Yeah, well, in the first round of the Presidential Elections the Fascist candidate had the 2nd largest number of votes and the one from the Hard Neoliberal Party (who in their early days wanted to privatize the National Health Service until they discovered that was incredibly unpopular) had the 3rd largest number of votes.

The Revolution was over 50 years ago and a lot of people have forgotten how things used to be before that or simply don’t value genuinely Leftwing conquests like the National Health Service and Universal Education (which have been slowly undermined in the last 2 decades or so) from the short post-revolution power when Leftwing ideals were much more dominant (before things slid into the “2 main parties dominance” system that voting systems with electoral circles and no proportional vote invariably create).

He can refer to the Constitutional Court any legislation coming from Parliament that he thinks might be unconstitutional.

This is important because Justice in Portugal is slow as shit (really, truly, world-beating, stupidly slow) so rather than some unconstitutional shit (probably designed to make some well-connected fatcats even richer) actually coming into effect as Law and spending 10+ years fucking people’s lives whilst it gets challenged in court and works its way up to the top court of the land with the Government spending taxpayer’s money to doggedly defend it all the way until that court finally throws it down, it can go directly from Parliament to the President to that court before it ever affects anybody’s life.

(Having lived in Britain which has no written Constitution, I have learned to value having a Constitution as a second line of defense against political abuse by parties which with a minority of cast votes have parliamentary majorities because the voting system is some undemocratic shit that does not give the same weight to all votes rather than Proportional Vote)

Personally, even though the President has flashier powers such as being able to bring down a government, I think that this specific more technical power of referring legislation directly to the Constitutional Court before it becomes the Law in effect can be far more important in terms of impact in people’s lives, especially in this day and age when politics is pretty crooked and money-driven.

The guy who just got elected, even though he hails from one of the two mainstream parties which have dominated politics in Portugal almost since the start of Democracy in 74 and are pretty rotten, comes from a faction of that party which is actually left of center and is not connected with the crooks that led that party for that last 2 decades, so I have great hopes that he will be more consistent than the last one in using these less flashy powers to stop the kind of unconstitutional shit that screws the many for the good of a few that the neo-liberals who dominate those mainstream parties have often pushed in the last 3 or 4 decades.

Punched Paper Quantum AI is the next Revolution in Computing!

You heard it here first.

Invest Now!!!

Worry not, some of what’s perfectly fine nowadays will eventually be forbidden because how harmful it is for people, from micro-plastics that are being found even in men’s gonads to the excessive amounts of nitrous oxides emitted by diesel engine that kill over ten thousand people per year in Europe alone.

We probably still breathe and eat a lot of highly carcinogenic shit, just different shit from back in the days when asbestos was considered a great fire-proof substance.

Unless things have changed recently LLMs don’t really used slow data stores with very high capacity such as HDDs, at least not beyond the training stage.

The prices that have been pushed up by AI are for GPUs and DRAM (price rises which in turn possibly feed onwards to other kinds of chip done in the same kind of fab), whilst this stuff is magnetic data storage on movable disk plates, a very different tech.

I expect these things at most will only be affected in price very indirectly (for example, if memory prices go up because of all the datacenters targetting AI applications, there might be fewer datacenters set up for other kinds of server side application which are more data-centric, which would impact demand for ultra high-capacity HDDs).

Not that it makes much of a difference to us run-of-the-mill techies as consumers - even if HDDs get cheaper, with many times more expensive GPUs and RAM we can hardly put together new systems using these things, so at best it might just get a bit cheaper to expand one’s large storage NAS (the slower kind just storing data that doesn’t get accessed often, as the other kind uses SDDs).

Yeah, that quoted statement definitly sounds like a massive cope for a profound feeling of emptiness and/or inedequacy.

Whilst my point about The Guardian still stands, it’s a well known saying that the greatest enemy of the Left is the Left :/

The Guardian is very openly pro-Lib Dem, actively participated in the slander campaign against Corbyn including the one where a Jewish Holocaust Survivor was deemed an anti-semite to try and taint Corbyn by association and its columnists very openly say of themselves as being “Opinion Makers”.

These people are the very opposite of a trustworthy and unbiased news source when it comes to left-wing politics in Britain, with the notable exception of Monbiot and Owen Jones.

Sourcing your “information” about internals of left-wing parties from traditionally propagandist hard-neoliberal news media is almost as bad as sourcing it from fascist tabloids.

IMHO, the almost idolatry of the Constitution in the US meant that a what’s essentially a Prototype of Modern Democracy kept getting used without a systemic update for too long and was essentially relying on everybody being a gentleman to work.

Personally the whole part were the Political Pillar being in charge of nominating the top of the Judicial Pillar - the Supreme Court Judges - even though in Democracy those Pillars are supposed to be independent, always felt like a major weakness in the face of Authoritarian encroaching, as did the First Past The Post voting system.

That’s the point I’m trying to make: the flaws in the American system are systemic, making it more easy from autoritarians (not just Trump’s Fascists but also the Oligarchy that stands behind both the Republicans and the Democrats) to control it.

