MichaelGroves

I'm not saying we should go back to floppies. A prompt for the administrator password followed by an otherwise automatic driver installation should be fine.

> 20 years building infrastructure, railroads, highways, mining operations, schools to train engineers, managers, and professionals

20 years? Zahir Shah tried this for 40 years. Amanullah Khan also tried, as did several others. Numerous would-be reformers have thought as you do and tried to impose change on Afghanistan, and all their efforts have culminated in the situation we have now. It's been approached from a number of ideological/political directions. Some were monarchs, others proponents of republics. The PDPA/Soviets tried it from a Marxist/Leninist angle with lots of bloodshed, while Zahir Shah tried to create a constitutional monarchy and refrained from murdering his political opponents. Neither succeeded in the end.

What would you bring to the table that hasn't been tried before?

> if you can't make your product work with no fuss, your customers will buy someone else's

If Razor can't make their gamer mouse autoinstall drivers, then neither can Logitech. This would be an equal playing field.

> (or flee to another platform entirely).

If somebody can't type in their own password when prompted to install a driver, it probably isn't their computer in the first place. The computer almost certainly belongs to their school or employer, or at least another family member, and I think any of those would rarely be receptive to "Please replace your dell with a macbook because the turbo button on my gamer mouse doesn't work."

Furthermore, the gamer mouse will have basic functionality without the razor driver anyway, and from my experience I doubt most clueless computer users would notice the difference. If they can "click the internet button and the google shows up", then the mouse is working as far as most users of this sort are concerned.

Wellington used to say that the presence of Napoleon on a battlefield was worth forty thousand men. Partly due to Napoleon's tactical skill I'm sure, but I think this also speaks to Napoleon's unusual ability to motivate men. They didn't want to disappoint Napoleon so they were more willing to throw their own lives away. I think the defection of the Fifth Infantry Regiment at Grenoble probably corroborates this. There, they had the opportunity to shoot Napoleon dead and slaughter his rag tag forces but instead they chose to join him.

> commit China-style ethnocide, or at the least institute authoritarianish high-security measures, depopulate the rural areas

The PDPA and Soviets tried this, and it didn't work. Together they killed tens of thousands of combatants and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of civilians. Millions more were displaced. And what did they get for that bloodshed? Certainly not the reform they sought.

You may as well try to crush a fistful of water.

> Third party devices do need automatic driver install of some form.

I don't see why. Particularly not if the user wouldn't have permissions to do it themselves. If the user doesn't have permission to install a driver, there is probably a good reason for it and the system shouldn't be automatically installing drivers on their behalf either.

> Depending on the person and the prevailing culture it may be perfectly normal to more or less ignore someone outside the office

Precisely this. When about town in public, I ignore everybody except my closest friends or family, or people I have arranged ahead of time to meet up with. For me, this is an application of the Golden Rule. I do not like it when work acquaintances approach me in public and start trying to idly chat me. I don't like it when that's done to me, so I don't do it to others.

Hearing that some people will interpret this as racism or similar is disappointing and disconcerting, but I'm not going to change my behavior. If somebody is making those assumptions, that is disappointing but their assumptions are their responsibility, not mine. And frankly, treating others as I wish to be treated takes precedence over treating others as they wish to be treated.

Tree limbs die all the time. Normally when disease or damage kill a tree branch, it isn't a big deal because the tree is in a forest and probably won't fall on anybody or damage any property under it. In a city, you can't ignore a widowmaker. The risk of it damaging property or flat out killing somebody is too high, you have to pay to get it safely removed. Often this becomes "end-of-life removal" because it's deemed safer or cheaper in the long run to remove the tree entirely. So now you have a green mostly alive tree being chopped down because one of the limbs died, and everybody in the neighborhood thinks you're a tree butcher but nobody else wants to chip in to have it maintained.

> "Now there seems to be a paradox when it comes to clickbait. People almost universally claim to hate it, but you also see it everywhere."

His paradox of clickbait is very... interesting. I propose a similar paradox of used car salesmen: People say they hate it when used car salesmen lie to them, yet used car salesmen who lie the most sell the most cars!

If you're a race car driver who takes sponsorships from Ford to promote car culture and sell more gas guzzlers to the general public, shouldn't your chosen role in this system that earn you some ire? That's just "the player playing the game", except the game is a big problem. And if the game is a problem, then so are the players who choose to play it.

Maybe that race car driver is a brainlet who would otherwise be living in poverty, so we shouldn't give him too much grief for it. Probably not, but maybe. But the veritasium guy? He's surely a bright guy with plenty of opportunities; he could have chosen another line of work.

