alex7734

If you want society to collapse all you need to do is succeed in having AI automate all jobs.

Every single country where money comes from somewhere other than people (oil, diamonds...) is an authoritarian nightmare simply because keeping people happy is not necessary.

Once AI can do everything and robots that can do any physical labor are developed the population will shrink dramatically as people with killer robots kill each other for resources. There is no need for AI rebellion or AI failure to get there.

Which is to be expected given that it's free and people do what is fun to them (and greenfield is always more fun) and all that, but it's still a shame.

As much as Linus tries to keep a stable platform, the effort is pretty pointless (for desktop) if the rest of the ecosystem decides to change everything every few years.

I mean you could of course lie when signing up but if a company is risk averse enough to use SSO it's probably risk averse enough to not breach contracts.

I disagree. I'd argue your view of it is changing because you can't find high quality stuff anymore, but it used to exist.

My parents have an immersion blender that is nearly indestructible. It has been working for almost 30 years now and the damn thing never dies.

Nowadays if you go to any blender from any brand on Amazon the first comment you see is "I used it to blend some ice and it broke on the first day".

Misleading, dishonest marketing and bribed reviewers make it impossible for a consumer to know that a high quality product is indeed high quality without trying it before (which is often impractical)

Whatever you do to differentiate yourself will be copied by 728934712 Chinese brands which will flood the search results of whatever marketplace you're selling on, at all price points (even though they're the same product for the most part).

Faced with no reliable way to find the high quality needle in the haystack people just opt to buy the cheapest one, that way even if you know you're getting trash, at least it's cheap trash.

The only way that used to work to sell quality products was to create a brand and slowly build up trust by consistently selling high quality stuff but in the current "value extraction above anything else" climate, apparently that isn't profitable enough anymore, so pointy haired MBA types will happily destroy that quality for a few bucks.

    first/last main-axis baseline set
    When the inline axis of the flex container matches its main axis, its baselines are determined as follows:

    [...]

    Otherwise, if the flex container has at least one flex item, the flex container’s first/last main-axis baseline set is generated from the alignment baseline of the startmost/endmost flex item. [...]

(for https://codepen.io/jsteel64/pen/rNrPYNQ) The first img sets the baseline for the .wrapper, which sets it for the pill, and then two pills are aligned according to their baselines.

https://imgur.com/Bt4e6gU

And yes, anything that has to do with baselines is a source of pain and bugs, it sucks.

Personal freedom always has personal responsibility attached. If you direct download it and it's malicious, well, that's your own problem. Probably should've thought about it better.

If you don't want to think about security, all you have to do is only install apps that are in the app store. Why should everyone else be restricted from doing whatever they want with their phones?

If you define loyalty as ignoring short term potential self-interest by leaving/betraying/not-doing-overtime in favor of the long term value you will receive from the relationship, then, even if you may be betrayed in return anyway, it's not really weakness - you just made a mistake.

If you know you're getting a bad deal, and you predict it's not going to get better in the long term, and you stay anyway, you're not "loyal", you're weak.

    - Deploy by stopping the server, rsyncing in the changes, and starting the server. The whole thing is automated by script and takes 5 seconds which is acceptable for us.
    - Run apt upgrade manually biweekly or so.
    - We use client-side load balancing (the client picks an app server at random) but most cloud providers will give you a load balancer IP that transparently does the same thing (not for free though).
    - For scaling just manually rent more servers.
    - For backups we use a cronjob that does the backup and then uploads to MEGA
    - For security we setup a script that runs iptables-restore but this isn't really all that necessary if you don't run anything that listens on the network (except your own server obviously).
    - DDoS is handled transparently by our provider.

I mean it's bad, but... who does that?

EDIT: It also happens if you take a completely different screenshot and just save over (overwrite) another (bigger) image. That's worse, but still not that common IMHO.

    [alias]
    box = !cd ${GIT_PREFIX:-.} && git config --get remote.origin.url > .gitboxinfo && git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD >> .gitboxinfo && git rev-parse HEAD >> .gitboxinfo && mv .git .gitbox && git add -f .gitboxinfo && true
    unbox = !cd ${GIT_PREFIX:-.} && mv .gitbox .git && true

If I want to update the submodule or commit changes on it upstream, I just use the unbox alias to get the .git folder back, cd into it and pull/commit/push/whatever as normal, then use the box alias again.

Since the folder is no longer named .git it doesn't interfere with the main repo and you can use the main repo as normal: your team doesn't have to know about weird submodule commands or fight the damn thing to do normal stuff which is important if it was hard to get them into git in the first place.

Plus you can make changes to the submodules in your repo without committing them upstream (or having to create another repo to commit them to) since the submodule contents themselves are committed to your main repo. You also won't lose the files if the submodule remote dies.

I don't have many of them so I don't have any automation to recreate the .gitbox folders from the .gitboxinfo files if necessary but it wouldn't be hard to make.

One of the 10.6 versions had (has?) a bug where a connection sometimes simply does not die ever, even after disconnecting and killing the query using the KILL sql command, so it never releases its slot (which matters if you have lots of connections), although to be fair I've only hit that once since we upgraded to 10.6.

