The cruelty.

Revel in the hedonic treadmill for too long - with nearly every human experience available to you at a moment’s notice - like the wealthiest few tend to do, eventually the only joy you can feel comes from dominating other people.

Your soul.

The solution is to stop treating politics like a brief interruption of your normal life around election time, after which you go back to being a passive pawn - which is what most people in the USA have been doing since Reagan at the latest.

Join a union, stand for local elections, organize strikes. All year round. If you cannot afford to do so right now, start/join local mutual help communities designed to save enough collective time for one of their members to do so. Reject the hyperindividualism injected into your culture by the wealthiest few permille specifically to hinder your ability to gain collective bargaining power.

Your only bloodless path towards victory is creating a convincing enough economic threat to the personal wealth of elected politicians as a balancing counter force.

Continue to fail to do so (as a people) and all voting for the lesser evil does is buy you time you’re then wasting.

Sure! But it’s not particularly sophisticated. Other than staple recipes (like e.g. vegetables stews) I learned while growing up, when there’s a product I was previously dependent on buying ready-made that gets enshittified by the food industry so much I’m unwilling to pay the full asking price, I start looking into the recipe for it and experiment to calibrate quality, time efficiency, and material cost to the exact tradeoff I consider best for me. Frozen pizza vs self made pizza being one example.

My joy in cooking, aside from the above optimization process I find fun, comes from knowning I pay less money to eat a better quality (and almost always less unhealthy) meal than I’d otherwise be able to. Once I have a recipe dialed in, it also requires virtually no thinking to get done, which is the opposite of my daily work; that’s the “unwinding” for me. I can then also combine it with listening to some audiobook or TTRPG actual play / podcast.

Due to this depth-first approach my actual list of recipes isn’t incredibly large, but it’s enough to never get boring by now, at least.

Off-what? You mean in meatspace?

Jokes aside: Reading. Designing and playing Pen&Paper RPGs. Cooking.

Well, I’m assuming the comically timed cold and hot water events aren’t actually part of the curse, but the Manga/Anime format. So, technically not at will; but so far I’ve had virtually 100% control over when I’m submerged in enough water, so that’s why “essentially”.

Ranma 1/2. Being able to switch between male and female body essentially at will would be great.

If you want to do the least amount of tech support: Fedora Kinoite.

• Answer questions (with references) about source code and documentation
• Add clear-bounded features to a pre-existing codebase
• Transpile between programming languages

Stuff I can do myself perfectly well, but the results - after postprocessing - are indistinguishable from me having done so. Even when accounting for everything (including hallucinations) the time savings are real: Renewables-powered electricity is cheaper than my attention. By a lot.

Caveat: This only works if you’re already a domain expert and if you do it exclusively for too long, you might be at risk of ceasing to be such an expert. Don’t use it to try and do the thinking for you.

Proprietary frontier LLMs in companies riddled with highly suspect business practices.

My local LLM setup has absolutely been making the equivalence of positive cashflow for me since gemma 4 and qwen 3.8: I need less total time for several groups of annoying (but necessary) tasks, which means my productivity is up and I can use the rest as my own free time.

Yikes. I mean, I get that not everyone’s threat model requires isolating every agent harness into its own microvm jail with externally filtered network access and no [persistent filesystem] write access to anything but allowed project files, but that’s…

That’s “running with weapon in hand at a secret military facility and hoping the guards won’t shoot you” levels of stupidity.

How tf this even gets patented?

It hasn’t, yet, afaict. Applying for a patent != it being granted.

As to the latent question of why Microsoft seems confident enough to try:

Because the times of a patent requiring to clear a reasonable inventive threshold (to actually be a motor for innovation) are far behind us. These days, patents’ principal (not exclusive) purpose imho is so big corporations can sue each other to grab some of the others’ earnings.

Maybe I’m too sleep deprived, but why does “built from two blueprints” equal “is two organs”? When the two base components fuse they become one self-contained unit.

Because only the sound of orphans being crushed can fill the dragon’s empty heart with joy. Collectively, we could defeat it, but it might burn down all the land in the fight…

Also, most people cheer for the sacrifices - it’s not their children, after all.

Apparently you can’t fucking read. […]

That would be you, because you keep being wrong with virtually every single line. Here’s how it goes with pseudosignatures:

You make an account with Valve. Valve has previously received the appropriate certificate to perform age verification from the state, so Valve does not communicate with the state now: They present their certificate to the hardware chip in YOUR ePerso, which then creates a pseudonymous signature to send back to Valve that digitally proves the legal age of whoever the ePerso belongs to (and nothing more).

But go ahead and keep licking that technofascist boot.

No thanks, but you go right ahead - someone entrenched in blind ideology is for sure not an ideal mark.

Have you even bothered to do any research at all into what pseudosignatures are and how they can be used? Or are you just trolling?

Valve could simply set up an instance of an eID server software and get a digital certificate for it authorized by our respective national PKI chain. Functionally the same to how TLS certificate chains work. There is zero technical need for any information to flow between Valve and any other party - the state or otherwise - about who is being age verified. And Valve would not be able to get any information about you other than what I’ve already explained.

Seriously, the brainrot on here seems to be as bad as on Reddit. And btw: This has been state-of-the-art for more than ten years.

I agree that social hierarchies are a feature of homo sapiens, hence why any good form of governance should be based on restricting our worst instincts. That’s what the original liberalism improved with the separation of political power into executive, legislative, and judicate branches. Unfortunately, the same was not done for economic power, which - most liberal democracies - allowed to keep concentrating with few to no safeguards.

The eID of the ePerso supports pseudosignatures, which allows the seller to only get to know “This ePerso belongs to someone of legal age who also knows its PIN” and the state to only know “someone I [the state] authorized to perform age verification did so”. That is privacy-preserving by any reasonable measure.

They’re not. The seller just has to verify customer age, same as when e.g. buying alcohol in the supermarket or entering a gambling hall.

Valve has simply been refusing to do so, even though eID makes privacy-preserving age verification trivial, frankly.