admiralteal
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I, for one, could not be made to care one iota about what Jack Dorsey has to say. He’s a weird little fuck, and only getting weirder.
Time long past to be a lot more honest about these tech billionaires – pretty much every one of was just immensely, immensely lucky, and until they can talk honestly about how nearly everything to do with their success compared to any other mid-level software developer was just blind luck, we should assume everything coming out of their mouths is pure grandiose delusion.
Google loves to have entirely ai-driven moderation which makes decisions that are impossible to appeal. They are certain that one AI team lead is more valuable than 20 customer service agents. Meanwhile, YouTube shorts is still a pipeline to Nazidom and death by electrical fire.
Might be the worst customer service in the tech industry, though that’s a highly competitive title.
They also don’t offer replacement parts (even major parts like the charging case) for their headphones. So I guess they’re intended to be a disposable product. Evil shit.
If you’ve ever had an entirely positive interaction with Google customer service… you’d probably be the first.
The user above is just one of those guys who looks at anything the dems do and thinks, look at this bitch eating crackers.
Nothing good can ever be celebrated or praised. It has to always be bad.
Man, I keep getting this incredibly Mandela-effect like feeling that this entire Vegas tunnel project was something I made up.
Glad to see news that it wasn’t. The idea is just so colossally and obviously stupid compared to actual transit investment that it really FEELS like something a lefty type would’ve made up as a hypothetical to illuminate the kind of idiotic shit happens in American urban planning.
I have not encountered anything broken, aside from maybe binary app docstring stuff (e.g., automated example testing).
On the contrary, everything seems precise, reliable, and trustworthy. That’s the thing to really like about Rust – you can be pretty much fearless in it. It’s just difficult. I die a bit in time any time I have a return type that looks like Box<dyn Fn(&str) -> Result<Vec<String>, CustomError>> or some shit . Honestly, the worst thing about Rust is probably that you have to manually specify heap vs stack when the compiler could easily make those determinations itself 99% of the time based on whether something is sized.
I like Rust a lot, philosophically and functionally… but it is WAY harder. Undeniably very hard.
Just try and do anything with, say, a linked list. It’s mind-boggling how hard it is to make basic things work without just cloning tons of values, using obnoxious patterns like .as_mut(), or having incredibly careful and deliberate patterns of take-ing values, Not to mention the endless use of shit like Boxes that just generates frustrating boilerplate.
I still think it’s a good language and valuable to learn/use, and it’s incredibly easy to create performant applications in it once you mastered the basics, but christ.
Highly recommend Volts to everyone interested.
David Roberts is EXTREMELY practical, politically. He’s very no-nonsense, but gives clear and simple reasons for why he categorizes stuff as nonsense when he does. He’s not some techno-wizard optimist, but he’s also clear about how much tech we DO have and how much is achievable on realistic timelines if we just commit. He’s also clear about what the obstacles are, and even sometimes gives useful calls to action.
His most recent episode on nuclear is an almost perfect example of this. A lot of people are VERY enthusiastic about nuclear. He had Jigar Shah from the DOE on to talk about the field extensively – the upsides and downsides, what technologies work and make sense, what technologies are just mis-advertised, what technologies are total vaporware, why it’s so hard to build nuclear in the US (hint: it’s not the anti-nuke environmental lobby), and all that. Fabulous interview.
I definitely trend towards doomerism on all this stuff, but it’s good to be reminder the tech really is there decarbonize a LOT and VERY FAST, and probably even achieve planetary net zero or even net negative within my lifetime. Just have to convince people the juice is worth the squeeze – which it undeniably is when the entire ecosystem is at stake.
The most charitable read is that it’s an attempt to build hype among powerusers by letting them own a piece of it.
In a vacuum, that’s actually kind of nice.
A less charitable reading is that they’re targeting the users who have flukes and blowholes to try and get even more money from them as part of a media campaign to make it seem like they truly value those users.
There’s just zero merit to these “people on the internet are saying X” stories.
Nothing of value to sourcing a few retweets, ticktock duets, instagram stories, or whatever the fuck TMTMTM version of it you get.
Actual street interviews with random schlubs are far, far more informative than this crap. The internet is huge and you can find literally any opinions on it. Sourcing these anecdotes is absolutely the trashiest tier of journalism and anyone writing one of these stories should think hard about an immediate career change.
Run a fucking poll if you want to write a story about public opinion.
