Sindisil

Who is "we", Kimosabe?

Personally, I have no time for gen-AI in pretty much any context, at least given the current landscape.

And plenty of people seem to accept, if not love, gen-AI art. I don't get it, but it's true.

> While browsing YouTube, an AI-generated video appeared and I reflexively told my wife, “That’s AI—skip it.”

My reflex whenever I encounter gen-AI output in any form: text, code, image, music, video, what have you. I find all off it mid in the best of cases, and usually think it's quite terrible. I regularly see posts of the form "you'll never believe this amazing AI generated picture/video/paper/program, and when I check it out I feel like I'm taking crazy pills because I just don't see the magic.

Just my $.02, not inflation adjusted. You (and many others) may well feel differently.

This is going to be hell for the farmers in the region this growing season, not to mention for those buying groceries.

I'm not yet "elderly " -- contrary to what a troublingly large fraction of younger software developers seem to believe -- but I do have occasional issues with touch screens, for several reasons.

They behave unreliability when I use the fingers on my left hand. I play guitar, so I assume that callouses are the issue. Older folks often have calloused finger tips; it's somewhat inevitable.

I often make or repair things, as well as work in my yard. At the very least, this often renders fingerprint recognition useless for days or sometimes weeks at a time. Sometimes my finger tips get scuffed enough that it affects touch screen use, too. I wear gloves when I can, but that is its own issue. "Screen friendly" work gloves don't stay that way for long, and aren't great anyway.

I also live in a northern area, so for about half the year humidity is very low. Even drinking plenty, and using moisturizer, my skin gets dry enough sometimes to make screens unresponsive.

Of course, we also get actual winter here. Even the best "screen friendly" gloves I've tried have been mid at best, just as with work gloves. Certainly not good enough to rely on.

Decent health care? In prison? Are you serious?

> but I sense they are heading the namecheap way

What makes you say that?

>> Everything went downhill with the series of acquisitions.

Story old as time, seldom (though not never) ending well.

Indeed, companies are not people.

Compare the consequences for a large company vs an individual.

For the individual, if caught, a debilitating fine and, depending upon damages, jail time. Probable end of career, if related.

In short, life changing.

For the company, possible fine almost certainly less than the revenue made. Small chance of larger civil suits, with legal costs and possible judgments. Depending upon visibility, perhaps some additional PR spend. Even if the sum total cost is greater than the associated revenue, those costs can be used to offset tax liability.

In short, low risk of existential threat, or even actual financial loss -- just reduced profits.

Anything from the folks at Cook's Illustrated/America's Test Kitchen.

I love their recipe articles because they discuss what worked, what didn't, and why in the process of developing the recipe.

I rarely cook from recipes, but I have gotten an amazing number of good ideas and techniques from Cook's over the years.

Pretty much same, but over time I've switched to dark on light in terminal. Easier for me to read these days. Still use "night mode" often on my phone, mostly to save battery (OLED).

Me, for one.

Especially coding, I find almost all coloring to be distracting and counterproductive. Doubly so when I'm bouncing back and forth between Linux ans Windows. Many tools' default use of color borders on (or crashes head on into) unusable.

Some tools offer a --color=never option, and a good number respect NO_COLOR. Unfortunately, not all do, and even those that purport to assume that those modes will only be used for use in pipelines, programmatic interfaces, and such. That leads to all sorts of unfortunate behavior.

> 1) Do you need to separate types of plastics or clean them before using this process?

The whole second section of the article discusses this process on mixed plastics, including:

> Another test involved introducing different plastics, such as PET and PVC, to polypropylene and polyethylene to see if that would make a difference. These did lower the yield significantly. If this approach is going to be successful, then all but the slightest traces of contaminants will have to be removed from polypropylene and polyethylene products before they are recycled.

What about the person sitting next to the target?

Not always. I just tried it in FF on my Android phone. No luck. Assuming I'm not missing anything, if they can't be bothered to make a simple blog page loadable.

FFS.

It's a digital data stream. The bits either make it or they dot. Unless the cable is actually faulty (i.e., the error rate exceeds what error correction and recovery can handle), one cable cannot "sound different" to another.

The parallels with plastics in modern life are astounding.

Which is why it should be mandatory to show at least three numbers on price labels: product or service price, tax (optionally split by taxing authority), and final cost.

Fees are different from taxes in that they're not mandated and the customer has no direct way to affect them.