The "beacon/alerting system" are the signs, and the man in a vest. If the car can't respond to those, then the words "full self driving" should never be used to describe it.

> Have you also found other videos by the author to be "10 minutes of tiddly little bits of information"?

Yes. His videos are personable and pleasant to watch, but information sparse. They are more likely to leave me with the feeling of learning something than they are to impart lasting knowledge (ironically, I believe this is a problem he has discussed before, I guess that much stuck with me at least.)

I'd be really curious to see how a map/gps based system handles situations where a divided highway is under construction and has temporary lines painted to direct the right side of the road to drive on the left side while left side traffic is held up by a man in a vest holding a sign. This isn't a particularly uncommon scenario, and if the road crews are hard at work, the zone where this is occurring can move by miles a day. To navigate this, a driver needs to rely on road markings, temporary signs, and humans directing traffic. Maps won't cut the mustard in a situation like this.

If a driver assistance system can't handle this sort of situation, that's fine. I'm sure it's still useful most of the time. But it's clearly not "99% of the way to FSD."

Lots of people aren't okay with road conditions. But lots more people aren't okay with a myraid of other pet peeves and legitimate grievances they have with just about every single aspect of our society. The process of prioritizing which matters to address is called "politics", a process so notorious I assume I don't need to explain this further.

I doubt many, if any, would confuse the two. Bamboo is notorious for being hard to kill. It spreads underground using shoots, and those shoots can reemerge again and again every time you chop down the bamboo patch.

> It outperforms NTFS in most scenarios (an unfair comparison as NTFS is a disk file system and WinFsp is tested with an in-memory file system)

Oh good grief! Let me guess, they first benchmarked it against a ram disk, but the resulting graphs didn't look so impressive so they scrapped that and decided to benchmark it against a disk, which they admit was unfair, just to get the impressive looking graphics.

If shotspotter had not existed, I think this man would have still been charged with the murder. It seems beyond dispute that the victim was shot in the car of the accused. The case against him was seemingly lost for two reasons: shotspotter's fuckery, and the police not bothering to collect other evidence in a timely matter. It should not have been hard for the police to determine whether there was a gunshot fired in the car, or whether the passenger was struck by a bullet fired from outside the car. There was really no reason for shotspotter to play a role in this case, it could have been cut and dry but they went and muddled the whole thing up with their janky tech.

Ah fair enough, I think we agree in these regards. America's departure from Afghanistan was ungraceful to say the least. I think it was doomed to end up that way from the very beginning, but even so, America might have done more to evacuate western sympathizers before letting control of the country fall back under the Taliban.

I guess my response was prompted mostly by this:

> Leaving Afghanistan (to fail) has been a long time coming. Obama wanted to do it, Trump wanted to do it, Biden decided to pull/had to pull/tripped over the cord.

I don't think blaming the failure on Obama, Trump, or Biden is fair. Even blaming the failure on the way Bush handled the invasion after it began is unfair, since I think it was doomed to fail from the very moment of conception. I don't think it ever stood a chance of working in the first place.

Anyway, if you'd like to know more, there are interesting parallels between the Taliban's resurgence in the past few days, and the rise of the Saqqawists during the Afghan Civil War in the 1920s. Amanullah Khan's government and armed forces were struggling against a rebellion of tribal forces (the Shinwari) who opposed Amanullah's attempts at reform, particularly wrt the status of women. When Amanullah's forces were preoccupied with fighting the Shinwari, the Saqqawists used that opportunity to attack Kabul, which Amanullah's forces surrendered to the Saqqawists with almost no fight (sound familiar?)

Read the last century of history of Afghanistan and it becomes clear that the war was lost before it ever began. It was not just the Soviets before America that failed to reform the ways of rural Afghanis. The Soviets came into Afghanistan in large part because the Afghani PDPA was also failing to do the same. Before the PDPA took power from Daoud in the Saur Revolution, Daoud was himself trying and failing to impose progressive reform on the same people. And preceding Daoud was Mohammed Zahir Shah, also a progressive reformer, who failed to make much of any lasting impact despite forty years of good effort. Zahir came to power after his father, Nadir Shah was assassinated; Nadir Shah had himself acquired power in the first place by putting down a rebellion of Afghani tribesmen, but obviously that had no lasting impact either. And that rebellion was itself precipitated by Amanullah Khan's failed efforts to reform Afghanistan.

The arrogance of Americans to think their invasion would succeed where previous invasions and native reformers had failed is staggering. Even if America were to fight for reform for forty years, as Zahir Shah did, why should anybody believe it would make a lasting difference? 20 years made no lasting difference, and another 20 wouldn't either. You can suppress afghani tribesmen, you can send their children to universities and crush those who openly oppose you, but as soon as you leave (and you will eventually leave) they will go right back to the way they prefer to live. This has been demonstrated again and again.

