I used to make comics. I know that because strangers would look at my work and immediately share their most excruciatingly banal experiences with me:
— that time a motorised wheelchair cut in front of them in the line at the supermarket;
— when the dentist pulled the wrong tooth and they tried to get a discount;
— eating off an apple and finding half a worm in it;
every anecdote rounded of with a triumphant “You should make a comic about that!”
Then I would take my 300 pages graphic novel out of their hands, both of us knowing full well they weren’t going to buy it, and I’d smile politely, “Yeah, sure. Someday.”
“Don’t try to cheat me out of my royalties when you publish it,” they would guffaw and walk away to grant comics creator status onto their next victim.
Nowadays I make work that feels even more truly like comics to me than that almost twenty years old graphic novel. Collage-y, abstract stuff that breaks all the rules just begging to be broken. Linear narrative is ashes settling in my trails, montage stretched thin and warping in new, interesting directions.
I teach comics techniques at a university level based in my current work. I even make an infrequent podcast talking to other avantgarde artists about their work in the same field.
Still, sometimes at night my subconscious whispers the truth in my ear: Nobody ever insists I turn their inane bullshit nonevents into comics these days, and while I am a happier, more balanced person as a result of that, I guess that means I don’t make comics any longer after all.
Yeah, terrific use for a mini PC. Will some self hosters and home labbers spit bile at the thought? Probably. It’s a matter of personal requirements.
Basically, like you say, most mini PCs are quiet, power efficient, and just carry that bit more oomph than a SBC.
For context, Rock Paper Shotgun is a gaming site, which is why the reviewer focuses so heavily on game performance on different mini PCs. Unsurprisingly, the answer to the title isn’t an unequivocal “yes”, but some of the little lunch boxes fare quite well despite their limited specs.
A more accurate title would be “Should gamers bother with mini PCs,” but given their audience that would be superfluous 🙂 I think mini PC gaming will continue to be a niche interest, but there are certainly other and probably better uses for the tiny computers.
Yeah, the only threat to Big Tech is that they might sink a lot of money into training material they’d have to give away later. But releasing the material into the Public Domain is not exactly an improvement for the people whose data and work has been used without consent or payment.
“Congratulations, your rights are still being violated, but now the data is free to use for everyone”.
Ooh, that is salty! Will give it a try next time the family isn’t around to turn up their noses at my kitchen experiments.
Yeah, Nutella… I think it was the banana+pizza search query that sent me into crêpe-adjacent dessert territory.
I’m genuinely curious, can’t find many banana pizza recipes that aren’t smeared with nutella as well. I assume this is a white pizza base since you mention mascarpone? Then banana topping with a sprinkle of grated hard cheese?
Tell me more, I’m a glutton for punishment.
And in your understanding, Google are somehow superheroes swooping in from on high by … putting the thumbscrews on a union website?
I get you have an undefined grudge against publishers, but you’re kind of off the mark here.
Hardly. The lesser evil perhaps, but in any context that includes Google there’s never a doubt who’s actually the bigger culprit.
Ugh, sorry to hear about your experiences. Yeah, I’m not going to bat for all bus drivers. I’m speaking in favour of having a human onboard, because the passengers aren’t necessarily an ideal crowd either…
The role of being a proxy authority figure can definitely turn some asshole drivers further to the dark side… I don’t want to come off as defending those.
Yeah, the reasoning seems to have been “Think how much we’ll save on driver salaries! Plus, the computer will never unionise or cause a fuss about hours.” That’s the only arguments I can think of.
At the same time, I can think of several times I’ve been glad to have a human driver on the bus, mostly to do with obnoxious fellow travelers…
Perhaps the real question is, are we ready for a world without bus drivers? I think they’re a net positive in the daily commute.
I’m sort of okay with driverless trains — they are pretty much/ideally limited to the railway tracks. This has too many possibilities for error for my taste.
So close, and yet…
The “market economy” is the death cult. The notion that somehow market forces are inevitable, natural powers is the logical fallacy.
We are so primed to capitalist market thinking that we accept its dogma. As Frederic Jameson said, at this point it is actually easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
It isn’t the “rot economy”; It’s the Economy, Stupid.
I mean, I get the joke of using that expression in the context of a chat named after The matrix, but it’s an in-group jargon that mostly the terminally online will get.
LOL, you completely lost me at “rozzers”!
The Register failed in their due diligence by not clarifying from the beginning that this is a different Matrix chat than the open standard. They amended the mistake with an update to the post (quoted here in OP), but that is placed at the end of an article that not everybody is going to read all the way through.
IMHO this needs a rewrite to make clear from the outset that the Matrix protocol and matrix.org are not affiliated with the criminal chat service. As it stands, even with the correction, it looks like character assassination of a perfectly legal open source project.
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No worries, The Register hid the clarification about the two different networks way down at the end, so it’s an easy mistake. I honestly think they need to put that note at the beginning to avoid confusion.
Read the linked article; this was a different network using the same name.
Semantics. If person A is protected by privacy rights in her jurisdiction, but her data is scraped by project B from one where such rights conveniently aren’t legally respected, A should still be able to expect some way of injunction.