Waterluvian

Maybe this is silly of me, but maybe gaming would enjoy an era of hardware upgrades being rather unviable so the focus turns to optimization and aesthetic.

Also the Dixel for the male option.

I'm imagining a future where a bunch of bizarre laws interact oddly (as they do), and now we've got websites with unnecessary nudity pasted in the corner.

"Oh, those? Those are just compliance tits. Ignore those. It's just a thing that came a few years after we finally got rid of the cookie banners. The companies wanted certain protections awarded only to 18+ sites. But you can't just declare yourself an 18+ site, so some sites post the most minimal amount of imagery that constitutes erotic nudity. That's why Google's graphic for the past few months has just been that one with the two dots in the middle of the o's."

I want to share a bit about this becuase it is dear to me.

My public high school was a "Geography / GIS magnet school" because some unnamed retired geography teacher donated a very large sum to make it happen. I was an underachieving student with no ambitions to go anywhere, doing just enough to pass. The geography program teacher pulled me aside and encouraged me to sign up for Grade 10 GIS the next year. It became my first academic passion and my entire life pivoted.

I studied GIS/remote sensing every year. I participated in Skills Canada a few times, eventually going the full distance by winning gold at the regional and provincial levels. I was accepted to University for GIS/Remote Sensing. I earned a BES, defended a thesis, earned an MSc, won a national award for GIS, and got into remote sensing + robotics as a career, which I'm still doing ~15 years later.

I don't think I have the words to really describe just how thankful I am for everything teachers and professors did along the way to support and encourage people like me.

False colour composites were something I was introduced to in high school GIS and did a lot of in undergrad remote sensing. It was one of those Eureka! moments for me in terms of developing a better understanding of signals and signal processing, as well as sensors and data collection. Ie. absorbing the reality that the way in which my eyes (or any optical sensor) see the world is not canonical. Vegetation is red, not green!

It was also just the COOLEST THING EVER to swap infrared bands in LANDSAT ETM+ imagery and watch vegetation immediately pop out at you. It's what turned this sort of dull (at least for a teenager) geoscience into a kind of puzzle where you have to figure out how to bring the signal up out of the data.

Is everyone wrong, or is there more to it than you can see from where you stand?

I don't want to spend much time on this comment so I risk not making a sufficient point, but something I notice is that you're appraising the situation from a purely technical point of view. The technical component is just one piece of what makes a whole product. I think Apple is probably a good example: they regularly make decisions that bother the hell out of tech-centered minds.

There’s risk to doing anything. There’s risk to doing nothing. A bit off topic but my perception is that organizations bias towards doing something more often than they should.

If you put every company that needs/has an app on a spectrum, there is a line somewhere that roughly divides them into two groups: where Electron/React Native/etc. makes sense or not. It's just a normal engineering decision: solving problems given limited resources. Companies have different problems and different resources.

I think people in the tech community have probably also noticed that it's rather popular to have an absolute opinion on the goodness or badness of these tools. There's some magical thinking borne from ignorance that everyone just ought to go native or that React Native is the best thing ever to be used everywhere or that AI makes this line disappear entirely.

I think these takes serve little value and distract from what’s interesting, and what the subtitle to this article says: that this line is moving due to AI. And I think that’s probably right.

It’s oddly fun to put maximum Stockfish in play against some horrible position and to be murdered by it.

Probably nothing. But Meta throwing a boatload of money at Muse is probably cheaper and easier than being evil about it.

The problem is, it’s Meta. And like the scorpion said to the frog, “I can’t help it. It’s my nature.”

I think the first major issue I had with Elite Dangerous is that there’s, I think, three orders of magnitude of flying around. Which really disconnects me from the feel of it all.

I remember when it first came out, there was so much hype but I immediately wondered, “where exactly is the game loop?” I also remember how aggressively defensive fans were about it.

I was imagining their moat was having a monopoly on where you go to get documentation for the free product, and that's how they sell the for-profit product. If that monopoly is lost (people get the answers they need without going to the store), the moat is gone.

Those with the money and influence have always been in conflict with the masses that actually make the economy run. They would love nothing more than to do away with that problem. It allows them to control the terms of the economy.

I think the second half of your statement disagrees with the first.

Much like saying, "there's never a need for Scratch, it's just a way for my kids to code fun things without worrying about semicolons."

The shape of business moats are changing. There's probably a lot of businesses that are suddenly non-viable as currently designed.

Being a bit silly with the analogy: it's like we've discovered gunpowder and now entire classes of fortification are deficient.

I think your personal beliefs fit reality if you ignore the parts of reality that strongly refute it. That kind of mentality is getting popular these days. I'll leave you to it.

The one time NATO was called on to defend a member was the U.S. asking for help after 9/11. And nobody but the UK followed them into Iraq, shortly after the Afghanistan war began. So there’s certainly strong history of NATO not just doing whatever the U.S. is up to.

I recall this time as a very strong refusal of the above miscategorization of NATO. Bush and his cronies had a whole “you’re with us or against us” tantrum when NATO didn’t follow. I think Americans even did some proto-Trump trolling with “freedom fries” and other nonsense.

There clearly is. Because NATO isn’t getting involved in America’s idiotic war of aggression and Trump is very upset about this. They’ve spent years being very upset about every other NATO nation’s spending, too.

So even if you don’t believe it, the U.S. clearly cares about NATO member behaviour and therefore recognizes a distinction.

Weddings if you’re lucky. They’ll also murder 150+ girls at school.

I never did well in English and I usually don’t know it when I see it. But it was immediately evident that the writing style of this blog was sparking joy. Even the intro section was just so well structured that I had to read it again.

Yeah… I feel like “falsehoods X believe about Y” need to omit anything a reasonable X would consider to be a bug.

Edit: fair point. Maybe not.

You're entitled to no protection, nor are we entitled to you providing an example. But if you don't want to provide an example, your claim immediately turns to dust. This is just the fundamental core of rationalism.

The sky is green. I won't be taking any questions.

(actually the sky really was green a few days ago, related to tornado weather!)

> It is weird that quite a few developers comes up with advices where they seem to come from a world where they work alone, have not work with enough people, or with enough projects.

What is weird about it?

Yeah makes sense. I was wondering if there was special meaning to “editor” that made it non obvious that they wouldn’t be unionized.

Are editors employees in any formal way or are they closer to Reddit moderators? Or editors as in anyone, ie. Reddit posters?

The worst thing about Ouija board debugging is the latency and bitrate. Honestly, I can tolerate a puzzle project. It’s almost satisfying. But sitting there and waiting for the response is agonizing.

Does this mean a net of 13% of foreign gold has been removed from the U.S. since 2006?

It’s just the best thing ever. Compiling at work took a minute for full builds with babel, and with rsbuild it now takes about 0.9 seconds.