the Finance Industry before, after and during the 2008 Crash, saw things from the front row (I was literally an IT contractor for Lehman Brothers when they went *PUFF*) and spent the following years trying to understand what the fuck had happened, and as far as I can tell there was no grand conspiracy to time the Crash, and instead the collusions happened mostly afterwards. For example:

• The banks that blew up - Lehman Brothers which went bankrupt and Bear Stearns which was sold to BofA for $1 - were the two with the most exposure to Credit Derivatives by far (there was an article in The Economist a few weeks before showing exactly that)
• The bank that in the end came out the best - Goldman "Vampire Squid" Sachs - who were recognized as the smartest of the bunch would still have come out way worse had governments not indirectly saved them, both in the US were the feds unconditionally proped AIG which was the main derivatives counterparty of Goldman Sachs (so most of that propping up ended as payments to the likes of Goldman Sachs as the counterparties in AIG long bets on credit derivatives) and in the EU were the commission plus a bunch of large countries got together to literally buy Greek Treasuries directly from banks like Goldman Sachs at far more than they were worth thus saving those banks from huge losses (and after than turned around and imposed Austerity on Greece using as justification that EU money was at stake, all of which was IMHO one of the most Corrupt operations ever in the EU).

The whole thing wasn't some kind of "billionaires playing 5D chess against the rest", rather it was good old Corruption empowered by the massive crisis situation to go far beyond the level at which it normally happens because there were excuses to lay claim to and redirect far more of the overall resources of society than normal.

So for the upcoming crash, whilst many of the billionaires, being more well informed than average, will probably evade the obvious points of failure, they're going to be hit by the likely (and even more, by the thought to be unlikely) side effects and then there will be yet another massive corrupt rescue under "crisis powers" to prop-them up.

That said, I suspect most of the margin of operation that existed back in 2008 for saving the rich whilst tightenning the belts of the rest, isn't there this time around: interest rates never recovered back to their long term trend from the "temporary" ultra-low interest rates set in the aftermath of the 2008 Crash, wealth is way much more concentrated on fewer hands now than back then so there is a lot less juice to squeeze out of the working and middle classes now and in the US there are at least 2 majors bubbles (AI and car debt) as well as a lot of mid-sized and smaller bubbles (mainly realestate, stocks, hyper-speculative assets such as crypto) which will likely blow in ~~synch~~ sympathy with whatever one of the big ones blows first.

The Chinese Curse says "May you leave in interesting times", and I'm afraid we've all been cursed in that way.

My own experience of being, within a large transnational company, technical lead of a small team based in India for a cross-border software development project, is that their own management structures over there were spectacularly incompetent (and I come from a country - Portugal - were management practices are, IMHO, shit compared to the rest of Europe).

Amongst other things, they still had ancient management practices such as "managers must always earn more than technical personnel" which meant that even a junior manager earned more than a senior developer, in turn directly leading to bright young developers moving to management (were they were invariably shit) within maybe 5 years purelly because it was the only way to earn more money, so as a result the broader team (so, not just my project) there had no good senior developers - it was either "senior" in the sense of lots of years working there rather than senior-level expertise or a handful of junior and mid-level devs who were good at that level and could turn into competente senior techies, but were bound to transition to management as even a junior manager earned more than a senior techie.

Other "funny" things were how nobody there would never, ever, ever admit not to have fully understood something or needing more clarification during an open call about the project next-steps with the rest of the team, so I had to do "special handling" for my remote team of talking to each one individually and carefully tease away their questions with some kind of "it's on me" excuse, for example, saying that "I want to make sure I explained things correctly and didn't miss anything important". Notice that my Indian colleagues who were not based in India but rather sat with the rest in London, did not have that peculiar behaviour.

Unsurprisingly, that outsourced team which existed as part of an outsourcing division the senior management of the company had decided to set up in India to cut development costs, didn't actually add significant value because of the overhead of dealing with them and the need to check and correct their work, mean that the vastly more senior - and costly, as half of us were contractors - team in London (of which I was part) ended up losing almost as much time dealing with them and the side-effects of the low quality of their work as was gained from having that India-based team doing part of the development work.

Well, what's already happening is circular self-contained greed "economies" were money (not actual wealth just value-tokens such as money but also assets which have valuations expressed in said value-tokens, from crypto coins to realestate and stocks) is made from merely money being passed around whilst no actual value is created (in fact, value is mainly destroyed as those things are consuming actual resources to produce no real value at all, only boost the count of value-tokens)

This is destroying the capability of currently accepted value-tokens to actual represent an underlying utility value.

In other words, thing like stocks but also things like currency are decoupling from the underlying value they used to represent:

• Stocks were a share of ownership in a structure - the company - that created things, either directly - manufacturing, extraction - or indirectly by increasing the efficiency of direct value creation - i.e. services that indirectly made manufacturing or extraction more efficient or helped in distributing the products of those - whilst nowadays the most "valuable" by market capitalization of stocks have almost purely speculative valuations or are for companies in rent-seeking activities which don't create value but merely take a share of the value created by others.
• Currency used to be (and still is to a large extent) value tokens which were a claim on the value produced by the Economy. What we're seeing is that as more of those value tokens are created in those circular "economies" each token can claim less and less quyantities of the traditional underlying value things - just notice food inflation. Also rent-seeking activities (such as realestate investment) have even faster devalued how much each value-token can claim. Whilst official Inflation numbers don't tell us this story (there is a strong motivation for politicians to have Officially recognized Inflation be lower than reality, because Mathematically that makes GDP seem larger), most people are actually feeling the real Inflation, especially in the most ancient and required concrete assets: Food and Housing.

