I generally don’t think that old PCs are that useful. I don’t usually make much use of mine. That said:

• If you don’t have a server and need one that doesn’t require latest-and-greatest hardware to do something, I think that that’s probably a good choice. You already know the hardware. All kinds of things that one might do, fileserving, home automation, whatever. I’ll also mention some less-obvious options below.

• Reserve PC. If you have the space to store it and only have one PC, having a second for if something goes horribly wrong on the first can be helpful. Not so bad these days, since most people have a smartphone, and it’s not so hard to find a computer.

• Alternate OS machine. If you want to maybe use another OS on bare metal, another machine can be a way to do that.

• Print server/3D print server/pen plotter server. A lot of newer printers have their own print server built in, but not all do. I was looking at pen plotters from Bantam Tools the other day. They don’t. Especially with 3D printing and pen plotting, elaborate tasks may take some hours. You don’t want to have to reboot your attached computer, and you might want to put noisy hardware in another room from your main PC.

• Security camera server. Detect motion, log images, maybe notify you. Don’t want to have the load on your main PC.

• Whole-house music PC. Maybe run something like mpd, which has good support for remote control Hook it up to your fancy sound system.

• Guest PC. Most people do have a smartphone or laptop these days, but it might be useful to have one available.

• Router. I’d probably get dedicated hardware for this and run OpenWRT, but you can use a PC for it, if you equip it with suitable hardware.

I don’t on the couch, but occasionally I do on my bed. Not stuff like first person shooters, but less-frentic mouse based stuff.

I have a USB trackball and a USB trackpad, and I’ll use one of those.

I am not as accurate or quick as I am with a mouse with either of those, but both work fine without a rigid, level surface.

EDIT: My problem for use on a bed isn’t really the mouse, but the keyboard. I have used a split ergo keyboard, with one half on each side, but even that isn’t amazing. I don’t have a reasonable way to do much typing if you’re not sitting up.

Clearly someone from five years in Semisimian’s future just gave him the inside scoop.

Probably, but I’d just charge more. More people than Venice wants? Crank up the entry fee. Venice benefits and tourism decreases.

So, thanks, but…that was PugJesus’s alternative community. He’s the only mod, and he appears to have quit the Threadiverse a couple weeks ago.

CLS’s stock price will increase by 3,860.57% over the next five years.

I kind of suspect that what might happen is that it might open the federal government to a lawsuit, in which case the taxpayer foots the bill for any damages, and it is likely the Democrats will be the ones raising taxes and taking the political flak.

I suspect that the same thing may happen with tariffs. The Trump administration is going to effectively run a deficit related to tariffs, because the government is on the hook to pay back to importers at least a large part of the tariffs it exacted. The country is going to have to pay for that, whether via reduced services or increased taxation. Trump is looking to stall on that as long as he can. If he can stall until the next administration, it’s their problem.

It’s a messaging problem, all right.

[email protected]

C’mon, we don’t need YouTube for this.

I think that there’s something of a binary distinction between speaking and non-speaking parts under SAG union rules. Like, it gets significantly more expensive more expensive once someone speaks.

I’m not sure whether a zombie moaning crosses the line into a speaking part.

Russia might amplify it, but I saw a Telegraph article submitted here with a dire headline along those lines, which I imagine was aimed at getting Conservatives riled up.

Assuming that this is the US (and I strongly suspect, many other jurisdictions), your signature doesn’t really need to be your name at all. It just needs to be some distinctive mark that shows your intent to commit to the document. Illiterate people used to use symbols or whatnot.

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WP isn’t as in-depth as I’d like, but it does mention this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature

In the United States, signatures encompass marks and actions of all sorts that are indicative of identity and intent. The legal rule is that unless a statute specifically prescribes a particular method of making a signature it may be made in any number of ways. These include by a mechanical or rubber stamp facsimile. A signature may be made by the purported signatory; alternatively someone else duly authorized by the signatory, acting in their presence and at their direction, may make the signature.[2]

It’s just useful to use your name in cursive. People tend to develop their own cursive writing style and historically lots of people learned to write in cursive (though that may be coming to an end). But…not required.

Side note: I’ve been playing around with fountain pens recently, and I just realized that I’d been writing my "d"s incorrectly for some decades. I’ve spent a lot more time over the years typing, if I need to deal with any significant amount of text, so I really haven’t spent all that much time on my handwriting. I spent a few days slowly retraining decades of muscle memory. I can fairly consistently do it the correct way now, and it actually looks rather nicer. If you want to sit down and practice a bit, you really can make it look nicer, though it’ll take some not-very-exciting time investment where you just handwrite text and tweak how you write based on your output.

It is kinda interesting to see how much tech has overwhelmed the top rankings. I mean, “tech in the US has doing well” has been a thing all of my life, but over the years, it’s really crept up there. Almost everyone there is self-made wealthy in tech.