The world will be a better place the day after every serious news media organization leaves twitter and tells all their journalists they cannot use it as anything other than an original source to what a specific public figure has to say.
You have fundamentally misunderstood the interoperability that is being discussed re: podcasts and drawn a totally spurious conclusion.
You can connect to nearly any podcast using as little as an RSS reader. You can build your own podcast app TOMORROW and that app will be able to access pretty much any podcast from any network (with very narrow exceptions for the worst actors, e.g. Spotify exclusives, NPR One, etc).
The only purpose of the various platforms is boosting discovery. There’s nothing oligarchic happening there; for pretty much all of them listing your podcast is free. There’s also absolutely no necessity to use any particular platform’s discovery tools or to list your podcast on any platform. It’s totally fine to distribute it yourself, via a link, using whatever means pleases you. Your “podcast discovery platform” could well be your local bookclub’s email list – and while the quality of that discovery may be worse, it in no way inherently limits what you can access. Even if you use that platform’s app, it should still generally be possible to add any podcast via RSS URL (if any major apps don’t support this, they’re behaving in a deviant way).
There is absolutely nothing oligarchic in general. At least for now, so long as the fucking fuck fucks at Spotify don’t get their way.
Spotify is actively and aggressively trying to be the ones to break podcasts by having their spotify exclusives.
Even things like Patreon bonus episodes aren’t a problem – they still are sent out via RSS. Still use the interoperable standard. You can even share the URL with people you know, if you feel like it.
The bad actors creating true app-exclusive content need to be called out, shamed, and stopped. Even if it is NPR.
Analog cameras also do not catch an image exactly as-is. Most likely, the idea of a “true” image of exactly how a thing exists in the real world is just a fantasy. This is qualia. An image is definitionally subjective. Just look at the history of film technology and the racial biases it helped perserve.
But there’s undeniably a huge difference between how you interpret and commit the photons going through the lens versus entirely inventing photons going through the lens.
I had some French cousins we would talk to a little bit at the time, and I remember their descriptions of the early internet were just absolutely bizarre in comparison with the minitels.
In those days, I’m sure every major region and country had vastly different experiences.
But yeah, at least my experience in the US was that AIM was huge. My entire peer group was connected through AIM. That and memorized land line phone numbers.
God, I remember in the early-ish days explaining what browsers were to AOL users.
It honestly felt pretty early in AOL days that people were mostly just using it for email, chatrooms, and otherwise as a web browser on the regular, non-AOL internet. Then AIM becoming more popular as time went on, but eventually third-party clients totally obviated that in a lesson Google would learn from well (and their takeaway was to destroy Jabber/XMPP with great prejudice before they lose control over their users).
Explaining parents that all they needed to do was open another browser – literally any other browser – while AOL was running and they could go to the websites with it was rough. “AOL has you connected to the internet already, you don’t need to use it to go to infoseek.com” or whatever.
Whenever they finally did it it seemed like magic. WOW, how does this connect to AOL! Then they’d close AOL and disconnect the modem and tell me the other browser was broken.
I remember all my friends convincing me to switch to Opera because it had tabs and that was revolutionary.
By that same line of argument, there are myriad ways to be progressive but only a single way to be conservative. Which is really only true theoretically. In practice, most people who identify as conservative actually have very specific policy preferences for how they want their society to evolve. But at least the way the word is used it has an intended meaning like this.
I mean heck, with the right parameters and conditions doing things like rolling back regulations and appealing to traditional values is progressive. For example look at the advocacy of Strong Towns, who in (very) broad strokes are pushing for a return to more traditional urban development patterns in order to help cities return to safer and more financially sustainable models. If you had a mind to do so you might define this as conservative progressivism, which isn’t really a contradiction at all.
Traditionally left and right were not “economic” terms. They were the revolutionaries and the monarchists. And the idea that economic politics as separate from other kinds of politics I kind of reject too.
“Left” isn’t really much of an identity definition anyway.
Right is clearly aligned with the greater political body of the small-c conservative movement. Preserve existing power structures, resist social progress, prop up ‘traditional’ values (i.e., the values that match the preferences of your tribe justified by whatever histrionic nonsense you can think of).
The left is really only defined in opposition to the right these days. Liberals, socialists, progressives, Marxists, anarchists, you name it and all the shades in between. The common identity of “the left” is just… not conservative.
