I have a black and white laser but am considering color for crafting purposes. But the B/W laser has done well for years and rarely needs toner.

I am surprisingly ok with this.

I don’t know what “morally lazy” means as the author never defines the construct. Discord has an uncertain monetization model, sure. It’s not great for privacy. It will, no doubt, follow Doctorow’s “enshittification” model.

And then I’ll just spin up a Mumble server or something. So what? Should I feel bad for using a service while I can? Should I feel bad for having fun conversations with my friends? Maybe not everything has to be a fraught struggle of good vs evil.

I found a job that doesn’t ask me for 50 hours a week and they go to bed at a reasonable hour. But don’t ask me what I’m not spending enough time doing, like working out. Or how much we spend on takeout (way, WAY too much). And on top of that I have pretty great family support.

Basically, it’s hard even under ideal conditions with some less than great compromises.

Something with a mind. The term floating around now is “general artificial intelligence.” My primary objection is that a giant pile of poorly understood machine learning trained on garbage scraped from social media bears no resemblance to a thinking mind and calling it “AI” makes the term practically useless. Where do we draw the line between a complex algo and mind?

Large Language Models and other affiliated algorithms are not AI and no amount of marketing will convince me otherwise. As a result I refuse to call them AI when talking to people about them.

Play Gris, if for no other reason than the art. It’s just so beautiful.

I think your next task is to start modding Skyrim so you can have the ultimate experience of spending more time setting something up only to spend a fraction of that time actually using it. XD