• Musk: manufacturing, fintech
• Page: tech
• Dell: tech (personal computers…again, manufacturing, not pure software)
• Bezos: tech (well…again, Amazon is also logistics now, though I do kinda think of it as a dot-com, not to mention being a cloud services provider)
• Brin: tech
• Zuckerberg: tech
• Ellison: tech
• Huang: tech (hardware, not software)
• Ballmer: tech
• Buffet: finance
• Ortega: fast fashion (and not in the US:Europe)
• Walton: retailing
• Arnault: luxury goods (and not in the US:Europe)
• More Walton: retailing
• Slim: Varied (and not in the US)
• More Walton: retailing
• Gates: tech
• Zhao: fintech/cryptocurrency (not in the US:China)
• Peterffy: fintech
• Bloomberg: finance, fintech

I mean, outside of Musk not fitting into pure tech, Waltons doing retailing, Buffet being a famous investor, and maybe Bloomberg, depending upon how you classify him, being finance, it’s all tech now. Like, that’s where the big economic growth has happened. The non-tech stuff is outside the US: two Europeans in luxury goods and retailing, and a Mexican in a huge conglomerate.

And in the US, only the Waltons are on there due to simply inheriting a shit-ton of multigenerational wealth.

That was one thing that I wondered about for a moment, like, maybe you have people working very specific types of fields—I’d seen some papers in, like, psychology and stuff talking about human-AI interaction, and maybe this is a really hot thing to be doing to be doing in that field—but this survey was specific to “companion” uses, which I don’t think that would likely include professional use the way it was defined here:

The people who have used LLMs for social, emotional and personal purposes are known as “AI companion users” and a representative sample of 1,000 of them were surveyed to discover how they use their social bots, the nature of their relationships and the impact of their encounters with these systems.

I haven’t played it, but:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2443720/Concord/

All Reviews: Mixed (849)

Generally, if it’s got a “Mixed” rating on Steam, it’s not going to do well.

I am pretty confident that that post-dated 1959.

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Yeah. Older than I would have guessed, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi_Magic_Wand

Availability: 25 April 1968–present

“Fight”, not “find”. He was telling them to keep posting favorable posts in response to the guy. Which is, on one hand, is less concerning, but on the other hand…he’s deploying FBI personnel to participate in flamewars on Twitter with a troll who insulted him.

That Twitter user must be laughing hysterically right now.

He seems to be enjoying it.

https://x.com/IfindRetards?lang=en

We got Jake Tapper to say “retard” on CNN.

Wild times.

That comment presently has 15k likes and 648k views, for Director Patel’s statistics.

These are some wild numbers, looking at them together.

So, basically, it’s heavily disproportionately loaded towards high-education users. 25% users have post-graduate degrees.

https://www.ccdaily.com/2025/09/datapoints-educational-attainment-in-the-u-s/

This has 14.9% of the US age 25 and older falling into that group.

But it’s also disproportionately loaded towards black and Latino users. This has 30% of the userbase being non-Latino black.

https://blackdemographics.com/black-population-in-the-u-s-reaches-51-6-million/

That’s 12.7% of the US.

I wouldn’t blink at either one of those statistics in isolation.

But…both black and Latino groups, particularly black, typically have lower levels of educational attainment in the US.

I would expect that to mean that there is either some really high concentration in one area—like, a exceptionally high level of black users with graduate degrees are using AI, enough to throw the numbers that far from overall proportions in society, or you have different strong “clusters” of different groups using AI—like, there is a really high level of black AI users and a really strong cluster of high-education users.

considers

It does say that users are disproportionately below 50, and that would explain some of it. Younger generations are both more educated and less white than older ones.

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https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/07/30/most-common-age-among-us-racial-ethnic-groups/

Would need to go dig up demographics for each cohort to figure out what proportional numbers would be, but just glancing at that, that’s definitely not going to explain nearly all of that. The groups are roughly equally-sized for younger age cohorts, so that’s be a fair bit of that on age, but there’s still gonna be a substantial education split.

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https://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=72

For the 2021-2022 school year, this has whites being granted about six times as many masters or doctorates as either black or Latino students, so that’ll be a pretty big educational gap even for younger age cohorts. Yeah. Huh.

drums fingers

Well, I dunno. It’s an interesting pair of figures, though.

39% said they occasionally tell AI things that they would not tell other people.

I would be a lot less concerned about this were it not for the sneaking suspicion that most users (a) probably are using cloud-based LLMs rather than local and (b) have no idea what the rules on data privacy regarding their conversations on said service are.

To clarify: you’re talking about the Android onscreen keyboard? If so, in what way has it gotten worse? Less-accurate predictions of words?