Which means I agree with you. Leaning left just means leaning away from right. It doesn’t really tell you what specific policies the person wants, just what policies they reject. And center/middle/“moderate” has no particular meaning in this day and age.
We shouldn’t even need to “remove” qualified immunity. We do, but you we shouldn’t. Qualified immunity already excludes violations of statutory/constitutional rights. It already shouldn’t be protecting pretty much any incompetent cops. Showing it was a violation of training – that is, that the officer was incompetent – should be enough to re move the protection.
The original standard as applied to police required they be able to show they were acting in good faith in a situation where the law is not clear. For Christ’s sake it was established by an Earl Warren decision – from probably the ONLY time in US history the SCOTUS has mostly been a force that strengthened civil rights instead of deleting them – and it somehow has become this bulwark of the police state over time.
Even now it is supposed to be a 2 part test: first, can the official show they believed in good faith they were behaving lawfully and second was the conduct objectively reasonable. Most police abuse shouldn’t pass either pillar of that test.
It isn’t even originally statutory. It came from the SCOTUS legislating from the bench.
The idea that qualified immunity should protect police is utterly absurd to begin with. Qualified immunity is what stops a bureaucrat for being sued for stamping approval on a zoning change according to the policies of his job. It’s just a category mistake to apply it to 95% of police activities.
The insurance solution sounds good until you remember it’s the taxpayer that foots the bill and a private industry that reaps the profit. The cost is basically external to the department so it is unlikely to seriously change their behaviors absent a separate and more complete cultural shift to one where the police are viewed as public servants instead of… well, police.
My memory idles on around 3341MiB with a browser and just a few basic daemons like Syncthing used in mint cinnamaon. 4GB is pretty tight unless you are willing to make some behavioural changes or use a less friendly distro. But 8GB is more than enough.
Different story trying to run VMs on my server, though.
Traffic violations is an almost perfect example of a place where people pin all the biggest problems on poor exercises of individual responsibility when really it’s almost entirely and issue of road engineering and urban design.
We build streets that encourage bad behavior and then get mad when the bad behavior happens.
Even behaviors people consider quite aberrant like street racing can only happen because we build race tracks in cities and then try to pretend they’re something else.
Or take drunk driving. Of course people are going to drive drunk when your entire society is structured around driving being the only way a reasonable person gets from point a to point b… This doesn’t forgive the bad behavior, but taking a firm moral position here instead of listening to the explanation and making a change is not going to protect any lives.
In the first place, you can’t fix bad driving with enforcement. You can only punish it after it already happened. Pretty much no one is going to stop driving badly because pretty much nobody intended to drive badly.
You do not fix road safety with an enforcement-based solution. All the money sent to police to try to keep the roads safe is money that could have actually been spent on engineering solutions to keep the road safe and instead is now pissed away into the wind.
Well, I certainly don’t get 10 hours, more like 5-6, but have also never in my life and hopefully never will need to sit in the same public place for 10 continuous hours using my notebook. God help me, my life is so off the rails if that ever happens that I don’t even want to consider it.
The rest of those things my budget notebook does just fine. Maybe if I used these touchpad shortcuts that the Mac offers it would change my life, but I’ve always massively preferred navigating the OS with the keyboard and have always found the way Mac application windows and taskbars work totally unitiutive and fighty.
On the whole though, even if I accept everything you said at face value, it’s still just… not an argument for “there is no alternative”. Seems to me my ancient ASUS is a perfectly reasonable alternative, especially considering it was a less than a third the price of the Macbook even when it was new. Plus it’s repairable. I can open it up and change out components myself, with just a screwdriver.
I hear this all time to time and I just don’t understand it.
My 9-year-old Windows laptop does literally everything I need a mobile notebook to do (which unfortunately includes a bunch of software like AutoCAD which just gives a double middle finger to Linux). It’s reliable, boots quickly, doesn’t frequently bug out, has more than enough battery to never make me stressed and scrambling for outlets, and all these things. It’s windows 10 and not signed into an MS account. It can run powershell, python scripts, all those little sugar things that make computers less horrible to use. I’m not forced into any weird proprietary rabbit holes by the OS and have all MS telemetry shut down on it.
If not for bad actors like AASHTO or AutoDesk, I’m quite confident the notebook would be working just as well with something like Mint Linux on it.
What the hell is it that Macbooks are doing that my notebook can’t? I just don’t get it.
This is a big part of why I dislike consolidating downloading and viewing.