Alternative take: Universal broadband is a governmental program supported by Democrats to give Internet access to human people, some of which identity as Republicans, with the goal of improving things for all if us.

Jesus fuck, why does it always have to be us vs. them?

We're living in it.

(ha, ha ... only serious)

Neat idea. That solves everything.

Oh, one quick thing. I'm sure it's nothing, but I'm a bit slow.

How do you get new experts if no one gets to do the junior work that gives them the experience to become an expert?

There are at least two Java bytecode compilers. Though javac is obviously the "reference", there is also egc. It's used primarily by IDEs and editor plugins (like Eclipse, from whence it came, and the RedHat Java plugin for VS Code).

Still, if memory serves there have been a handful of cases where egc's implementation of the spec differed from javac's with resulting fixes in javac itself (though I don't have sources at hand, so perhaps I misremember).

1. Broccoli, ~60 - 90 cal 2. Green beans, ~60 cal 3. Carrots, ~50 cal 4. Potatoes, ~300 - 500 cal 5. Tomatoes (not counting those in paste or sauce), ~30 cal 6. Onion, ~25 cal 7. Lettuce, ~20 cal 8. Mushrooms (if they count), ~20 cal 9. Celery, ~5 cal

All very rough estimates, and not counting butter and such. Thanks for the prompt; it was an interesting exercise.

Dog knows I could stand to lose 15 lbs or so, though.

The standby light on a TV in on for standby and off when viewing because a) it could be distracting and annoying for the extra LED to be shining while viewing in a darkened room, and b) the "on" state should be pretty obvious because of the stuff on the screen.

Five flights was the original mission plan.

Given the asbestos content, that's not really an option anyway, yeah?

Hopefully, it'll die in a fire?

Not that I really think that. There's too much incentive to fine new and exciting ways to game the system, instead if actually just being relevant.

Google and, to a lesser extent, other search engines, deserve some of the blame for having easily gameable ranking algorithms. Still, it's mostly on the bad actors doing the gaming, and the people hiring them to do it.

And YouTube is getting easier for me to dodge.

I still watch a few things on yt, but many of my favorite channels are over on Nebula.TV, so I watch them there. It's around $36 a year for Nebula + Curiosity Stream, with no yt "suggestions" or ads.

Now, if yt offers something in the same price range (maybe up to $50/year), and lets me opt out of data collection and "helpful" suggestions, I'd certainly consider it.

Yes? Sort of?

Depends what you mean by "gap".

I certainly think the power dynamic we currently have in the US is bad. The wealthy are insulated from most, if not all, of the troubles facing the rest of society. Yet they still extract benefit from, and have considerable control and influence over, society at large.

That's not healthy for anyone but the wealthy. Maybe not even them, long term, but that's more of a philosophical question.

Not sure if that answers your question or not.

For US and comparable economies, D.

Obviously it varies by economic region.

The tax question gets complicated because of several factors. At the very least, every discussion of reforming the tax code, at least in the US, falls apart because of issues (real or imagined) with, ignorance of, or confusion about one or more of:

1. Wealth vs income 2. Earned income vs capital gains 3. liquid vs illiquid wealth 3. Marginal taxation 4. Estate tax

My thoughts have evolved over the years as I've learned and grown in experience, but while I strongly believe the current situation is both unconscionable and unsustainable, I don't know what the perfect solution would be.

My current off the cuff straw man for the US would be something like:

1. Earned income and capital gains taxed the same

2. Progressive marginal income tax with a bottom rate of 1% (to possibly even less, but not zero) and a top rate well above 75% -- probably 90%.

3. Some way to tax the "ghost income" of wealthy folks building loan ladders to avoid showing any actual income while still having liquidity. They get a large loan at favorable rates based upon their capital or paper wealth , spend the moneys over time and doing token debt service. When the balloon payment comes due, they get another loan to cover that and more. With enough wealth, this can continue for a lifetime. By keeping wealth in shell companies and/or trusts, often over several lifetimes.

4. Marginal estate taxes, with the first couple million exempt. I haven't thought hard about how high the rates should go.

5. Reform's to the laws and regulations around the myriad ways of skirting the system.

My experience with complex systems leads me to believe that the only way to make progress here is to focus the goals of the system and simplify the system as much as possible while still achieving the goals.

US political forces leave me little hope of progress in my lifetime, but I would love to be surprised.

Half their decision.

Workers can obviously decide to make their own decisions WRT RTO if their employer demands it vs seeking new employment.

Maxim 29. The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more. No less.