Image generators can make a much wider variety of styles than this (still all derivative, of course), but the people in charge of these AI companies are hollowed out soulless fuckers, trying to make a product that produces “content”-shaped images, to sell to an audience of creatively bereft upper managers at games and media companies, who’ve spent their entire careers trying to corral artists into producing interchangeable art so they can be more easily reassigned and fired.

It’s so hard to say without knowing the price. If it’s too expensive, it doesn’t matter. If it’s a little expensive for what it does, then at least it’ll bring more people to Linux (but relatively affluent gamer nerds, not anybody cool). If it’s exactly the appropriate price for the hardware, then that’s very good for Linux. If it’s below that, that’s fantastic for Linux and I might get one. If they somehow made it genuinely cheap, then that’s the most important thing to happen in computing since the iphone.

Oh, well in that case maybe Trump actually will face similar consequences.

Not much, what’s yks with you?

he just realized he forgot to pay taxes

You know, “fake ass holiday” would be a great name for a new holiday.

For the last decade or so, the tech jobs market has been dominated by big tech hiring everyone they can, so they can’t wander off on their own and make new competitors. That’s predicated on big tech having so much money that they can’t find anything more useful to spend it all on. It won’t continue past the tech growth stock bubble, whenever it pops. (Which might not be the pop we’re currently headed for; if it’s just AI instead of the whole thing somehow, then those jobs will bounce back.)

On the positive side, if that ever stops, some of the unemployed tech workers will make actually useful things, some of which will become businesses that can hire the other tech workers. This is more like how it worked in the early 2000s.

However, those new tech companies have to actually make money somehow, which means somebody has to be able to afford their products, which means new tech will be beholden to the shape of the wider economy. For example, currently startups are all B2B, because businesses have money and consumers don’t. In a wide scale economic downturn where businesses are cutting costs, even those B2B startups won’t be able to find customers, so they’ll have to fold (or just not get founded).

So I don’t think the market is going to recover to the old maximum, and afterwards it’ll be much more cyclical, following the rest of the economy along whatever nonsense it does.

That estimate assumes there’d be a one-time 40% decrease in mortgage/down payment costs, then prices grow at the same rate they’ve been growing.

It could very well be overly optimistic. I did say it was jank.

I did some jank estimates and I think the 50 year mortgage thing would stave off the affordability crisis for about 10 years before we’re back to where we are now. Then back to the normal increasingly unaffordable housing. Then a total meltdown of material conditions when those loans start getting past 30 years and people become too old/sick to finish paying off their mortgages.

About $900 billion (USD) a year.

That’s gotta be a speed record, right? Somebody call Summoning Salt

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/why-not-visit-edits

come on down to Communism

we got

rolly pollys [shiny Chinese train]

And whatever goofy names/pictures you can come up with for free housing, voting for your boss, free medical care, not bombing people, and free education.

An outdoor cat is a sandwich.

Corporate social media sites are always going to follow a trajectory from vaguely progressive, to “free speech” maximizing, to profit maximizing, to state dept goons on the board, with the only off ramp being if the site implodes before it gets successful enough for the goons to notice. They’re always going to wind up as a nazi bar with pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist bias.

Decentralized sites instead follow some rando admin’s biases. Are the admin’s politics any good? Probably not, most people have shit politics. But a cross section of total randos is still a better diversity of political thought than the repeated systematic trimming that corporate sites have.

I think becoming a careerist sellout is almost guaranteed for people in these positions, for the simple reason that they’ll be surrounded by careerist sellouts, and people are social animals who will eventually adopt views more similar to their peers. However, AOC took years to completely sell out, and if it takes Mamdani as long, he’ll still be able to accomplish a lot more as mayor during that time than a then-junior congressperson.

I’d make all sorts of inventive high concept scenarios to show off and share with people, but my personal one would just be yet another a tropical sex island.

This is built into html itself.

Guess you’re stuck with unflavored Debian then.

Does it help that the default, best flavor of Linux Mint is Cinnamon?

The standard reference owl also suggests Mint!