I’ve been using PerfectViewer on a tablet for viewing for ages. I’m sure there’s a better one and would be game for recommendations, but I am very used to this app and its quirks.
There exist any number of ways to download and sync the chapters to my device. I currently mostly use the mangadex-dl script and a syncthings folder and it’s no trouble. And all my read chapters I can just move into an archive drive where I’ll have them if anything ever happens.
This is standard practice with media. You use something like MPV for viewing and the downloading is handled elsewhere.
I ride a bike 95% of the time for my trips, but I have to own and maintain a car because the city I live in, which is FAR better than most in the US, still doesn’t make it possible to let me function without needing an occasional car trip. And the box hardware store near me almost never has its light truck rentals available for those occasional errands. To get to the nearest proper vehicle rental place… you guessed it, I’d have to get in a car.
I was very seriously investigating a Kei import for my needs. They’re cheap, small, easy to maintain, and insanely versatile. I arrived at doing this after researching what kinds of small, reliable trucks I might be able to find for my rare uses and ultimately gave up – all of them are roadboats these days.
Then some state bureaucrat arbitrarily declared that imported keis were somehow less safe for their drivers than motorcycles, bikes, and scooters and so cannot be registered any longer. There’s basically no vehicles for sale that I would want and find useful at this point.
I’ve honestly been looking into setting up a trailer for my bike for hauling a sheet or two of plywood. It might be my best overall option, since I can’t fit them in my ancient Honda.
All that to say: yeah, there’s no middleground anymore. There’s ONLY road yachts for people who view them as status symbols and transit vans for people who actually have work to get done, but either way too expensive for me to justify.
Rental cars are still a thing. Plus they get regularly cleaned and you aren’t responsible for their maintenance/depreciation.
If you live in a city – and if you are getting municipal water/sewer, you definitely do – there’s a car rental place close enough that will doubtless be happy to do a same-day rental.
The car rental may be expensive, but you’re comparing it to owning and maintaining that car year-round for those occasional trips. And if that car is anything bigger than a small suv, it doubtless costs more than the EV would’ve in real terms.
People also forget that rental cars exist.
For the handful of actual long-range drives a typical person needs to take in a given year, it’d almost certainly be cheaper to rent a different car rather than spend extra to get a huge-range EV. But relatively short-range EVs are basically not a thing because of how universal these range anxieties are. Not to even mention that the available rentals aren’t a great situation either, given how universal it is for people to own these long-range vehicles.
Our society is a damn prisoner’s dilemma.
The crazy thing is, outside of the US, small and cheap vehicles are the norm. Both ICE and EV.
I’m still convinced that if a major automaker brought a line like they have in the likes of China or France to the US market, they’d be hugely popular. That people WANT cheap vehicles and are willing to compromise on size to get them – that the reason vehicles are getting pushed bigger is because that compromise is not an option. I think there’s massive untapped demand for things like mini city cars and kei trucks. But the profit margins would be lower for the manufacturer, so even if it was still a profitable business model the US automakers don’t do it and exert their influence in various ugly ways to prevent it from happening (e.g., all the states that have used administrative levers to ban registration of imported keis based on total nonsense safety arguments).
One of its primary purposes was literally as a distraction to prevent investment in traditional transportation infrastructure like trains. When a car maker is suggesting some kind of strange new transportation technology, be skeptical always.
And it wasn’t entirely unsuccessful. Vegas got duped on it (plus boring company) pretty badly, for example. Idiot suckers. But it wasn’t successful enough for the auto mogul Elon Musk to continue throwing money at it I suppose.
A shame the writers of the law didn’t have good enough knowledge of the underlying technology to mandate not just the USB C connector, but specific USB C standards. The fact that USB C cables are very much “you can’t even tell what it does without plugging it in” is a bit of a nightmare.
But on the other hand, there’s always changes for further revisions in the future.
It cannot be automated or systematized because neural networks are the tool you use to defeat systems like that. If there’s a defined, objective test, a neural network can train for/on that test and ‘learn’ to ace it. It’s just what they do.
The only way to test for ‘true’ intelligence would be to perfectly define it first, such that when the NN aced the test that would prove intelligence. That is, IF you could perfectly define intelligence, doing so would more or less give you all the tools you needed to create it.
All these people claiming we already have general AI or even anything like it have put the cart so far before the horse.
You mean Half Life: Full Dive, followed by Half Life: Full Dive 2. The second in a trilogy never to be finished.