I’m addition to convenience Amazon has just killed off a lot of retail options. The only competitor left with brick and mortar is Walmart and somewhat best buy for electronics. Very hard to find those small specialty stores nowadays for little random things unless you live in a big metropolitan area. Even stores like Walmart now will have the same products by a million different brands instead of having an actual variety of products.
Yeah it takes screenshots periodically and all the storage and analysis is done on your local device, which is why it requires the newer CPUs with NPUs from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. There’s a setting to turn the whole feature off, and you can also choose to turn it off for only certain applications, etc. Microsoft seems to be making an effort to encourage chip manufacturers to make better NPUs so that their AI features can run as locally as possible. That’s likely why their new surface devices will be using the snapdragon x elite processors because they’re the only ones that have NPUs with enough TOPS to run all the AI features Microsoft wants on device, instead of having to send the data for processing to a Microsoft server. I think beyond trying to quell privacy concerns, it would be a huge cost for Microsoft if they had to have enough compute available to run all these AI tasks for users for free. I’m sure there’s still some way they are logging pieces of info here and there, but they’ll have to include some way to make sure the OS is secure enough for business operations that are handling secure information.
People are acting as if auto saving, web history, reopen last used windows, etc aren’t already features on all modern apps and OSes. If the claim about everything staying on device is true then this is no different.
Never too old to learn. I think Python is a great beginner language. It has fairly broad applications, and easy to set up an environment (don’t have to download/install a thousand things, you just install python and can run the text files in terminal). I also learned by doing starting in late middle school/early high school. I always found YouTube videos to be the most engaging way to get started. I used to like thenewboston. Once I had a handle on the basic programming language, I would do easy programming challenges where you have to solve some sort of basic problem. The challenges helped me learn basics like taking in input, changing the input based on the various rules and conditions of the challenges, then outputting the proper results formatted in the right way. Also helped me to think about algorithms, etc. After that, I started learning programming through a textbook. This was helpful for understanding some of the more technical aspects, basics of memory management, what different variable types are really for, OOP, abstraction, algorithms etc. I found that leaving these advanced topics till after I had a working understanding of the programming language helped understand the concepts better, and helped me understand why it’s important to learn the concepts in the first place. I was using Java for learning most of this, which might also be a good place to start for you, but I feel like python has simpler syntax to start with. In the end once you learn one language, I recommend learning more and not being stuck to any particular language. Every language has it’s own strengths and weaknesses, and understanding the commonalities and differences will only make you better in the long run.
Edit - now I use Go, python, JavaScript, R, Java, Julia, rust based on what I’m actually doing. It’s fairly easy to switch languages once you get used to basic syntax.
I have a question about rigid curriculums. This is mostly for high school. Many of my teachers had curriculums and syllabi that they had been using for years and kept them basically the same, and then there were the AP classes where the curriculum was determined by the AP exam. I felt that I learned really well in AP classes and we would get through much more advanced material in the AP classes than in others. And I also felt that the teachers who had developed somewhat fixed curriculums from experience taught much more efficiently than those who hadn’t. It never felt like the teachers were changing their curriculum for each class whether it was an AP class or not because most had their curriculums kind of figured out over the course of teaching for many years. And most of the teachers I had in high school were excellent. So my question is, why is it believed that rigid curriculums don’t work? Because in my schooling experience, whether the rigid curriculum was developed by the individual teacher or by an external organization (like AP), the class seemed to benefit from having fixed goals for the year.
Youre right about income tax and to some degree income tax does primarily effect the wealthy except the brackets haven’t been updated to reflect inflation and the new ultra wealthy class appropriately. The other thing is, many of the wealthy don’t have incomes in the traditional sense, and it makes no sense to differentiate capital gains from regular income. The argument that you don’t want retirement investment income taxed as regular income tax is a little moot since that’s why we have tax advantaged retirement accounts. If those accounts aren’t enough for all retirement investments, maybe those limits need to be increased or the way the tax advantage works for them needs to be changed.
Past failed attempts are also a good point, but to me they sound more like administrative failures rather than a failure of that type of policy. In the US we already have some wealth taxes on the value of homes and cars. Some of these failed European policies seemed to define wealth poorly and as a result either weren’t fully taxing wealth or spending more resources on administration than collections. But banks already do a great job of assessing an individual’s wealth. This is how the ultra rich are able to get huge lines of credit to play with rather than having to use their own capital directly. I don’t see how the government can’t use similar systems to calculate an individual’s total wealth. And the argument about the wealthy fleaing the country are also a little moot in the US. The wealthy in the US make money off of American tax dollars. Amazon/Bezos is rich because the US government started using AWS. Tesla is successful because the US uses their influence in South America to cost effectively obtain raw materials for batteries (not to mention those tax credits on EVs). There are all the military industrial companies, and the insurance companies. If the government had the backbone to say Americans who got wealthy using the American market have to pay taxes in America or they lose their right to sell to the American market (government or to the public), no one is going anywhere.
