oppy1984

I donated to st Jude for a while, every month I got mail multiple times a week asking for more money along with my "free gift". Even talking into account buying supplies in bulk and using every conservative low-ball numbers I estimated I was getting around 60% of my donation back every month. I just gave up and stopped donating, and even sent them a letter telling them why I was ending my donation. I still get mail from them at least once a month and it's been at least 15 years since I last donated.

They are doing something extremely important, but I don't want my donation being thrown away like that. Send me a donation envelope once a month, that's fine even though I was making my donation online, but the almost every other day mailing that was packed with notepads and return address labels? Nope I'm not fund that. On the plus side I haven't bought return address labels since Obama was in office, and I doubt I'll have to buy any until Chad who just graduated from DeVry, becomes our 64th president.

Yep, been on Linux for 10 or 12 years now, I honestly can't remember. Distro hopped at first, then I found Mint and never saw a need to change.

Having done a short tour of duty in food service myself, I can only imagine how combining that with finance would work....try not to summon any demons. Oh don't worry I approach everything on the Internet like statics, 79% of it is made up. Also I'd just like to say, while I admire the creativity behind the mutant lemur with a crack addiction story, I know a flew when I see one.

I prefer the idea that there is no set number of justices, every president gets to appoint one judge per term. Obviously they should still be approved by the Senate. After the Senate approves the judge, that's it, someone dies, to bad wait a few years for the next term or president. Sure we might end up with 20 justices if a bunch of young people are appointed but that just opens up the term limit conversation, and that would be great since lifetime appointments shouldn't be a thing for any position.

Right there with you, diagnosed about 25 years ago and I've never heard of "visual exhaustion" even though I understood it from lived experience before I finished reading the comment.

We choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy.

How long have you been waiting to use your combined knowledge of restaurants and finance in a comment? I imagine this opportunity doesn't come around often.

You can not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that God exists.

Issac Newton saw an apple fall and then dropped other objects to prove the existence of gravity.

God = belief.

Science = evidence.

We have a warp core breach, doctor Crusher lead the crew to the escape pods while myself and the senior staff take the ship into that nebula.

If we get lost, we'll just dock somewheres and ask directions.

I promote the use of AI since I've seen massive benefits since I started using it, also I feel like everyone should learn to use it since I believe it's here to stay. That being said, I do hope open source models, and the hardware to run them become more accessible and we move to self hosting our LLMs and only offloading certain tasks to a providers API when appropriate.

I think we're on the same side politically, we just have vastly different approaches. You do what you feel is best, as will I.

Just food for thought, I took two days to reply because I saw a wall of text and found it overwhelming. I suspect that is the reaction of most people. If you feel you absolutely can't leave anything out, consider at least putting a few points in a bullet point list, if nothing else it breaks up the text and makes it seem a bit less overwhelming.

You say you are used to tailoring to your audience, let me share something that it took me far to long to understand. Those that can express their thoughts calmly and concisely, will always be more well received.

On the commercial AI and Epstein class, yes many of the top people in the industry are involved with that. But why limit your self when you have the same tool your enemy has? Is it not better to use AI to develop open source alternatives that will bring them down? Would the irony not be the sweetest if they were brought down by their own tool?

Do with these thoughts as you wish, disregard them if they have no meaning for you.