even now you can still host your own website / services at home without any specialized gear

Yes, as I said, that’s the only thing I’ve done myself—in particular, at times I’ve run it off of my main desktop, and at other times on a Raspberry Pi with an external hard drive attached—but that’s specifically not what I was asking about because the previous comment was specifically talking about non-developers who might have that basic HTML understanding and just want a server where they can throw up an HTML file and have it served up. A goal that’s more technically involved than a wordpress.com site, but less involved than self-hosting a LAMP stack and running the Let’s Encrypt certbot.

(Plus, of course, the growing prevalence of cgNAT making self-hosting impossible for many people necessitates the use of a hosting company or user-friendly web service.)

Yeah I learnt static HTML and CSS circa 2007, but even then it felt like what we were being taught was very out of date.

I’ve never actually used any form of hosting for my own pages. I’ve run the LAMP stack on my own local server, and I’ve used services similar to WordPress, but never dealt with static web sites hosted by someone else. Do they not make TLS really easy for you in that circumstance?

Riding in a road race or crit, or even a time trial, is very different from a commute ride.

But even on commutes it’s really good, depending on how often you expect to be stopping at lights. It’s great in rainy weather where my flats often slip off the pedal, or climbing up the many hills on my commute that necessitate getting out of the saddle.

Edit: also, you backslashed one of the underscores, which is great, but forgot to escape the backslash itself.

I’m not talking about WordPress.org, but WordPress.com. The basic blogging service. It’s all WYSIWYG.

Tell me you’ve never cycled seriously without telling me you’ve never cycled seriously.

Fwiw these days balance bikes are considered better than training wheels for people learning to ride. Training wheels are ok if you actually need to go somewhere accompanied by an adult on a bike, but they’re terrible for learning. They don’t teach you how to steer or balance properly; a balance bike does. In fact, training wheels can teach bad habits that are difficult to unlearn.

Yeah but a basic Wordpress.com site could do exactly the same thing for free. Or for super cheap if you want your own domain.

How so?

I doubt it. Other forms of AI could be useful, but generative AI? I doubt it.

And tbh even deep learning through neural networks doesn’t seem to be making the leaps we’d hoped for. AoE4 promised, prior to release, a machine learning–based AI would be delivered down the line. It’s now almost 3 years since release and we haven’t heard a thing about it.

Maybe eventually we’ll be able to easily train a machine learning algorithm to play any game at a wide variety of skill levels (or at a very high level, if not at customisable levels), but it doesn’t seem like it’s any time soon.

A century or so of oppressed masses and greedy elites did it.

True, and that’s important context if you’re trying to get a deeper understanding of how Julius Caesar came to have the power he held before his assassination.

But there’s enough of a problem you can see even if you just start at Julius, which is what I was concentrating on in my previous comment. The parallels to Trump are terrifyingly on the nose.

My significant other has the same vague possessive connotations

I don’t think it does at all. In fact I think just the opposite. It’s saying they’re an “other” person who is “significant” to you. It’s quite sweet, actually, IMO.

Oh I didn’t for one second think it was a true story. But it is a fun story that, with the exception of this one massive glaring hole, reads really well. Which just makes the one plot hole stand out even more.

Oh good, I’m glad someone else is asking this question. The whole story hinges on it, and it doesn’t make sense.

I don’t speak Spanish, but just looking at the alternative options Google Translate provides when you only input a single word, it’s possible that “tóxico” might be a clearer translation of “poisonous”.

Mastodon link?

edit: and/or link to Lemmy discussion?

It literally was though. Not a military intelligence tool, but a big business intelligence one.

Niantic was founded by Google and their first product, Field Trip, and their first game, Ingress (a much better-designed game than Pokémon Go, btw) were pretty obviously about gaining geolocation data for Google to improve their products like Maps and Shopping.

I don’t have the ability to listen to a video right now to engage with the points this video specifically makes, but I will share something I just recently learnt that may alleviate some of the blame from Ticketmaster for concerts becoming expensive.

There’s been a complete flip in the music industry. It used to be that record sales were the primary means of musicians getting income, and they would use concert tours as an advertisement for their records. But since digital downloads of singles, and even more since streaming, people listening to their music at home doesn’t make much money for musicians anymore, except for from the small subset of hardcore fans who might be buying vinyl or other collectors’ items. So instead they make money by touring and selling merch (which itself is often associated with a tour). Which naturally means prices need to rise.

None of this absolves Ticketmaster for its role in dishonestly raising the prices through the use of extra mandatory fees. The advertised price should be the minimum price you can actually pay, inclusive of all required components.

It’s a bizarre and (afaik) unfounded conspiracy theory, but I don’t think this reasoning works as a refutation. It’s still very possible that the experiment got out, and even if not they still needed policies to protect all the people they didn’t want to be affected because the targeting isn’t perfect.

Honestly I’m a light hobbyist myself. My exposure to history is primarily via YouTube channels like the excellent Historia Civilis (their series on Julius Caesar and the downfall of the Roman Republic is stunning) and via games like Age of Empires.

I just don’t understand how someone interested in antiquity can possibly fall for Trumpism. The fall of the Roman Republic was presaged by a guy literally trying to get elected to office so that he could escape prosecution for illegal abuses of power, and the legal system standing aside and saying “yeah, we’ll let you do that in order to maintain the peace” and then falling into civil war anyway.

How much of that sounds familiar…?