At least in the US, most people already pay local and state property taxes that are higher in high population density areas. The problem with this tax is that it still disproportionately affects middle class home owners instead of only affecting the billionaire class. Also, land is just 1 aspect of wealth. Most of the wealthy in the US don’t keep any significant part of their wealth in land.
You make it sound like factories don’t actually net them profit LMAO. Even after paying taxes they’re still making money. If they weren’t, it would be a terrible business. Also what do you mean sell them to whom? Other billionaires that still exist even with a wealth tax, non billionaire investors, international investors. If they can’t find someone to sell their shares to, then clearly their shares are overvalued and that’ll take care of some of the problem in itself.
Also shutting down factories won’t affect their wealth, which is actually what’s being taxed. And it won’t matter weather they sell $1 billion of whatever to buy $1 billion of something else. You’re taxing their wealth, not their business or cash in hand. If they’re holding on to $1 billion in one form or another, then they’re holding on to $1 billion that can be taxed.
I agree a wealth tax is difficult to implement, but that alone is not a reason to dismiss the idea. Also, for shares, you can always sell shares to pay the taxes that are due. The point of wealth tax is to wealth, not income. Much like a property tax. I don’t understand why they would be forced to limit their own income potential (by closing factories or decreasing production) in order to pay taxes on wealth they own.
No Microsoft Access is/was a GUI software actually meant to have databases instead of how everyone uses Excel/spreadsheets as databases. It is a part of the office suite. It works pretty much like traditional databases but has an easier to access GUI for non programmers I guess. I don’t think it’s used a ton nowadays except for legacy processes that haven’t been updated.
Yeah actually just looking around the way the light changed and that weird darkness with light all around you in the distance was really cool
This is the best I could do.
Edit - does lemmy compress images? I may need to share the file elsewhere if that’s the case…
I was like 30-40 min north of Burlington so maybe that is what made the difference? And those shots look awesome dude! I get the beads came out a little fuzzy but the totality shot looks great! Especially for being at 200mm. You could always use this at motivation to start planning a Spain trip for the one in 2 years haha
I don’t have a higher res version (this was a crop from the full image that had a lot of blank sky) but if you want, I can run it through the Lightroom ai super resolution thing to make a higher res version for wallpaper. What ratio do you need? 16:10 or 16:9?
Honestly I remember it being at 7 o’clock too but I think it might’ve just been that my camera was rotated a bit weird because it was mounted to a star tracker. I was really happy with how crisp it came out. I used a longer lens (this photo was at 400mm) and also made sure to use f8 as that’s been noted to be the sharpest aperture for my lens. Beyond that I had focused on the sun using the sun spots and then didn’t change the focus at all. I also had a remote trigger so I wouldn’t shake the camera while taking the image. Also for this image I brought down the highlights which helped cut down on the blooming around the brightest features and helped them look more defined. I am very happy I was able to get this result because this was the first time I’ve tried shooting an eclipse and really wasn’t sure if I was doing it right.
I missed the correct exposure during C2, but was able to get it around C3 as totality ended. Maybe that’s why it’s the reverse. I wasn’t using a reflector though, not sure where/how that’d be used.
That’s awesome! Thanks for the clarification between flares and prominences as well!
Yeah it was crazy, we could all see a red dot with our bare eyes during totality and weren’t sure what it was. Think it might’ve been a particularly bright solar flare!
Like this photo isn’t even specially edited. I literally just brought down the highlights to get better definition on the beads because without that it looked more like the diamond ring. No artificial color enhancement or anything.
Is it not crusader kings 3?
I think I want work to end an hour earlier in the winter because of how early the sun sets, and care much less about the summer. So however it’s done, it would be great if office jobs could happen when it’s dark outside and we could live our lives during daylight.
It is most likely this. OP is one of the unfortunate people that just cannot use marijuana safely due to his biology. If you have cannabinoid hyperemesis, best to stay away from weed because the constant nausea/vomiting can lead to unintentional weight loss and a lot of other physical problems that are no fun.