The main difference with the Fascists is how brazen then are in doing so, which the other bunch would be far more discrete (hence which the Prison population in the US was already so large under the “other” political party of the US Duopoly system).

suppress wages in prison workshops, and exempt them from minimum wage

And how is that in any way form or shape a good thing?

Prison forced labor is just Indentured Servitude with extra steps to give it the appearance of legitimacy and fairness.

It seems to me (not at American) that the intention to exploit people who have no other choice was there from the start. Create a structure were you can get cheap/free labor of people who have been deemed by others to be LABEL (in this case, a felon) and deprived of their freedom and you always end up with more and more people being given LABEL and deprived of their freedom so that the can be used as cheap/free labor.

The United States has long been the nation in the World with the highest percentage of people in prison, so one either believes that human beings in the US are different and more prone to crime or that there is a higher incentive in the US than elsewhere at the level of who controls those things to put people in prison and getting cheap or even free work sure sounds a lot like such an incentive.

The well was poisoned from the very start.

As I see it, this is far from the only way in which America is Exceptional but not in a good way and if one thinks further out from that, one can conclude that movements such as MAGA, the way workers are treated and a lot of other phenomenons in the US rooted in not treating ones’ fellow human being as a person are in fact all part of one broad systemic cultural and political problem.

Yeah, if the script only ever schedules the next day’s run, that would work fine.

This crap predates MAGA by a long long time - after all, as somebody else pointed out, the 13th Ammendment of the US constitution explicitly allows slavery for those convicted of crimes.

Whilst MAGA is obviously going to abuse the shit out of this, this kind of infrastructure for Fascism has long been in place and was already used even before MAGA was a twinkling in the eyes of whatever Koch Brother’s Funded Think Tank employee who came up with it.

All it takes is a water pipe painted black zigzagging inside a box which is black inside and has the sun facing side replaced by glass.

You can get hot water from something like that even in Winter.

Mate, I have a Masters in Electronics Engineering and a partial degree in Physics.

I just didn’t want to pull the authoritativeness card out, so instead tried to explain things to you from basic principles.

You’re either confusing some other application with what I was talking about - which was the emitters used in LED light bulbs, the ones which look yellow when they’re switched off, the yellow stuff being the phospor - or you mentally over-generalized something you heard, either to an area were it doesn’t apply or missing the required context to make sense.

The script can be triggered just before and run during the time that’s calculated as the transition from nighttime to daytime.

If that possibility is not taken in account in the implementation there’s a risk that the cron job is scheduled for a bit under 24h later.

It’s basically a critical race condition.

Yet, if you exclude last week’s spike Gold is around its all-time high value, which is over 2x its price when Trump took office.

Meanwhile per this article the price of Bitcoin is lower than when Trump took office.

So the biggest by market valuation cypto of all either isn’t really correlated with people’s expectations of economic crash as you postulate or crypto investors totally disagree with Gold investors about an economic crash approaching.

Personally I’m starting to suspect that the theory that crypto is seen as a protection against economic crashes is either false, outdated or some crypto investors do see it like that but they represent a tiny fraction by value of all trading in that asset class so they’re not the ones shaping crypto prices.

Don’t take this badly but generally when people spout that “their society’s values are different from ours” about how countries like Morocco and Turkey wouldn’t be a fit for the EU what they really mean is “they’re Muslims”.

You haven’t see much of Europe if you think LGBTQ rights are looked at similarly all over.

My own native Portugal used to be pretty homophobic 30 years ago and there are still plenty of people around who think like that even though the country’s culture tends towards perceptiveness rather than judgement.

Or just go to Hungary outside a main city and ask people what they think about Transexuality.

Don’t confuse Northern Europe and Scandinavia with most of Europe.

Frankly whenever I look at a country like Turkey or Morocco I mainly see my own country, Greece or even Spain 50 or 60 years ago, with pretty similar values - though a different main religion - and average levels of education. Pretty backwards by today’s standards, but one can hardly claim Portugal, Greece and Spain weren’t European back then.

Looking at my own country I would say universal education is what made most of the difference in those things you seem to think are “European values”.

The main problem with Morocco is as others pointed out it not being properly Democratic, the whole problem of Western Sahara and its self-determination, the huge wealth-imbalance between it and the EU (read: fear of mass immigration from there) and European Islamophobes (who are not just the European far-right).

Whilst this wouldn’t work for this specific application we’re discussing (no USB support, no wireless), it’s an amazing example of just how little a microcontroller can be nowadays.

The entire spirit of Neoliberal Capitalism is that Regulations and Enforcement of Regulations are bad for business and shouldn’t be done.

This guys’ take is pretty much just a continuation of the takes of lots of publicly celebrated CEOs of the last 4 decades.

You could.

It just makes the design more complex (there’s at least one extra nasty corner case I can think of) and generally doesn’t add that much a performance improvement vs “run every 30 minutes”, to be worth it, IMHO.