Is this still true, it was my understanding that you need a visa from the onset as of last year, also, I am pretty sure it’s 90 days not 180.

Edit: I went ahead and looked it up: https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies/schengen/visa-policy/applying-schengen-visa_en

The United States is on the list of countries that need a Schengen visa and it is 90 days.

What is this post even? One of the main plot points of one of the books was about how the students are so engaged that they made an underground secret class to study and learn.

Harry literally stays up all night studying his books during summer break in the earlier years, the book describes how it’s all he can think about. (before schooling became a lower priority due to the active war).

There are always going to be boring classes, and the book describes that even Hermione is bored in some of them, but typically the students are always engaged, it’s clear that Hermione is a hard worker with doctor parents that expect a lot from her, not that she is some hyper genius.

Harry is a rich jock and a literal child, he is the common trope of the school athlete that slacks in classes occasionally and likes trouble making.

I think it’s very clear that the students were generally engaged in engaging classes with good teachers (hagrids classes, PE / flying, defense against the dark arts, the gardening class with the screaming plants), disengaged in classes that would have equivalent perceptions of boringness (history of magic).

If buying a new video card made me money, yes.

This doesn’t really work, because the goal when you buy a video card isn’t to have the most possible processing power ever and playing video games doesn’t scale linearly so having an additional card doesn’t add anything.

If I was mining crypto, or selling GPU compute (which is basically what ai companies are doing) and the existing card got an update that made it perform on par with new cards, I would buy out the existing cards and when there are no more, I would buy up the newer cards, they are both generating revenue still.

I would agree if the features they did work on made sense.

How come every time I open Plex there is another social media integration, yet device downloads haven’t worked for literal years.

Plex itself is niche software, offering niche features is why Plex gained popularity, watch together is a great feature, I often use when I’m cleaning house so I can watch a show even as I move around rooms, same thing when cooking, which let’s the person in the kitchen watch while others may be in the living room.

I’m not disagreeing with you, I just want to say, the reason the terminal is helpful in these types of scenarios is never communicated properly in my opinion.

The reason when you ask people for help or Google stuff and get terminal commands back is because they are clear, concise, and reproducible. It’s really hard from the perspective of the people helping, to communicate, usually over text, how to navigate UIs that are ever changing and change depending on the users hardware and setup. This is true for windows too, and it’s why getting any help beyond very simple troubleshooting will devolve into powershell commands.

As for this scenario, it’s just inflammatory on purpose, would anyone mention or care if one person at Microsoft who was a project lead retired after decades of working? There are literally thousands of contributors to the Linux kernel, this is just one of them retiring. A maintainer is only one role in a project and can (and will) very easily be replaced. If not by a volunteer, then in a paid position from one of the many companies that pay developers to maintain the Linux kernel. Regardless, there is already people maintaining the the ath10k, ath11k, and ath12k drivers. This is really just a non issue of a temporary vacancy for one position, the same thing that happens at every single software organization every day.

There has always been money, it’s just other people footing the bill for you.

You don’t pay all at once, you need to pay quarterly tax estimates or you will be constantly paying penalties.

I really wish people would stop giving bad tax advice to strangers.

https://www.irs.gov/payments/underpayment-of-estimated-tax-by-individuals-penalty

Just so you know, you will likely face underpayment penalties doing this.

I suggest you avoid giving 16 year olds tax advice.

If the lesser evil were consistently voted in year over year, the evilness would slowly decline.

The problem is that doesn’t happen. The lesser evil is often not selected, that’s the part that shifts the scale.

You kind of get it, it’s not really a dictionary, it’s more like a set of steps to transform noise that is tinted with your data, into more coherent data. Pass this input through a series of valves that are all open a different amount.

If we set the valves just perfectly, the output will kind of look like what we want it to.

Yes, LLMs are prone to hallucinations, which isn’t always actually a bad thing, it’s only bad if you are trying to do things that you need 100% accuracy for, like specific math.

I recommend 3blue1browns videos on LLMs for a nice introduction into how they actually work.