> A lobste.rs user asked why you would use find | xargs rather than find -exec. The answer is that it can be much faster. If you’re trying to rm 10,000 files, you can start one process instead of 10,000 processes!

Fair enough, but I still favor find -exec. I find it generally less error prone, and it's never been so slow that I wished I had instead used xargs.

Also, if you're specifically using -exec rm with find, you could instead use find with -delete.

Would you say the title terminated your consideration of the article?

I believe this is now generally regarded as a misconception, since there are records of the workers being paid. However it can be difficult to tease out the true nature of this work in the historic context, since the way such workers would be paid at the time would likely look like slavery in the modern context (e.g. being paid in grain.) There is also the orthogonal matter of paid/unpaid work, vs forced/unforced work; somebody who is forced to work but is also paid may still be considered a slave.

To be fair, term limits also protect the public from whatever tyrants they might accidentally vote into power. But this too has the effect of stabilizing the status quo, which benefits those who like the status quo the most (the wealthy.)

Thanks to the influence of television, arguably the most famous chef in the world is famous not for food, but rather for verbal abuse.

The most important message of CICO is not "count your calories". It's "you're fat because you eat too much." Matter isn't materializing out of the aether and putting itself into your ass, it comes from you eating too much food. Fat people are fat because there is an imbalance in how much they eat and how active they are. And in modern American society, the vast majority of it is from a culture of binge eating. This is what I've observed not only in myself, but in every other fat person I've met.

There are all kinds of coping mechanisms people use to excuse themselves and stay fat. "I don't eat more than normal, I'm just a genetic anomaly who absorbs more nutrients from food than everybody else.." Well assuming that wasn't BS, the answer is still to eat less. Or "CICO is just a thought terminating cliche"; if I had fallen for that BS, I'd still be fat. I'm glad I saw through those lies.

> I think the problem is that "calories in, calories out" is not that easy since it's hard to measure the calories in and the calories out precisely.

You don't have to, precise calorie counting is a strawman argument against CICO. All the fat people I've ever known, which is most of my family and many of my friends, all eat way too much. I ate too much too, ever since I was a kid. Huge portion sizes and constantly grazing throughout the day without set meal times were the norm for me and those around me. After hearing CICO repeated often, I recognized these behaviors in myself and corrected them. I didn't need to count calories for any of it. Where I would once buy a pizza and devour it over the course of an evening, I now save half for lunch the next day. Anybody can do that if they choose to. By eating less, I've lost about 75 lbs in 5 years.

Assuming such a lawless state of affairs, having a large constellation of satellites in LEO already could be used to prevent competition from reaching orbit to challenge you. I am not sure many people have noticed, but in launching thousands of Starlink satellites, SpaceX has demonstrated their ability to implement the SDI/Star Wars proposal Brilliant Pebbles, which called for a thousand or more kinetic interceptors hanging out in LEO, waiting for enemy rocket launches to crash into. At the time, Brilliant Pebbles was an absurd proposal because it called for thousands of satellites, but SpaceX has already demonstrated that ability. They can already launch 60 satellites per launch, and apparently have plans to increase that several times over.

(It has occurred to me that Starlink might secretly be a Brilliant Pebbles installation already, waiting to be revealed as such if a major war were to break out. However I believe the thrusters on extant Starlink satellites are too weak for this. And they don't have the sensor suites for it either, at least officially.)

I think the practical effect, if not intended design purpose, of a republic is to launder responsibility. To create a layer of indirection and uncertainty between the people who have power and the popular perception of who to hold accountable. The wealthy write the rules and use politicians as patsies. In return for their service to the elite, politicians are offered some privileges and a degree of protection from the angry mobs. The mobs are made to believe that the most effective way to effect change is to vote in new politicians, allowing the old ones to peacefully retire. The economic elite rest easy, knowing the new politicians will serve their interests just as the old ones did.

Sometimes a renegade politician who earnestly has the interests of the common people gets voted into power, but the 'damage' such a renegade can do is regulated by term limits (and sometimes assassination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracchi) Other times, the public believe they are voting for such a renegade, but accidentally empower a tyrant who aims to usurp the elite and have true power for himself. But by in large, a republic regulates the system, maintaining the status quo to the benefit of those who already have power in the status quo.

Where is the demarcation line between "legislating morality" and simply "legislating"? Murder is morally wrong, aren't laws against murder thus legislating morality? I don't claim to know many christians, but the phrase "legislating morality" isn't in the common vernacular of those I know. They advocate for what they believe in, and advocate against that which they oppose, the same as anybody else.