I liked when you could make a playlist radio and do that manually. That's been removed now of course.
442 karma · joined December 10, 2024
While southern Florida is hardly at the equator, living here has really highlighted how northern-hemisphere and temperate-centric the online sphere - tech in particular - tends to be.
We don't get spring/summer/autumn/winter so much as rainy and dry season; heat pumps are irrelevant; natural disasters come in the form of hurricanes, and weather is either sunny or stormy; the days don't change in length much; and so on and so on.
It's a bunch of little things, but it's been surprising to me how often they come up in discussions, and just how rare (sub)tropical-specific problems and topics are in comparison. It makes me wonder what it's like to live somewhere even further removed from the natural world of the north.
If anyone with a GPU has access then the cat is out of the bag on the creation side of things. But on the other hand, it means there is little incentive to share / distribute it - unless it's not drawn or generated. Resources can be fully put towards preventing harm to children without getting lost in the weeds of questionably effective, 'slippery slope'-based enforcement which will only become less feasible with AI.
Of course, no politician is going to touch CSAM laws with a ten-foot pole. So things remain in limbo to the benefit of no one.
It's been a while since school so progress is slow as I'm having to relearn how to actively learn, but it's already been super rewarding. I've been making my way through a couple textbooks and have signed up for a course online. Even just memorizing the geologic time scale has made pop paleontology videos feel less like disconnected factoids, like I'm actually building a knowledge base.
I've also decided to condense various web-related projects into one big full stack project with its own protocol, client, server, dns and so on. Basically my idea of what the world wide web should be. I get easily distracted and have multiple web servers, templating engines and so on littered in my wake from when I run into something I don't like and want to do it better.
I know I'll probably never finish it, and even if I do it probably won't be very good. But it makes it a lot easier to stay focused on other projects when they hit a roadblock, since instead of being tempted to remake whatever is causing the problem from scratch I can just make a note for how I think it should be done in my little stack when I get to it.
Plus, yknow, it's fun.
I don't remember that from history class.
That being said I think it misses what made the old physical interfaces so appealing and useful. It's not that there's something inherently superior about multimodality; it's that physical interfaces are permanent, with defined edges and definite shape. Unlike screens you know exactly what's where, building muscle memory every time you use it. There are no hidden menus or moving parts.
Multimodality - such as being able to see the position of a slider at a glance, or feel its position by touch - is useful because it reinforces the absolute existence of a control and its state across multiple senses. Interfaces using voice and gestures like suggested are the exact opposite of that, because each point of interaction becomes even more disconnected and vague.
Is it a betrayal of the entire FOSS movement? A loss of "all pride and dignity"? No.
Pointing fingers like this is more a betrayal of FOSS principles than what GNOME has done and makes me embarrassed to consider myself a part of the community. If you're working to support FOSS it is your right to use whatever software enables that goal best.
[0] https://reason.com/2024/11/11/mom-jailed-for-letting-10-year...
What a mess.
[0] https://reason.com/2024/11/11/mom-jailed-for-letting-10-year...
1960s US is hardly Siberia and I don't think any NASA engineers had their heads on the chopping block if their designs failed. But engineering philosophy was still rooted in survival; the primary goal was to make something that wouldn't kill you because it fails.
You hear stories about artisans in the old days refusing work because they don't believe what they're being asked to make is safe or reliable enough for the person asking for it. Maybe it's romanticized and idealized, maybe it's just them covering their ass so they don't get blamed. But that philosophy of personal responsibility not just for making things according to the constraints, but for the outcome too, is something that served society well for a long time before slowly disappearing over the past century or so.
It hasn't left without reason. As the things being made became less key to survival and more key to thrival, as the world became more interconnected and safe, it didn't make as much sense. Just think of how many crazy, inventive concepts we use every day wouldn't have been made if they could only be made to work reliably! Our entire modern existence is based off things that don't work reliably. It's a blessing and a curse.
