I’ve been thinking about this lately in regards to how shitty food is getting, with shrinkflation a lot of stuff now has smaller portions sizes but the calorie count usually remains the same, presumably due to adding more sugar to mask the taste of replacing ingrediants with cheaper alternatives, fresh produce isn’t spared either as most meat and vegetables turn a lot sooner and are sometimes already beginning to turn the same day you buy them. The result is a decreasing ability to have more than a day or twos worth of fresh ingrediants on hand and frozen food (or worse) just getting simultaniously less health and less filling.

Its early adoption problems in the same way as putting radium in toothpaste was. There are legitimate, already growing uses for various AI systems but as the technology is still new there’s a bunch of people just trying to put it in everything, which is innevitably a lot of places where it will never be good (At least not until it gets much better in a way that LLMs fundementally never can be due to the underlying method by which they work)

transactional? that implies the US has provided anything in return (to any of its allies) for the last decade.

He’s a good showman, its basically the cornerstone of his current success, he may not appeal to you or me but he has that used car salesman, carny barker style energy that really appeals to a certain kind of person.

Nah chat GPT is just a verbal mirror, so the idiot puts his complete lack of legal knoweldge in and gets a complete lack of legal knowledge out.

I just realised that the tankie point of view may be described as thinking countries should get what they deserve based on past wrongs regardless of how many people get thrown into the meat grinder due to the current reality.

Bad people can have good qualities just like good people can have bad qualities, failing to aknowledge this is failing to know your enemy.

I think they did one of those replace all the characters to repeat the show and then immediately get canceled because thats never worked final (12th) seasons?

And the rise in oil prices and removal of sanctions is pulling the russian economy out of the gutter while simultaniously drawing away air defence that would have otherwise been given to Ukraine (either directly or through European purchases)

I can’t tell if this is a moment from your real life or a bit of creative writing about a dystopian future.

Alternatively have you considered letting energy companies offset the price entierly to the consumer and then also giving them a tax rebate once the crisis is over to account for the increase in costs that they didn’t even pay themselves?

Seems more like a world where everyones fucking dead at the rate things are going. Then again if we’ve learned anything in recent years its that other than manipulation skills most billionares are fucking idiots.

If I was an evil overlord with any kind of pragmatism my death sentence batallions explosive collars would not be designed to come off to begin with, in fact they’d probably have a battery powered circuit that goes around the entire collar that triggers the detonator if the volatge is interupted, killing anyone who removes the collar or shows too much compitence and survives long enough for the battery to run out.

A completely pragmatic soultion with minnimum effort to implement and no R&D cost? Sounds completely useless for generating value for shareholders.

Tell me again why we think C-Suite folks are smart?

Some weird fetiziation that financial accumen is somehow the ultimate mark of intelligence above all else.

Remember when we joked about america invading anything for oil and then we all stopped for a bit because they tried to convince us that there was more to the US than being the state equivelent of a crackhead with a dozen shotguns? And then they launched a self described war to bring about the apocalypse and also steal all the oil… can we stop pretending everything is ok!?

Fuck off, thousands of people are dead this is not a ‘distraction’ its peoples lives.

I felt like the thunderhead was pretty great but had its flaws, it was wayyyy too comfortable with destroying non-human life even if it did it in a pragmatic way.

Presumably this is marketed at Elon Musk so he can pretend to be a gamer.

So to go down the bullet point list:

• Swappable battery: I’m going to assume its a generic battery and therefore the best possible option here since I know some (a lot of) laptops have weird proprietary batteries. Point for Thinkpad.
• Industry standard m.2: Even notebooks can do this.
• Easy keyboard replacement: This looks like a lock in? Of the laptops I’ve seen where you can swap the keyboard, which is actually quite a few but in a really dodgy looking way, the keyboards look very different from this. Point for looking WAY easier but might take it away again if this keyboard really is proprietary.
• Swappable memory: I’ll give you that many notebooks solder this in but its easy to find a regular laptop with swappable memory.
• Streamlined display repairs: Much like the keyboard this looks awesome and WAY less jank than normal way you have to do it but it also looks like a proprietary part.
• Modular cooling system: I don’t really know enough to say on this one, most laptops have a cooling system you can take out with similar form factors but I doubt they’d work well with random parts from other machines, then again I doubt this laptop would work well with random parts from other laptops either so your still probably locked into buying the correct one from ThinkPad.
• Modular ports: This is actually pretty awesome, though again where else am I even going to get these modular ports.

Ultimately its still good, the stuff that’s already common has been made way easier and some new options have opened up for repair and replacement, I can’t really blame thinkpad for being the only ones providing this hardware when they’re the only ones making a laptop that would use it in the first place, its still an ecosystem lock in to a degree though even if its not an intentional one. It would be nice to see some competition in the space.