JoshTriplett

> What happens when you run out of banks

There are many, many banks and credit unions out there. Not all of them treat customer service as less important than whatever optimization they were trying to do.

> A few years ago I got an "Ok" TV, sold in Germany, house-brand of Saturn/Mediamarkt.

I'm guessing this is probably on par with Sceptre TVs in the US.

> My next purchase is gonna be a projector, so I hope those also don't get infested.

Many of those are very sensibly going the route of saying "we assume you want some kind of separate smart-TV stick, so here's a compartment for it with power and HDMI". Not all of them, but many.

> I happened to walk past a branch of my bank, and remembered my debit card is playing up due to wear-and-tear, so I popped in to order a replacement. I made the request and the first response was "do you have our banking app, you can do it on there?". "No".

I switched banks over something similar.

I'd had an account with Wells Fargo (and before that with First Interstate before Wells Fargo bought them), dating all the way back to when I was a kid. I'd used that account for everything, for 20+ years, and kept all my assets in there.

I regularly went into the branch to do certain transactions, like making deposits or withdrawals, for any number of reasons. (This was long before you could do any kind of remote check deposit.)

And the teller decided to provide an overt reminder suggesting to do this via the ATM rather than talking to a teller.

That day, I requested a cashier's check for my entire balance, and went to another bank to put it in my account there.

It's no longer possible to buy any non-low-end TV that is not smart. "Vote with your wallet" doesn't help you much if there aren't any good candidates to vote for.

Among other things, it's less about searching the web, and more about reliably surfacing your history and bookmarks and already open tabs.

That's a trademark issue, not a copyright issue.

> I do cringe when people insist on "an + h" where the h is in fact invariably pronounced, as in "an historic occasion".

Some people do in fact say "istoric", which seems largely like an affectation.

And cigarette companies wouldn't have manipulated the levels of nicotine in their cigarettes if it didn't work.

> He points out the value of introspection, which the literary culture has in spades, but the scientific culture utterly lacks.

I think you're drastically overgeneralizing. There exist many scientists who think about the impact and ethics of their work, and choose what to work on accordingly, as well as trying to discourage or mitigate harms.

There aren't necessarily enough, but I wonder how much of that is actually lack of introspection, rather than lack of being in a position where their reflections are able to amount to much. I wish everyone were empowered to follow their ethics without worrying about their next paycheck.

> If we get the worst outcomes from AGI, the scientists who worked so hard to enable it are unlikely to reflect deeply about it.

If we get the worst outcomes from AGI, which are also the modal outcomes from AGI if we don't thread the needle, there won't be anyone left to reflect.

Which he described as "solving the AI alignment problem".

Some UK speakers pronounce "H" as "haitch" (with a non-silent leading 'h'), not "aitch". Which leads to "a haitch tee ...".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H#Name

> Funny tidbit: "missile" used to be an adjective, "a missile weapon" = "a weapon than can be sent/thrown".

Related bit of comedy:

> Note also that the correct term for 'a missile to be deployed against "anti-missile missiles"' is not "anti anti-missile missile." It's "anti anti-missile-missile missile." You're always supposed to have one more "missile" than "anti," because otherwise nothing will blow up.

-- https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2005-03-16

> It's more like "locks are illegal because the police might need to get in".

Same idea, yeah. One of the issues with "TSA-approved" locks is that the corresponding keys are widely available. We should not expect a government backdoor key to be secured any better than that.

> "See! The government is trying to pick all our locks"

Them having to bring lockpicks (or more commonly a battering ram) would be preferable. This is more like "all locks and locksmiths must only manufacture locks that can be opened with one of a handful of TSA-approved backdoor keys".

*SKUs

Unfortunately, in practice most PC vendors get paid to bundle a giant pile of bloatware/malware/adware on the system, and they eagerly accept those payments because PCs are a low-margin business. So if your refund actually represented the amount the vendor spent, you'd end up paying them more to have a system without Windows.

The most obnoxious aspect of that: I specifically have my texts accessible on my laptop, but some 2fa authentication texts get blocked via that mechanism in favor of a message saying "look at this message on your phone".

> I find it funny that people complain about emotional blunting when that is the entire purpose of the drug.

The ideal would be to blunt the negatives but not the positives. The effect of some of the older antidepressants can be to blunt both, across the board.

Some of the newer atypical antidepressants can address depression without making everything flat.

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

I think he's saying the opposite: that "clever" attempts to work around the license aren't things a judge is going to appreciate.

> If people feel that benefits aren't going strictly to the intended recipients the sense of fairness that underlies the system is eroded.

And in an ideal world, you then say "that will literally cost you more money than not doing it", and the argument ends.

In practice, gatekeeping on government programs is primarily pushed for by people who don't think the programs should exist at all. The Venn diagram of the set of people who will withdraw their support for programs without such gatekeeping, and the set of people who mostly don't support such programs in the first place, is close to a circle.

Disappointing that this seems to only be a "daily" game, and not have a "just play" mode that uses random words. First thing that I look for with any game that presents itself as "daily" is "where's the non-daily mode".

In practice, the government spends far more trying to prevent the boogeyman of people who "shouldn't" get benefits receiving them than any actual fraud would ever cost.

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

This seems like it's heavily AI-written.

Personally, I'd recommend trillium. Great server and client both.

Android is much, much more open. You can run an SSH server, run things like Termux or a full Linux VM, use more capable synchronization like Syncthing and give it real access to files you want to sync, run alternative app stores and more Open Source apps, and otherwise have more control over your device. It's not perfect, and I'm eagerly awaiting even more open options (e.g. vendors with official Graphene support), but it's remarkably decent.

> i'm not sure why people expect agents to one shot everything to perfection with just a prompt.

Every time you see a benchmark for "how long the agent can go without asking for human intervention", that's encouraging vibe coding.

I can see all of my tabs at a glance, their titles indicate what's running in them, and I can easily and quickly switch to them with the keyboard.

I remember using talk back when first learning Linux in college. I enjoyed the character-by-character aspect of it.

Angry people gonna angry. Don't take criticism from people you wouldn't take advice from.

Ethernet isn't just about speed, it's about reliability. Before I wired my office, I regularly experienced latency spikes and hangs on video calls. After upgrading, I essentially never do.