Mekantis

Sorry, but "good people" who are involved with all the evil things Facebook does by working for them aren't good people. I know it's hip to absolve yourself of responsibility by saying "I just work here" or "I didn't work on that", but all these rationalizations don't fly as long as you're one of the quiet majority that does nothing to fight what Facebook does.

Seriously, techies seem to act on the same amoral plane as business executives and I wonder how you people manage to sleep at night.

They should, actually.

It's not just the US at risk here. I feel like nobody here pays attention to what China does. Look at all the tensions between China and... Literally nearly every country around them. This isn't a US-only problem.

I'm not sure a bunch of techies who have no clue about geopolitics and have zero interest in the welfare of the US or even European or non-Chinese populations to be the arbiter of what's okay or not okay. Apple/Google are turning a blind eye because they're in this to make money. They don't give a shit about our rights or our security.

National security issues override your freedom to use a spying app by a country's primary geopolitical opponent. That's just how it is. You paint China as this innocent party and the US as the sole aggressor, which is utter hogwash. I'm not sure whether you're intentionally or just ignorantly ignoring all the things China has done and continues to do in the past 20 years such as stealing IP, price dumping, etc. They're not the good guy here and anybody outside China should be wary of them.

> I wonder why one would chose a phone with Ubuntu Touch over some non-linux phone.

This is a false equivalency. If you don't like Ubuntu Touch. Try Mobian (Debian) or Manjaro for Pinephone. The Linux phone is still in its infancy, but its prospects now are far better than they've ever been. And even if it's in a rough state right now, my next phone is going to be Linux simply because of how much control Google takes away from users (let's not even get started on Apple).

If you say that, then I don't think you've paid attention to what they did to ROM sites in recent years. No other company has been as aggressive as they've been on this front.

I'd say it's worth it to use JoyCons even if you're emulating the games on PC. When they're not drifting, they're great controllers (if a bit cramped). I sold my Switch but I do miss the flexibility of holding my hands in whatever lazy position I wanted or using the gyro for aiming.

That said, it's trivial to use any other control or input device. You just might run into issues if a game requires motion control. I'm not sure but you might even get away with using a Wiimote, but I'm not sure what the controller support looks like there.

They're right to be paranoid. Nintendo is one of the few game companies that's extremely aggressive about protecting their IP (particularly when it comes to emulation and ROMs). They've forced a lot of sites to stop distributing ROMs of games for their consoles and I don't doubt they'd come down with a massive life-ending hammer if they caught whiff of piracy in the Switch emulation scene.

Look at the comments. He has barely any files on that server. "Yeah, you can use ZFS with barely any RAM."

(if you don't have any files) Doesn't do me much good with my 10TB's of data.

Why wouldn't I want deduplication though? "You can use ZFS just fine, just turn off one of its most useful features." Really? And I'm being downvoted for it. Thanks, guys. You realize my home desktop is doubling as my storage, right? Which goes back to RAM requirements being an issue.

I hate the cargoculting on this fucking site.

I'd love to switch to ZFS, but the RAM requirements are absurd. I don't have a separate storage server, and I'm not really to sacrifice 10GB of RAM (1GB/TB of storage if I'm to believe what I find through Google) on my home desktop just for it when the vast majority of my data could probably handle a rotted bit or two.

I did briefly try ZFS on my laptop a year or so ago, and it ate up half of my RAM permanently. Since it was already fairly limited, that wasn't a sacrifice I wasn't willing to make either when I have plenty of backups anyway.

I'm not aware of any neuron that functions differently from other neurons. You have a soma, dendrites, synapses, electrical impulses and glia. Even if there are subtypes, they are all based on this basic functionality. Care to elaborate?

> there is basically no way for me to properly debug and solve this problem, whereas solving your problem on Linux would be relatively trivial for anyone with a bit of experience, even if it is in fact a bug in Pulse.

I've never been able to debug any of this. I think "a bit of experience" is putting it lightly. I have no idea how to fix any of this and none of the documentation helps. Imo, between "being configurable but being impossible to configure" and "not configurable except for the most important bits, but at least you get a GUI that makes sense and does what you want and expect", I prefer the latter. I don't want to become a PA developer before I'm able to make it do what I want.

Also, if you dive into the Windows 10 sound settings, you can set the default device and the volume for every application and it'll never deviate from that unless you explicitly change it again. This is how it should be, and I don't understand why PA isn't capable of this as far as I can see.

And if a program deviates from that setting for any reason, the only other reason why it could deviate is because the program itself has changed it, and you just need to check that program's settings. There's two places to check. On Linux? No idea. Infinite possibilities.

Probably Linux. I don't understand how people put up with things like PulseAudio. If I use Windows, the audio sinks behave like I expect them to. They use the device I expect them to. They don't mysteriously set the volume to some bizarre level that has nothing to do with anything when I start a new program, or change the video I'm watching on YouTube, or open a new video in VLC. Whenever I use any audio-capable application, it's like I'm rolling dice as to which device it'll choose to use and what volume it thinks I want it to be at, and none of it has anything to do with previous usage or what I want it to do. What is this crap? Also, if you want to configure anything, have fun trying to figure out what magical command-line incantations will do what you want it to do. Because the GUI tools are all utter crap and don't do anything useful.

