DoneWithAllThat

As I’ve gotten older and more moderate in my political leanings I’ve unsurprisingly revisited some of my earlier absolute positions (usually but not always very liberal) in light of real world considerations.

Encryption and communications privacy is a position I’ve actually gotten more “extreme” on. No, I don’t think the government should get to see anyone’s communication if they don’t want it to. Yes, I know that will allow criminals of the worst kinds to communicate secretly. I’m okay with that. The alternatives are all worse.

I’m not sure how many people realize the number of great sci-fi stories that started as anthologies in these magazines. It’s a foundation of the entire genre that often goes entirely unappreciated.

I find interesting that the slow fading of physical media is one thing sci fi has gotten wrong for the last hundred years or so. Even the most futuristic visions involved some kind of physical media and/or connection.

I don’t understand why people act like checking bags is a huge time sink. It’s maybe fifteen minutes at most on a bad day for the bag drop, and I can’t remember the last time I had to wait more than 20 minutes for them to show up on the carousel at my destination (and 20 minutes is super slow, it’s usually more like 10). The only times I’ve really had problems with checking bags is connecting flights when my flight is delayed or canceled and such, and even then while there was some stress over it my bags always got to my destination either when I did or sooner. On the last point the last time I flew international I had a baggage attendant at Heathrow actually call my phone personally to reassure me they had my bag and told me where to go to pick it up when I got to baggage claim.

I’m sure there’s horror stories out there of course, there always is, but 99.99% of the time checking a bag is only marginally less convenient than trying to fit everything in my carryon.

Not criticizing you but it will never not be funny to me that crazy people have tried to legitimize seeing alien spaceships by renaming them from UFOs to UAPs. It’s like the conspiracy theorist version of unhoused.

“Hope <the number two by sales in the US vehicle manufacturer> gets their mojo back” is certainly a take.

Claiming that “mass data collection” by our own government is inherently a natural security risk is not an assertion based on rational evidence.

Like you can just go read the opinion. It goes into detail on exactly this question and is easy to understand.

It is endlessly fascinating to me that people ascribe emotions that individuals experience to organizations, companies, nation-states, etc.

As the article says ByteDance is a massive company with thousands of employees in the US alone. It’s ridiculous to think a corporation of that size operates as if it was a singular (and extremely petty) individual, especially to the detriment of its own self interests.

There’s a dozen potential motivations for pursuing this strategy and none of them boil down to being “pissed”.

I was more struck by the fact that the author thinks anyone would or should care what some random tech journalist thinks about something. Person has opinions, news at eleven.

This is just CRT nonsense.

It’s just you.

Since train fans always like to point this out when it comes to flying: this is how far you can get in 8 hours on the train. It doesn’t include the time to get to the station, the buffer time you need (if your train leaves at 0700 you can’t plan to get there at 06:59), and the time to travel from the destination station to your actual destination. Actual travel time for an 8 hour train ride is probably at least closer to 10 hours if not more.

“Chances are” is not science, it’s just obsessing over the current Scary Thing. You’re just making things up.

Excessive empathy is not a virtue.

What is the relevance of your anecdote? I’m genuinely confused.

The CA DMV test is 20 minutes. Whatever it was in 2008 I sincerely doubt it was five minutes.

Years ago I was hired to do IT for a company that had just massacred like half its workforce. And when I say “just” I mean most of the people I interviewed with were gone when I got there - it happened just a few weeks after I interviewed.

It was so, so surreal. For one thing they decided to consolidate on the second floor of a two story building, so to get to work each day you had to head through the dark and empty part of the building. And it was just like everyone just got up one day and left, at least for a month or two u til we could get all the equipment and stuff off the desks and into storage.

Storage was what had been the gym (or was going to be? Not clear to me), and I just remember rows and rows of tower computers and monitors awaiting a company to come and take it all off our hands.

They had also bought a ton of expensive networking gear (Cisco routers and switches) that they now no longer needed, they just sat in boxes in the server room.

Labs still entirely stocked with gear and computers, meeting rooms with whiteboards still filled with meeting notes, it was all so unreal, almost post-apocalyptic.

This idea was also used in The Algebraist.

You don’t think it’s reasonable to tell your employees that as a condition of employment they have to be at a specific location at specific times?

I’m sorry but all I can think of reading your comment is “but why male models?”.

This article is mostly lifted from a linked articles and is a dupe of yet another article and somehow none of the three saw fit to link to the ruling. Mostly all three are caterwauling about impact without addressing the ruling on its merits which combined with the reluctance to link to the ruling makes me wonder if maybe the legal analysis in it is more compelling than they’d like to admit.

They’re claiming…… tourism is the reason for increased demand? Seriously?

This is by no means true across the country but I’m sure it plays well to the “American public transport sucks” sentiment some folks like to cling to.

Slightly off topic but that site is everything that is wrong with mobile websites. Incredibly short snippets of text intercut with ad after ad, the ads pop in late making the text jump around, a pop up asking me to sign up for some stupid thing, and finally less than thirty seconds into reading it the page is obscured by some loading spinner that I do not have time to wait for so I navigate away. How stupid this all is.

They didn’t have to “gender” it, it’s the Guardian. They don’t write uplifting feel good stories about straight white men.

I was laughing too. Yes the legendary typhoons slamming into SF yearly, how could I forget.

It’s just a fact that in the US that any item over a particular cost is not a fixed cost item. There’s always room for negotiation. It’s not awesome for those bad at haggling but it is what it is and it’s not limited to cars.

I use Designer almost daily and I’m stunned by how good it is. I have zero interest in ever going back to Illustrator. I’m sure there’s pro requirements that only Illustrator has but I’ve not encountered them. For the price it’s simply amazing.

This was absolutely not feasible at the time IP was being developed. There simply wasn’t enough computational power available or good encryption algorithms invented yet. And you can make a reasonable argument that that’s not the responsibility of that layer of the stack.