This is like arguing which cast of SNL was best. It's more about you & what age you where at the time, then the games themselves.

There hasn't been direct democracy in the USA, ever.

We are not a direct democracy.

Now lets really break your brain, are you & I able to make our own choices? Is the ego, the voice in our own skulls, the conscious mind really ever making any decisions?

There are a great many studies that seem to indicate decisions are made well before our conscious selves are aware of them.

We are far more driven by emotion & instinct then any of us care to admit.

What your saying doesn't exist is an Artificial General Intelligence, something approaching the conscious human mind. Your right that doesn't exist.

AI doesn't just mean that though.

What we're dealing with right now is the computer equivalent of growing mouse brain cells in a petre dish, plugging them into inputs and outputs & getting them to do useful things for us.

The way you describe chat GPT not being creative, is also theoretically how our own brains work in the creative processes. If you study story structure & mythology you'd find that ALL successful stories boil down to a very minimalist set of archetypes & types of conflict.

The mall I used to ride my bike to as a child, where my favorite Arcade (Aladdin's Castle) & had a toy store (K.B. Toys) was leveled to the ground about 20 years ago, with the exception of like two restaurants at the corner of the building.

It's now some fake ass 'downtown' like outdoor mall, in Michigan, with terrible parking & it's just gross.

I miss Meadowbrook Mall, man, I miss it a lot.

I was gonna say "The Arcade" but you made me remember the entire mall it resided in got blown up.

Yup.

With rumors the defense minister has been detained coupled with Wagner blaming the defense minister for the lies justifying the invasion.... MAYBE this is some weird way for Putin to save face/stay alive while pulling out of eastern Ukraine?

But that sounds like bullshit, this whole thing is getting weirder by the moment right now. Smells like a lot of misinformation flowing from all sides right now.

Likely to see de-escalation of the war in Ukraine if he succeedes. But I don't have hope for a whole sale withdrawal.

My guess is at a minimum he trys to hold Crimea

Bingo. He's following a WELL KNOWN playbook of making the company both leaner in terms of expenses, and trying to add revenue, with zero care about long term viability of the company.

The goal is to make the books look better then they are, so that you can dupe investors into thinking the turd you just shined up isn't a turd.

EVERYTHING he's doing is logical when you look at it in that sense, they are throwing a coat of wax on a used lemon to dump it on some unsuspecting suckers for a profit.

It's a MASSIVE security risk. What you tell ChatGPT is not private, if you knowingly or unknowingly tell ChatGPT secret information you have no control over where that information may go. Especially for a company for Apple that lives & breaths on surprise product releases.

Not entirely sure, started with Ubuntu in 2007 or 8 I'm guessing. Still on Ubuntu, but the shine is very much off with all their pushing away from .deb files & several other frustrating issues.

It's been a few years since I tried Fedora but I'm kinda still angry at RedHat for the RHEL & Fedora split, that was some bullshit right there. That was a good chunk of why I went away from them, and being purchased by IBM & killing off CentOS hasn't won any popularity contests.

I'm thinking I may have to give real Debian a shot next cycle. I don't want bleeding edge anything, I stick to LTS for about a year past the release of the latest LTS, so Debian's "slow" cycle works fine for me.

Yeah, but us Michiganders know Culvers is gross & steer clear.

Firstly, certain groups have over politicized this topic in order to punch down on a minority group they dislike. Those people are ass holes, and I'm not defending that behavior. However, unfortunately, their base argument does actually have some marret, even if they are complete ass holes about it.

There is consistency, to use your terminology cis gender women can compete with cis gender women & cis gender men compete against cis gender men. Transgender folk are somewhere around 1% (or less) of the over all population, they are the extreme outliers that don't fit this consistent & highly effective (in terms of athletics) categorization of men's & women's sports. Another group, roughly the same size with an unknown advantage/disadvantage that are excluded from this classification are amputees/augmented humans.

We currently have separate competition for amputees from non amputees, the Paralympics exist & is lauded as a good thing. Outside of the political oppression issues, this model makes far more sense for trans athletes then simply allowing them to compete with the gender they identify with.

Splitting competition into male/female makes sense, because sexual dimorphism is a reality for our species. In nearly every sport, women are highly disadvantaged against men. Statistically the physical divergence between the sexes is vastly larger then the divergence within the sexes. This is consistent, despite your argument to the contrary.

I'm all for trans people being treated with respect, but respect goes both ways & part of that respect is the admission that a trans woman is not the same as a woman, and a trans man is not the same as a man. These are 4 different & distinct categories of people (hence the desire to relabel two of those groups with the 'cis' moniker), and ignoring that reality causes more problems then it will ever fix. It is not transphobic to prefer dating cis gender people, nor is it transphobic to believe that men & women's sports should be for men & women respectively. Both of these CAN be transphobic if your being a hateful dick about it, but it's not inherently so in holding those opinions.