It's too bad people look at proprietary software with such disdain. Yeah, I'd love it too if all the world adhered to open source, but there are too many useful and awesome applications that simply aren't open source, where the open source "alternatives" pale in comparison.

rupa/z

Being able to type something like "z ab g f" to reach a fairly deeply nested directory is almost akin to magic. I absolutely hate cd'ing everywhere, and often I'm cd'ing between the same couple of directories for a number of projects, so I feel like it helps retain my sanity. I've also written scripts to take advantage of it, such as a cp clone that doesn't require an immediate target. So I can cp a file (or number of files, or a directory), z-jump to a different directory and paste it there instead of laboriously typing out all the directory paths. I love it.

A part of what makes the brain so special and capable is how it's able to structurally and functionally layer regions upon each other with their own specialized functions which all funnel their outputs up and down as needed. So even if every part of the brain is using the same kinds of neurons, they're all completing very different tasks. This is something (afaik) we haven't seen much in modern AI and it's probably a missing piece of the puzzle.

This looks incredibly interesting. Going to give it a try.

I have no idea how anybody can look at TikTok with a straight face and not see that they're a threat. Maybe if you've conveniently closed your eyes to the CCP's behavior in the past, say, 10-20 years regarding corporate espionage and suppressing freedom of speech and compiling profiles of everybody who dares speak out about them, as well as their behavior now in recent events (particularly how they're more than eager to punish local dissidents). Then, I guess, sure, there's absolutely nothing here to see. As with every Chinese company, the problem isn't that they're Chinese. It's that as a Chinese company, they exist only with the blessing of the CCP.

There's also the question of how open open source programmers might be to some UX/UI designer stepping in and trying to force their vision on the project.

It makes me wonder. Is there enough research and sufficient good data to make evidence-based software engineering? It's not something that comes up much and whenever I do see research, it usually feels disconnected from realities in software development. That said, I'm going to read this and see if there's anything valuable to learn.

I'm still mad about Campo Santo. I couldn't give two shits about Alyx or Half-Life or any other of Valve's games. But they had to consume one of the most promising story-focused indie studios and relegate them to making games I just have zero interest in, and don't have anything really interesting to say or let you experience about the human condition. Firewatch felt like a real story about real people. Alyx et al are just completely different genres. Now we're never going to get another Campo Santo game and it's a significant loss for gaming culture.

> This is wrong, misguided and naive.

I'd appreciate it if you didn't jump straight to insults.

> International trade when done with effective reciprocity and managing the trade deficit, can lead to competition on a larger scale, better outcome for consumers and specialization in particular aspect of manufacturing or services.

I didn't say international trade should be stopped entirely. "Free trade" isn't "all trade". I'd appreciate it if you didn't strawman me. A part of the myth is the idea that free trade means perfect competition. No, it means a massive existing company can easily buy up local competitors and ensure that competition ceases entirely.

> Even domestically, specialization is how human species became to me. If humans continued to be inwards looking and never engaged in barter-trade or any kind of bilateral exchange either with monetary instrument or goods/services; we would still be caves.

This ignores the many cases where countries have protected local industries despite these industries existing elsewhere producing far better products and being far more competitive, and been wildly successful because of it. And again, I never said "no trade ever at all allowed because all trade is bad".

> National to international trade is just one more step in the expansion of trade that we all benefit from. We have proof that it works when all parties are rational and cooperative. If we found aliens on another planet, it would only make sense to trade with them (just increasing the abstraction layer from national to international to interplanetary).

I never said otherwise. Trade is fine. Foreign companies crowding out local industries to the point that local jobs are primarily low quality and low paying is not (see the number of countries that are relegated to production of fabrics and other low-cost goods).

Well, you have external constraints that prevent you from doing so. The suggestion is that, without such external constraints, it's fairly likely that you would be waking up with looking at your phone. But even if you didn't, it wouldn't be particularly relevant. Looking broadly across everybody I know, and that I know of, the use of electronic screens is ubiquitous throughout their lives.

Your statement basically amounts to "Well, I don't look at my phone in the morning, so clearly most other people also don't look at their phone in the morning". Which is obviously false (at least in the sense that one doesn't follow from the other).

I think the issue with comments is that they lose all temporal and situational context. You see a comment next to code, but you have no idea if it's actually still addressing that piece of code. How out of date is that comment? Nobody knows. But if you look at the git history of all the edits specific to a part of code, you'll have a full view of what happened and why and by whom. I think the big issue is that programmers aren't taught to properly leverage git in this holistic way - instead it's just "version control", when it can be such a crucial and informative and helpful part of a process around documentation, writing good code and working in a team.

People like to pretend that protectionism is such a bad thing. But Western nations built themselves through protectionism, it's something China has been doing to great success and the Asian tiger economies (primarily South Korea) did as well. After all, there's only so much you can do for your population if you never ensure a steady supply of high quality jobs that provide a path into the middle class, and you don't protect fledgling industries (beyond basic commodities) that are necessary to create these jobs but can't compete properly against well-established companies elsewhere. It's one of the great neoliberal myths that they've so successfully perpetuated (primarily through institutions like the IMF and the World Bank) that free trade and vicious, expansive privatization is the only right path.