I expect that something is going to break, though I don't know when and exactly how it's going to materialized (though the way the ultra-wealthy are trying to transform the powers they captured from Democratic to Autocratic, leads me to believe that they're preparing for a break in the functioning of the current value-tokens by having a more direct control over just about everything than indirectly by merelly holding lots of value-tokens).

The societal consequences of the value-representation structures we have (literally, of thing like money, stocks and even certificates of ownership) unwinding would be huge.

I've been using Bose Quiet Comfort noise reduction headphones for almost 2 decades now, ever since I had to do software development in a large open space office alongside the noisy business-side types (this was in Investment Banking - so whilst not a heavy-machinery-noisy environment, certain the top range of office noisy) and those they were very good already back then (I'm still using at home the first model I got, after replacing the ear-pads which is what gets damaged over time).

The QC 3.5 and onwards have bluetooth AND also a wired connection as fallback (which I have had to use with devices without bluetooth).

Of course, you pay for it (last ones I got were €250 if I remember it correctly), but then again they last a long time (as I said, the first ones, now almost 2 decades old, are still work fine even if the outside is all scratched up and they're now on the 5th or 6th pair or earpads).

I very much doubt Sony one's are anywhere close to that, especially given that the quality of Sony devices took a massive dive in the late 90s when top level management which until then was dominated by the Engineering side was taken over by the Media side took over (before they used to be known for the high quality of their electronics).

Well, the Mini-PC actually looks like it belongs in my living room TV table.

But, yeah, functionally it would work just as well on a spare laptop as long as the microprocessor in it has the video decoders in hardware (something which is only a concern for really old laptops).

Beyond that, I wouldn't recommend an old desktop because of its higher power consumption and noise, but a laptop should be fine on both regards.

Once in a while Sony reconfirms my choice to boycott them since the rootkit CD scandal in the 00s.

Gold.

Don't really know about the HDMI cec, but I use one of these remotes which works perfectly with Kodi (it seems to just work like a wireless keyboard that just sends keypresses for shortcut characters corresponding to the function of each button, and those shortcuts are some kind of standard that Kodi supports, so this kind of remote - that also works for Android stuff - works fine with Kodi).

The only quirk it has versus the remotes that come in commercial solutions is that whilst the Power button in the remote will switch the Mini-PC OFF, it won't switch it back ON (for the obvious reason that it uses a USB dongle and the PC when switched OFF won't recognize input from the dongle).

I first got one which had even more buttons (also working fine with Kodi), but the remote's build quality was shit and it didn't took long for some of the button on that one to stop working reliably.

This one has been working fine for about a year now.

I do have a keyboard and mouse attached to that Mini-PC because it doubles up as home server and once in a while I have to do something on it which is more easilly done directly there with a UI rather than remotelly on the command line via SSH (or I simply don't want to boot my main PC to access the Mini-PC remotelly), but to just consume media via Kodi nothing else beyond that remote is needed.

Your first mistake was buying anything Samsung.

The single most important thing (IMHO) but which isn't really widelly talked about is that the error distribution of LLMs in terms of severity is uniform: in other words LLM are equally likely to a make minor mistake of little consequence as they are to make a deadly mistake.

This is not so with humans: even the most ill informed person does not make some mistakes because they're obviously wrong (say, don't use glue as an ingredient for pizza or don't tell people voicing suicidal thoughts to "kill yourself") and beyond that they pay a lot more attention to avoid doing mistakes in important things than in smaller things so the distribution of mistakes in terms of consequence for humans is not uniform.

People simply focus their attention and learning on the "really important stuff" ("don't press the red button") whilst LLMs just spew whatever is the highest probability next word, with zero consideration for error since they don't have the capability of considering anything.

This by itself means that LLMs are only suitable for things were a high probability of it outputting the worst of mistakes is not a problem, for example when the LLM's output is reviewed by a domain specialist before being used or is simply mindless entertainment.

Indeed. Any online store can go under or enshittify.

If you want to stay safe with GOG, download the offline installers for your games and archive them. If you don't you're running the risk of losing some or all of it.

The rule "best avoid situations where you give power to some big company (for whom you as an individual customer are basically a nameless bacteria) over something you care about" is general, not Steam specific.

Fortunatelly GOG has DRM-free offline installers available for download as standard, Steam does not make that option available - at best you can copy and zip existing installations of Steam games and hope for the best (some will work, some will not), and that is a "hack" rather than official supported.

The point being that Steam could make something like DRM-free (or at least phone-home-DRM-free) offline installers available - at least for games whose developers/publishers are willing - and mark that as a feature in the game page in their store for those games, but they have chosen not to do so and remain steadfast in that choice: they purposefully keep customers dependent on them of enjoy their purchases and we're all expected to just trust them, now and forever.

As I said, 4 decades in gaming and Tech have taught me you can't trust large companies forever.