But when we're exploring the final frontier we need frontier thinking and frontier technology; things that, from the ground up, are built to work first with all other constraints secondary. Unfortunately spaceflight endeavors today must invariably build off the 'good enough, when it breaks just make a new one' foundation that permeates modern design at every level. Even if you want to make something nowadays with the sole purpose of working, as long as you're using any technological advancements made in the past 50 years chances are you're using something that wasn't made with that goal in mind.
> John’s third wife Maria Elizabeth (neé Last)
I suppose it avoids any confusion as to what her last name is.
To be perfectly clear, I am not sympathetic to war; war is the most terrible thing humanity can do. Avoiding it should be one of our primary goals as a species. Which begs the question: what can motivate people to contribute to that? War hasn't become any less horrible, so why are people more open to being a part of the industry now?
The short answer is, of course, money. But to look a bit deeper, we have to understand the mentality that's driving the change:
> “National security includes the toughest and the most exciting problems that the country has to offer. And Facebook is basically fentanyl for your head. Why would I want students to go there?”
> [unnamed student] described national security work as “mission-driven,” unlike the “empty pursuit” of consumer software.
As much as I support anti-war sentiment for its own sake, that sentiment has been the prominent thinking for the better part of the last decade, yet it has evidently failed to stop the shift in mentality we see happening now.
These students do not believe in consumer tech. They do not believe we are collectively working towards a better future, a sentiment I share. That is what needs to change to stop this move towards national 'defense'. There will always be enough people who choose practicality over principles for evil things to happen if evil feeds mouths where principles do not. Principled action must be focused toward making principles and practicality the same.
You say you physically leave your house to escape the noise sometimes - getting a pair of noise-cancelling is significantly less disruptive to one's activities in comparison.
The Gemini robot tech is cool as heck, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't seem particularly well suited to industrial automation.
Morally the 'defense' industry is distasteful enough for me to stay away, but as someone also looking to enter the tech industry I don't blame anyone for looking for a lesser of evils. I can only hope things improve enough in the private sector for the choice to be clear before it's too late.
The initial blog post effectively proved the former. I appreciate that this post proves the latter through demonstrating how to add the ability to see gorillas to the stapler. But I think concluding that either proves a quality of staplers rather than our expectations of them is unwise.
Which is more or less the conclusion this post comes to, I suppose; but I think the source of the dissonance in the first place comes from thinking about AI as "humans minus [x] capabilities" rather than purpose-built machines. And I think until that fundamental (mis)understanding is clarified people will still be making poor assumptions about what AI can and cannot do.
[0] https://mensfeld.pl/2025/03/bringing-your-chromecast-back/
The article acknowledges this to some extent and expects the US to be able to pivot but fails to recognize how close China is to being able to do the same. Things like DeepSeek and BYD cars have shown that the gap is not as wide as traditionally thought.
5-10 years ago decoupling would have had a much bigger impact, but the threat has been looming this entire time, giving China plenty of time to prepare.
With modern features like CSS nesting, anyway; just a few years ago when IE support and whatnot was more relevant it was a different story. Now you can just throw everything into a flexbox.
The title gives the impression that AI is being expressly given the roles of fired workers but that doesn't seem to be the case.
https://data.worldobesity.org/country/united-states-227/#dat...
Though treating the symptom is undeniably good, it also lets the deeper problems that lead to it go unchecked, and my fear is that it will lead to novel problems down the line. How recreational drugs are being replaced by social media is a good example of this; less harm to the body, undeniably good, but still harmful to the mind, and enabling new industries to pop up and find new ways to exploit people.
To be clear my problems aren't with Ozempic, and I believe it should be researched further and, if safe (which seems to be the case), widely available. But the fact is that many nations are able to maintain healthy weight without drugs, and I think if we fail to continue asking why that is, the same societal patterns that led to self-destructive individual behavior in the first place will remain unaddressed.