Finally someone who at least knows the difference between the WWW and the Internet…

Where do you get that certainty from? Lucasfilm owned all the rights to the Expanded Universe, including all work-for-hire novels. Disney acquired everything Lucasfilm owned, so they shouldn’t have had to pay any further royalties.

Do you have better evidence than this interview, where it was stated that Chewie dying was the reason?

The new Framework Desktop with 192GB unified memory, specifically for LLM inference. I’ve looked at the numbers and there’s no scenario for me in which it’s economically sensible to upgrade from 20GB gpu vram + rent EU API inference for larger models. Even if the tokens became more expensive by factor of 10 overnight, by the time the hardware paid for itself it would already long be obsolete.

It’s an impressive machine, but I just can’t justify the purchase.

Have you been aware of it? Have you tried it?

I’ve been aware of it more or less since the beginning of the project. General thoughts:

• They seem to have looked at XMPP and thought to themselves “let’s reinvent this, but with an even more complicated tech stack and less clear specification”.
• When asked about allowing proper account deletion their response was… well, judge for yourself.

Are you an active Discord user?

No, it’s a proprietary system with an unacceptable privacy policy.

Are you an active Matrix user? If so, what do you like/dislike about it?

No. Their approach to privacy is unacceptable to me in any circumstance other than being paid to use it (as part of a job).

Broadly speaking, do you think there is value in what Matrix is doing?

In general? Sure, it has users that could be using something else, so it seems to have value to them. To me personally? No.

How do you see it fitting in with the rest of the Fediverse?

Afaiu there are bridges people can use to connect services, should they want to. So, like every other part of a federated network?

Personally, I’d much rather use Zulip or Mattermost, given the option.

The cruelty.

Revel in the hedonic treadmill for too long - with nearly every human experience available to you at a moment’s notice - like the wealthiest few tend to do, eventually the only joy you can feel comes from dominating other people.

I agree, but I can’t see it happening until they’ve milked this “timeline” dry.

I don’t know, but his death was the primary reason they killed the Expanded Universe. The merchandise aspect is my cynic interpretation, because the stated non-reason why it’d be a problem makes zero sense.

Should’ve just used the Thrawn Trilogy as Episodes VII through IX. But that would’ve eventually lead to

and think how much that would’ve hurt merchandise sales…

Your soul.

Ah, yes, the duality of USA’s foreign policy w.r.t to the EU: We want you to pay (us) more and take on more responsibility for your own defense, but only in such a way that we still get to keep all our soft and hard power over you.

This may have become more obvious under Trump, but this is nothing new to anyone paying attention since the late 90s / early 00s.

The solution is to stop treating politics like a brief interruption of your normal life around election time, after which you go back to being a passive pawn - which is what most people in the USA have been doing since Reagan at the latest.

Join a union, stand for local elections, organize strikes. All year round. If you cannot afford to do so right now, start/join local mutual help communities designed to save enough collective time for one of their members to do so. Reject the hyperindividualism injected into your culture by the wealthiest few permille specifically to hinder your ability to gain collective bargaining power.

Your only bloodless path towards victory is creating a convincing enough economic threat to the personal wealth of elected politicians as a balancing counter force.

Continue to fail to do so (as a people) and all voting for the lesser evil does is buy you time you’re then wasting.

Though, to be fair, they should really blame the electorate. The politicians have simply been doing what they and their parties were voted in for.

Widespread starvation.

As long as the “working masses” can still feed their children, the vast majority of us bow to whatever authority wants to rule them.

It’s the same here in Germany.

Status condition recovery items are even worse, because you have to stock them, just in case there’s ever a fight that you really need them in, but then finish the game without ever having needed even a single one.

if someone is unhappy with the German rail network, they could just drive too.

Can’t speak for everyone, but at least for me: And pay the considerable high upfront cost for the license, car itself, insurance, parking, etc.?

I complain about the rail in Germany a lot, because I see how much better it could and should be, given our economic capabilities. Not because I think cars are better. The only thing I can imagine pushing me to willingly go through all the financial and temporal hassle of cars would be moving out into the countryside.

It’s frankly hilarious that the author specifically calls out everyone but Green voters as the problem and in the next sentence identifies Schröder as the root (the infection vector in Germany for neoliberal shitfuckery was actually Kohl, but close enough):

Ultimately any German who has ever voted for any party other than the Grüne also deserves what they get. The Third Way / Die neue Mitte of Gerhard Schröder from the late 1990s is at the root of all of this […]

Who, again, were the coalition partners of Schröder’s SPD and whose voters are thus just as responsible for Germany’s catrastrophic neoliberal course? Toot, toot, it’s the Greens.

The only major party we can (as of yet) count on the make-things-better-for-normal-people side of this is Die Linke; as usual, unfortunately, 'cause they have their own issues.

Sure! But it’s not particularly sophisticated. Other than staple recipes (like e.g. vegetables stews) I learned while growing up, when there’s a product I was previously dependent on buying ready-made that gets enshittified by the food industry so much I’m unwilling to pay the full asking price, I start looking into the recipe for it and experiment to calibrate quality, time efficiency, and material cost to the exact tradeoff I consider best for me. Frozen pizza vs self made pizza being one example.

My joy in cooking, aside from the above optimization process I find fun, comes from knowning I pay less money to eat a better quality (and almost always less unhealthy) meal than I’d otherwise be able to. Once I have a recipe dialed in, it also requires virtually no thinking to get done, which is the opposite of my daily work; that’s the “unwinding” for me. I can then also combine it with listening to some audiobook or TTRPG actual play / podcast.

Due to this depth-first approach my actual list of recipes isn’t incredibly large, but it’s enough to never get boring by now, at least.

Off-what? You mean in meatspace?

Jokes aside: Reading. Designing and playing Pen&Paper RPGs. Cooking.

Well, I’m assuming the comically timed cold and hot water events aren’t actually part of the curse, but the Manga/Anime format. So, technically not at will; but so far I’ve had virtually 100% control over when I’m submerged in enough water, so that’s why “essentially”.