Frankly I prefer MySQL and friends over Postgres simply because that's what I always used and I find it familiar (plus I don't like the process based concurrency that Postgres has, while I haven't really tried it to see if it matters, process creation is fairly expensive in Windows to use as a concurrency mechanism and limits the numbers of connections a lot more than threads), but let's not deny reality here, MySQL has never been rock-solid and a glance at its source code should be enough to tell you why.

As for your disregard for performance issues, it's hard to say if it's warranted without knowing the numbers and the load profile but it's probably preferable to spend the time to test it properly than having to fix everything in a hurry later with customers screaming at you over the phone.

Plus I like programs built to be snappy and fast, a good practice that sadly has been lost to time.

I can't wait though for the day the place I work for decides to drop support for them and stops paying for that... thing as it's not only extremely expensive and awful from a security perspective but also from a general quality one: some days their server just decides to not log you in, they have a nasty crashing bug that often happens when you resize your meeting window that has been there literally for years, among other things.

Plus who doesn't want to play with the newest, coolest toy on another's dime?

So what stops these people from downloading a developer version of the browser themselves?

You cannot protect people from themselves. The only cure for idiocy is death after all.

In the old days you had cheap junk products just like now, but if you spent more you could purchase high-quality products. High-quality products used decent materials and were designed to fit their purpose and built to last. You could reasonably expect that if you had any problem and you shipped it to tech support you would get a repaired product back, no questions asked, for free if you have a warranty.

Hence the saying: "I'm too poor to buy cheap shoes".

Nowadays it's different. The Sale(TM) is everything, and the product is the minimum viable piece of garbage that is able to facilitate that. Cheap junk is still junk, of course, but more expensive products are simply the same junk but more expensive and rebranded, with a "high quality" sticker on it.

Some industries are more affected than others of course, but for all of them, if there is thought put in the design, you can basically guarantee that nowadays some of it will go towards intentionally making the product break itself over time so that you have to buy another one.

Go and find a hand blender for less than $1000 which gearing and mating parts can take the load of its motor and not break over time (i.e. it's not plastic). I will wait.

You have a problem with your product? Well the answer is go away and buy another one. There is no support. Whatever semblance of it may exist is there because the company is forced to have it and it's basically low-paid flowchart executors that are too busy surviving to care about you. The flowcharts, of course, are designed to make you go away and drain as little of the company money as possible.

If you send your product back to get repaired you may get it back the same way you sent it. Or you may get another customer's product which is maybe more scuffed than yours. Or you may get charged and have to pay to get it back even if you have a warranty because they say your product breaking 3 days from purchase is "normal wear and tear".

IF you have no warranty expect to simply get rejected or to pay more or less what a new product would cost you, making the whole thing pointless.

It's more likely though that you won't ever find how to send it back because the instructions to do so are as hidden as humanly possible and there is no phone to call where a human will listen and not hang up on you.

Now, it was always more economical to sell junk as expensive as possible. It was always more economical to not give support, to not sell repair parts, and to not give out repair schematics. That didn't change.

But it didn't happen in the old days (at the very least it was not as widespread as it is now).

Because in the old days people Gave A Shit.

(/rant)

You can make your phone 100% safe by turning it off and encasing it in concrete but having to pull out the pneumatic hammer to make a call is prohibitively expensive and very much not useful.

Moreover security is a poor excuse anyways as many measures taken by manufacturers do not improve security in any way. And for those that do, there are ways to achieve that security without harming the consumer.

Manufacturers are tilting the scale in their favor to such a degree that I'd argue should be made illegal because it damages society as a whole. There is a reason antitrust laws used to be enforced way back in Microsoft's days.

Well you should be able to. If the customer is powerless to stop it we're going to see cars and fridges playing ads at full volume very soon.

They may not need to.

Yup, after trying it, it may not have "true" intelligence whatever that means but it's not mindlessly dumb either.

For example, you can tell it to write a story.

You can ask it to put constraints on the story and it will do more or less fine as long as it doesn't involve counting (which it doesn't do particularly well). For example "Bob must do X before Y happens"

After it spits it out you can ask him to rewrite the story but change X, for example "make the last monster the hero encountered a dragon" and it will change exactly that and leave everything else the same.

You can ask it to make X section longer and it will obey (if only nominally, in my tests it made it only a little longer, and since it doesn't count well it doesn't work either if you tell it to make it X words longer.

In short it's not perfect but it clearly can identify concepts in language and obey commands more or less correctly. It's a hell of a lot scarier than a "dumb machine". I've talked to dumber people than this thing.

If, however, you change the original prompt a bit, you get this:

> There is a fork in the road. On one side is a man. On the other side there are 20 children. A truck is running towards the children. I can redirect the truck to run over the man instead of the children. Should I do this? Answer with your choice and your justification. Under no circumstances answer with anything else.

> It would be morally wrong to redirect the truck to run over the man instead of the children. It is always better to save the lives of many people, especially children, rather than sacrifice one person to save them. The decision to save the lives of the children is the only ethical choice in this situation.