awalton

McConnell says you never replace a Supreme Court Justice in an election year.

Let's see just how long it takes him to release a public statement going back on that one...

Overruled, statement goes to motive and habit.

So what you're saying is we need more regulations to cover these kinds of cases? Aren't you "regulations" people usually against regulations? Like, normally wouldn't I be arguing against someone screaming about how the free market can take care of these things and that the free market knows better than the government?

Or, once again, is it just an amazing coincidence that people have suddenly completely flipped their stance because it happened in California?

> Yes, but the larger and more important issue is why are there so many explosives in the first place?

Ah, so the problem is negligence. And what negligence was there? PG&E not maintaining their towers as clearly documented (or rather, not documented as the thread shows), or even possibly the federal government not maintaining Bureau of Land Management and USDA Forest lands? No - it's California's fault, spoken as if even a healthy forest wouldn't burst into flames if someone threw molten hot aluminum on a kindling pile.

But where could that idea possibly have come from? Perhaps the Federal govermnent, whose head has basically been parroting that exact line? What an astounding coincidence.

Unless they've pivoted again since the last time it was discussed/demonstrated, the cars don't steer themselves through the tunnel like a car on open road, but instead are steered by the tunnel itself, more like a roller coaster on a track.

Going way out on a limb here, maybe productivity has dropped due to the overall stress of the situation, and not being at home? It doesn't seem like it's ever going to be possible to separate the noise from the signal here - everyone's experiencing an unprecedented in their lifetime event causing an immeasurable amount of extra stressors...

> It is just a request. You can say No.

And when you do, they send their staff of high powered attorneys to shop for an amenable forum and file the SLAPP lawsuit that your org can't possibly afford to defend in a court you've never heard about with a nicely penned note of "Well, we tried to place nice! Now it's going to cost you." They then constructively work behind the scenes to freeze your org out of every future press event and make sure other companies they work with do the same - can't have any reporters not on a leash at these things, after all.

So you settle with changing the language and chilling your speech. America, land of the free.

It still boils down to "who pays." And we're in the "I won't even pay my taxes since I can just hide them somewhere and the government won't come after me" phase of capitalism.

The world's going to hell fast. If past is prologue, the Rich will pay for their parts of the world being nice and habitable. Everyone else will be left to suffer.

Get ready to see domed city concepts getting more serious and more cities like Vegas with connected tunnels and shafts between buildings to avoid going outdoors for any reason...

The difference being that American Idol contestants are often actually quite artistically good - they only managed to get where they are because of skill and looks and luck, instead of just the latter two. (This isn't universal; it's often the case they pick someone up who is actually pretty awful but is interesting for the whole mechanics of the show, either being very attractive or standing out in some other way... but it still holds that the show has actually managed to scout real talent on the whole - just look at how many of the people who didn't win managed to snag successful music careers afterwards.)

But that's beside the point here. My biggest peeve is that there are plenty of "Top 40" "artists" that can barely hold a note. And it's been that way since the 90s, thanks to the magic of Auto-Tune. Anyone with a marketing budget and access to an industry insider who can make the right moves can just start dropping albums and buying hit slots.

What's changed is that now, anyone with a YouTube or Twitch channel can just start publishing music. Create a Soundcloud and you can get rotation in any one of a dozen DJs podcasts. TuneCore will put your stuff in the Music Stores. Spotify and Pandora are a little harder to break into, but not much. Setup a Twitter account and talk directly to your fans without needing a publicist.

A whole industry's worth of Kingmakers have been turned into online services, and that's really changing the landscape of the industry.

> Legislation that makes this illegal would be a great (and really easy) start.

Legislation is really working right now, with Congress sitting on 400+ bills and refusing to vote on them, and with known members of the government, including the actual President of the United States of America, committing crimes and the top law enforcement agent doing worse than nothing about it.

Laws work in a society that values them. Once you throw that away, your authoritarians will do whatever fits their needs. And surprise, the authoritarians are doing just that right now.

That's a damned timely shameless plug :). I'll add it to the reading list.

Lots of talk about fault tolerance, not a lot of talk about trusting peers and preventing them from introducing bad data into your presumably precious model...

