I'd imagine it's because the beef and diary industry in the US is huge and heavily subsidised. It'd be like the US saying every meal needs to include a generous amount of corn products.
3D artist here. I am active on numerous art websites, including DeviantArt and Cara.
I joined Cara quite a bit later than everyone else so I can't give too much commentary on it yet, but I will say that it is very much not dead. It certainly has an active and growing community, but it is still a niche site so don't go in there expecting it to be the next Twitter in terms of userbase size.
DeviantArt, on the other hand, is quite a bit more unfortunate. It actually has a rather sizeable community still but the heartbreaking part is watching the owners systematically sabotage it. Nearly everything they've done in the past several years has been catered towards driving AI use/growth while letting every other part of the site fester and rot. I don't share my DA profile with clients or family members because if they click off my profile there is an extremely high chance they will be hit by a wall of untagged fetish porn and AI slop that will never be tagged despite the ToS requiring such.
Just a few months ago DA removed their official app from mobile app stores for some reason and it became very clear that that was how many users engaged with the platform. Myself and many other artists on DA noticed a very sudden and very large downturn in user engagement and views. They also made some back-end algorithm changes that made this even worse but they have never confirmed that and I doubt they ever will. Membership subs basically exist just to give you extra AI prompt credits and cloud storage space and maybe better selling rates assuming you actually sell anything. The other features, like boosts, have been broken for months now.
Platforms come and go over the years but DA should go down in history as the one that turned to their core userbase, the very people that built them and funded them for so many years - and punched them right in the goddamn face.
Slight correction: Two-party, first past the post democracy means that only 51% of the population decide which dumbass fucks the country while the other 49% effectively get zero say or representation in government.
They will steal it anyway. Stuff like this doesn't matter.
People still steal and (successfully!) sell stolen iPhones despite them being locked to the owner.
Decreasing the bikes future usefulness to a thief doesn't matter to you right now because you still lost your bike. Even if the thief eventually just dumps it in a bush somewhere... you still lost your bike.
Bike theft prevention happens at the bike rack, not when it's in already in the hands of the thief being ridden away.
I wonder if we'll see a shift towards graphical stagnation with upcoming game releases. With RAM and GPUs being so expensive, there will be a lot fewer customers that can afford the hardware to play upcoming, graphically-demanding games and so targeting that demographic is economically unwise.
It sucks that this is the situation we find ourselves in, but I'm actually kind of interested in what will happen. A new age of hyper-optimisation would be so awesome.
There's guiding foreign politics with an invisible hand behind closed doors and there is this... openly threatening and attacking anything that moves.
The US will have a fantastic time occupying numerous hostile countries at once, dealing with nonstop 24/7 guerilla attacks. US empire collapse speedrun.
The majority of phone reviewers (and modern tech reviewers in general) get their review units for free so they lack that feeling and awareness that comes with spending $1000+ of their own money on a new device.
So what they feel are issues and what everyday customers feel are issues becomes skewed. Quite often I have seen reviewers ignore major software issues because they personally feel they are not that significant... on a device worth hundreds of dollars.
Or you get the opposite where they get hung up on something that most people aren't going to care as much about. They can't feel ripped off because they got the phone for free so they have to find something else to complain about. Phone wobble is kind of annoying but I forget about it like 10 seconds later.
I use an electric bed heater (goes on top of the mattress, under the sheet) and use it to preheat my bed before I get in. My bedroom doesn't have any source of heat so it feels so goooood.
While China sees AI as another tool for controlling its populace, the United States is rushing to create AI that will give it global economic dominance.
Spoiler: The US wants that too, or at least the ruling technofascist elite do.
Goddamn the misinformation surrounding LLM's is so nauseating. They do not think, they do not feel, they do not exist as beings.
A LLM is a large amount of powerful computers doing a bunch of statistics on its database(s) and then guessing on what the proper output should be given the input. That's all they are and also why they so often guess incorrectly. They are not intelligent and never will be because that is not how are designed and built.
They have absolutely zero contextual awareness unless directly prompted to do so which is why every input you make into a chatbot includes the entire previous chat log every time you hit enter. LLM's are not aware of anything and remember nothing.
at least from the perspective of general PC users.
This is a bit of a side tangent not strictly related to this article - The overwhelming vast majority of computer users are not gamers. Most people do not play videogames on a PC and whether or not a few games run or not on Linux is irrelevant to them.
What is relevant to them is productivity software, employment requirements, ease of use, and stability. And, on those particular fronts, Windows still has a noticeable advantage despite being a dumpster fire that costs money.
I acknowledge the many achievements that have been made in the world of Linux development lately and I'm so stoked to see it enter the mainstream more and more, but grow very tired of all the articles, opinion pieces, blog posts, etc saying that Linux is "ready" because it can play games - as if that is the only thing that matters.
Prions are absolutely wild. There is no cure, no "vaccine" - not that that would even be possible because they're not viruses, bacteria, or even living things from outside your body. They're just a faulty version of something that already exists in your system and they make your body self-destruct.
Goddamn Dell of all companies is the only one that seems to get it. I'm shocked.
Welcome to the world outside of your own ass, Dell. The air is fresher out here.