I’ll just say, it’s ok to not know, but saying ‘obviously’ when you in fact have no clue is a bad look. I think it’s a good moment to reflect on how over confident we can be on the internet, especially about incredibly complex topics that cross into multiple disciplines and touch multiple fields.

To answer your question. The model is in fact run entirely locally. But the model doesn’t have all of the data. The model is the output of the processed training data, kind of like how a math expression 1 + 2 has more data than its output ‘3’ the resulting model is orders of magnitude smaller.

The model consists of a bunch of variables, like knobs on panel, and the training process is turning the knobs, the knobs themselves are not that big, but they require a lot of information to know where to be turned too.

Not having access to the dataset is ok from a privacy standpoint, even if you don’t know how the data was used or where it was obtained from, the important aspect here is that your prompts are not being transmitted anywhere, because the model is being used locally.

In short using the model and training the model are very different tasks.

Edit: additionally, it’s actually very very easy to know if a piece of software running on hardware you own, is contacting specific servers. The packet has to leave your computer and your router has to tell it to go somewhere, you can just watch it. I advise you check out a piece of software called Wireshark.

Why do you think it needs an Internet connection? Why are you saying ‘obviously’

Being able to back up and then encrypt the messages on cold storage for when I may need to go back through an old conversation doesn’t negate something like disappearing messages.

It’s the best of both worlds, messages go away over time so if you lose your phone / it’s compromised, you don’t give up the goose, but you also have a nice safe stored version in the off chance you need it.

The danger imo isn’t in having the messages at all, it’s more about how, when they are just on your phone or whatever, they are generally not locked down.

The internet as a whole is also different than it was 15+ year ago.

Your typical reddit user now doesn’t know what digg is or who Kevin Rose is or the significance of something like 09 F9, sites, people, and events that were big things on the internet are just nothing now.

Hell, tons of users on reddit were literally babies when reddit was young.

Being on lemmy at all is going to come with huge confirmation biases.

Something to consider is that most of these issues with common social media are intangible at best and straight up invisible at worst for most users.

Most people don’t care strongly enough about any of these apps or websites to be bothered. Go ask strangers on the street what they think of spez’s this or that and they will say ‘who’s spez’ followed by, ‘oh, I don’t really care’.

This isn’t art, it’s a platform, it’s a tool more akin to engineering than painting.

Would you have this same response for x, Facebook, or truth social?

Embrace, use it as an opportunity to shoplift. Home depot is run by an asshole anyway.

Or just go to self checkout

In the US at least this isn’t really true, at least not in a practical way for most people.

Charitable donations are tax deductible true, but they are for most people covered under what is called the standard deduction, which is a standardized amount that aims to estimate would a regular person would be able to deduct from their taxes. The standard deduction is applied automatically and is $14,600. This means that if you don’t do anything abnormal on you it taxes, your taxable income is reduced by the standard amount. For most people they wouldn’t typically be able to find $14,600 in tax deductible expenses, so the standard is worth it.

The catch is that if you take the standard you cannot itemize, as taking the standard deduction is basically saying to the IRS “yea I donated here and there, bought some stuff for work, did this and that”. Itemizing is listing out your individual tax deductible expenses (and justifying why they are deductible) so if for example you had a single year where you donated $20,000 you could itemize that instead of taking the standard deduction for a total reduction in income of 20k plus whatever you could come up with.

The other reason why that isn’t really applicable is that a deduction is not a credit, that is to say, deductions reduce your total taxable income amount. If you deduct $1,000 (a 1k donation for example) that would have been taxed at 20% you will receive back from the IRS, $200. Meaning that you still had to pay $800 out of pocket for the donation that will not be refunded to you.

Deductions pretty much never result in getting more than the tax that you would have paid refunded. Even if youanahe to deduct more than you make, the resulting negative would just result in a carry over loss for the next year. You can effectively pay an income tax of 0 but it requires losses and other deductible expenses that are greater than your income, which means you didn’t actually make any net income for the year (on paper and practically)

Other countries are different of course, but I wouldn’t want someone going out and donating their life savings thinking they will get it back in tax season.

Email is far too important to be set up in a fragile home server.

Unless you have concurrent redundancy with HA servers and multiple Internet connections, it’s just not worth missing important emails imo.