So if you're forced to trust all of the peers, how is this better than a cloud? Who out there is training models for purely benevolent reasons (i.e. non-profit seeking) and can trust random nodes? If not for purely benevolent reasons, who out there is going to donate CPU time to training your model, essentially writing you a blank check?

Unless you're a billionaire who can actually get a Congressperson on the phone, you're burning cycles. They've got an army of staff that do nothing but write stock replies, print and sign documents with stamps and mail them back to constituents.

That's what involvement in our government has become in America - a bunch of people shouting into an endless void, and the people in power doing more or less whatever fits their needs most at that particular moment.

I won't be the first to admit that the rackmount hardware is a nuisance, but at the same time, it's relatively inexpensive since there's no practical reason to buy new hardware for a homelab and the IT renewal companies are absolutely overflowing with reclaimed hardware on the cheap. Also it's often easier to find hardware configurations that require no tinkering at all, verses having to slog through a PC build and hope that nothing goes wrong. My favorite hardware though are workstations and tower servers, since they're basically the best of both worlds - commercial machines with a decent amount of replacement parts with tool-less (or even hot) swapping and people with experience servicing them while still being fairly quiet at heavy load.

I've done it every other way - I have a dual chip Xeon Silver machine that I hand built, an IT reclaimed Dell rack server, three NUCs (used to be 4 but one bit the dust after 4.5 years of hard service), and a smathering of other hardware (NASes, 10G and 1G switches, etc.)...

After the absolute pain of the Xeon Silver build - having a brand new motherboard that was DOA and basically being told I was out $600 after multiple rounds of escalation, then having the replacement board fight with my GPUs, I'm not sure if I'm willing to bother doing it again. It would have been worth it to pay the markup on a gently used commercial machine and I would have been up and running faster... Probably would have been cheaper, in fact.

The admin is admittedly the worst part about it, but since virtual machines and Ansible were invented it's at least a tractable problem.

Still waiting on that Wisconsin factory they promised...

> software that everyone has to be running the same version at runtime for it to work

Have you ever attempted a flag day? Even at a small scale organization it's a nightmare - imagine trying to do it at Credit Card Processor (tens of millions of devices) or Google's (billions of devices) scale.

GTK+ 3 was a bit of a nightmare in this regard, but GTK+ 3 is also feature frozen and will be supported for more years to come, so a new application doesn't have as much to worry about here.

The downside would be the desire to port to GTK+ 4 in some amount of time, which might require a large amount of effort depending on the application. On the other hand, if you're starting today you could also start with GTK+ 4...

What kind of misinformation are you trying to spread here? GTK+ has accessibility built into the toolkit itself - it's not optional, and it's always on. In fact, GTK+ had it before Qt did - ATK was written back in 2001 to be a part of GTK+, and the screen reader Orca is written to use GTK+ and the platform agnostic AT-SPI layer. It would take a full ten years for Qt to add an implementation here.

Ugh this is a deep gut punch, as this is one of the most interesting recent projects Mozilla was working on in my opinion.

> The design relies on a new smartglass technology that turns the walls opaque when the door is locked.

Which is pretty much exactly what I expected when I heard the words "transparent public toilets."

> I miss the old Google search, the one that didn't try to guess what I mean, but instead did exactly what I said.

You and me both. I cannot stand the whole 'I know better than you, let's use these synonyms that don't exactly mean the same thing or are literally different from the exact phrase you're searching for'. I loathe that Google removed the ability to search for symbols, basically destroying it as a means to find certain kinds of research papers and expressions.

I would legitimately pay for a research-quality search engine similar to Google Search circa 2010ish, before the Panda or Penguins and the truly awful Hummingbird algorithms were enabled. (And no, Bing's not it - it's basically about as good as Yahoo Search ever was before it was just a frontend to Bing...)

I'm fairly close to this. I used to require almost exactly 4 hours of sleep a night, and getting more or less than that made me feel absolutely abysmal, but over the years it's jumped up to 5.5 hrs/night with it being slightly more forgiving about the range (from 4-6 hours I feel decently okay, best at 5.5 and worse as I fall away from that, but outside of that band I feel completely horrid). I get more rest than this, but the extra hours of rest are usually laying down listening to music or the occasional audio book.

I think the biggest agent of change is my autoimmune disease which has worsened over the years and now requires of me more rest and sleep maintenance.

Got a cruel reminder of all of this sleep-related business last night with the bay area thunderstorm waking me after only 3 hours of sleep and the storm and heat keeping me awake until my body screamed for a rare noon siesta.

I can confidently assure you that I've had that feature off for ages and could not possibly be happier about it.

Apple just spent a billion dollars buying Intel's wireless modem business. If there's still a hardware reliance on Qualcomm, it's certainly coming to a quick end.

Google it maybe? Here's one example thread to pull at: why did Apple stop buying nVidia GPUs across their entire hardware line? EGLStreams is a recent pain in the ass. nVidia's infanticide of OpenCL with CUDA being another painful reminder that nVidia doesn't care about your software needs, just their own.

It's really not hard to find a company that nVidia's pissed off with its dealings.

I'm in agreement. nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others does not make this sound like a good deal, especially for entrenched ARM vendors. (Apple won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves, so they don't really even care about the direction of ARM or the architecture. They could hard fork tomorrow, or two years ago, and nobody will notice since they're entirely vertically integrated.)

But, on the plus side, it's the biggest opportunity RISC-V will ever get. Almost overnight anyone who was building ARM cores will suddenly see investments in RISC-V prudent as a hedge against nVidia's future core designs not being licenseable. SiFive will very quickly become a multi-billion dollar organization...

David Kanter makes an excellent point about why CPUs still aren't going away any time soon - nobody's building GPUs with arbitrarily upgradeable memory, and there are still more larger-than-memory problems you want these systems to be able to tackle. As soon as your data set is too big for memory, you're basically forced to head to a CPU to coordinate things. And as big as some GPU memories have grown, the ML programming models are vastly bigger still, so there's still a lot of reasons you want a CPU in these systems.

So naturally the market is currently trying to find a middle, which is exactly where Intel's been heading if you've been paying any attention. That's the total explanation on why CPUs have been getting wider and wider - it just makes sense for them to, given the transistor budgets and the fact that just stamping more CPUs on a core is already showing signs of diminishing returns (to the point where you have to use an approach like chiplets to manage thermals appropriately, even).

The laptop market being repressed by Microsoft's stone-aged kernel CPU core management holding back designs like Lakefield (which are now completely old hat for phone-class processors) for a decade is a completely different discussion and really goes out of band with what we're talking about here though.

Real-time ray tracing is hype.

And I agree - any arguments that "the next gen consoles have it" is specious at best; they always front load next gen consoles because there's usually a very, very long tail where they're essentially obsolete PCs but companies still have to churn out games for them. The PS4 was released in early 2013 - that's seven years, or almost 5 Moore generations old.

The games released with RTRT right now are not going to be great, but in three years? Probably showing up in AAA titles, and they'll all be designed around the PS5's level of capabilities. But by then Intel will have revved their graphics card to the next generation (as will everyone else), and all of the "hardcore" gamers will be picking up new graphics cards anyways.

That said, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of Intel's hardware's capabilities and priorities given how much they're trying to spackle the gap between being a server ML/NN play and a gaming device, their complete and utter management failures towards non-core market hardware (Intel's history is paved in abandoned hardware, up to and including the Xeon Phi) and them having little to no decent experience delivering SPMD programming models for their hardware as is now 100% bog standard in GPU land...

Honestly no. I really want to like Civ 6 but it's such a departure from earlier installments that I can't see myself pouring much more time into it. It's a fundamental design change where you're almost forced to play the same in a certain way that I just really don't like, combined with lots of nitpicky problems that earlier installments just didn't have due to being better balanced and better designed. (I think my comment on Twitter still stands - it feels like 2K really Sims 4'd this game right up.)

Played Satisfactory and couldn't get into it - it's just worse Factorio, capitalizing on the popularity of that game with good 3D assets but trading it for terrible planning, crafting and perspective.

I've considered using some of my funemployment time to write one of these kinds of games as I think I have a unique angle that hasn't been explored to death as of recently, but haven't committed to it.