beyondcompute

  morally ambiguous act of consuming

What? I mean, you can argue that it’s “morally ambiguous” in the same sense that almost everything is ambiguous, for example being happy and enjoying an evening with your friends while some people in the world are suffering. But otherwise I would argue that buying a smartphone in a capitalist society is a much less “ambiguous” act than eating meat in a communist society, for example. But in general if one is familiar with the basics of economics, one should understand that for the growth of standard of living (that includes health of your parents, for instance, not just “mindless pleasures”) there needs to be the growth of economy. And for that, consumption is essential. So yeah, consumption of in-good-faith sustainable and environmentally-friendly goods, consumption of local stuff and especially consumption of services is not that ambiguous at all. You contribute to economies going and to communities’ well-being.

I don’t know, I don’t buy the “let’s make people suffer so that they’ll revolt” logic. I don’t think that EU should make Belarus citizens suffer.

And ideally there should be better internationally-sanctioned ways to replace disfunctional governments and (what’s more important) institutions.

Absolutely! I remember asking to export my data from one of the services and the support pretty much ignored me (they replied in general but “forgot” to mention anything related to that question).

It feels like the ban hits ordinary citizens more. The rich and the powerful (including politicians) won’t be affected as much. :(

You could, you are right! :)

I still think that batteries are a slower, more complicated (and therefore expensive), heavier and less environmentally friendly tech. Hydrogen just seems more “elegant” somehow. Again, offering potential for much faster refueling. Once you come up with a good way to safely store it in a vehicle or a device.

Hydrogen is the future of electric transportation!

Imagine you are driving and you have several cartridges of magnesium hydride and when you pass by a refueling station a drone catches up with you and swaps nearly-depleted cartridges one by one all while you continue going! How cool is that! B-)

And then you can refuel by stuff that you produce yourself using photo catalyst solar panels in your back yard.

Interesting! At some point on harder levels I started forcing myself to select the example which looks worse to me and thus I started getting more of the questions “correctly”! I suppose some people find things beautiful that are slightly imperfect. Or in other words to be attractive an image must be “interesting” and slight “tension” does contribute to it (for me). Of course I am not speaking about gross problems like buttons having inconsistent spaces between them or different shapes. And still. That shorter line under the user card! Or that claustrophobically small padding around the “enable camera” button! How can those be “correct”?! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Why wouldn’t people just switch to something else?

Not as decentralized as one is expected to believe indeed.

Yes, you could probably use something like this: https://www.line-us.com/shop.html

Or any plotter for that matter. Your progress bar in general will only be able to go forward unless the plotter is able to erase. You could fill the bar with transparent rectangular segments to make things easier and faster.

>…unsurprisingly—Apple has been planning this change for many, many years

While most companies in tech work in reactive mode which is sad.

I like that they didn’t go all out on those dark patterns and created a rather user-friendly and straightforward version of how that experience feels in real life.

I wish they now added a subscription plan or a pricing model for people who use the software several hours per month.

I would like to add that not all people see it as that bad. On some Android phones these apps are already pre-installed and you can’t even delete them. You have to disable them one by one. On Apple you’ll be able to simply click “No” and reject the whole package.

The code quality is one thing but its longevity doesn’t seem to me like a problem in itself.

Does it feel like it took surprisingly long to port it?

“Interesting” logic.

“We eradicate HIV. So what? Malaria will occupy it’s place in the list of deadly diseases.

We stop serial killer A. So what? Serial killer B will become number 1.

We stopped all burglars. So what? Cyber-crime becomes the leading threat!

It’s too late, the idea of the crime is out of the bottle! What do you want, to start global brainwashing operation to tell people that stealing is bad?!”

Well yes. Why not start a “global brainwashing program” of explaining to folks that burning a noticeable share of world’s energy to create a mechanism that is outside of control of (ideally) democratic and therefore accountable governments and is to a good degree under control of shady groups is not such a good idea?

Additional note for those interested. A while ago I watched a lecture by Francis Fukuyama where he talks among other things about states which collapse simply because they’ve lost effective control over part of their territory. That’s actually pretty scary and makes you think. It’s good when a government is able to control a certain thing but doesn’t. And it’s a different story when a government simply cannot do anything. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKq_YvC1R14

P.S. Drugs are actually a bad example. Most of them haven’t won at all. And in many places they were practically driven out (including alcohol). Their price increases when you prohibit them. Their effectiveness does not depend on the number of users, etc.

I am wondering a bit what is meant here by “disruption”. As I see the situation, some people seem to believe that as professionals we don’t necessarily have to use “the best tools available” and if you can save a little by getting “almost as good (after some tinkering)” it’s more than acceptable.

My view is that if “a real IDE” (I use quotes as this is subjective and said in a bit of a tongue-in-cheek manner) gives you even 3% performance boost, it’s well worth paying 100 euro per year especially if you are making tens of thousands using it.

Overall though this “IDEA vs VS Code” situation is interesting because it reveals something about cultural situation in the developers’ community.

That’s a timely article and it has some good points.

I myself would say instead of “you should quit social media”, you should quit particular platforms that have too many toxic users (trolls and just rude people) and you should quit platforms that are run by companies with whose vision you do not agree. I am not saying we should quit Deviant Art or even Twitter, for example.

But yeah, quitting Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp seems like a good idea at the moment. And I did so myself some time ago.

Thanks! That looks good!

Thought on the second thought, I’ll continue to use the more “manual” method for now. As it gives me more control and it would be easier to switch off when touch ID sudo will be supported more officially.

I’ve just added this to my .bash_profile:

  enable-sudo-touchid() {
    sudo sed -i -e '1s;^;auth       sufficient     pam_tid.so\n;' /etc/pam.d/sudo
  }

But probably automating the check (if the automated checker has the correct permission) would not be that hard.

Good news! Sounds like a great initiative.

I was kind of guessing that that might be the future actually, not battery-powered EVs. Simply because of the large installed base (and affordability especially considering the secondary market). And then of course hydrogen for more hight tech vehicles.

As for batteries. Who wants to haul hundreds of kilos of hard-to-mine-and-recycle materials with some of the lowest energy densities per mass currently in use?

What’s so hard about meat? Just stope eating it! :D Quite a few people are saying that they are not going vegan because not enough medical professionals are saying that it is safe. Solution: sponsor more research that tries to find out whether it is “safe”, provide more publicity for the results of such research. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence out there. It’s just a matter of marketing at this point.

Also I think that building a city on Mars might be one of the greatest investments humanity could make. So much cool stuff would trickle down to everyone.

The not-so-aesthetically-pleasant (to me) “material” look goes away! Yes!

Really exciting news! I am a big believer in both small electric vehicles as the future of urban transportation and hydrogen as a better energy storage mechanism than lithium batteries. :)

I wish Amazon would tackle its “ridiculously useless at this point, overrun with scammers reviews” problem though. :)

Good point. But the healthcare situation is a different topic.

Immigrants everywhere are brought in to work for smaller wages than locals. What’s so new or unusual about this? The situation is unfortunate, of course. But the U.S. is not much different here. However, doing the same thing as everyone with less damage to economy (and therefore local working people, taxpayers, etc.) because of productivity is not necessarily such a bad thing. IMO, it should be much easier for productive people to enter any country than it is now. And it should be harder for non-productive ones (it’s too easy now in many places).

Context: I am an expat myself.

Just remember that during the “growth” company apparently delivers useful goods and services (otherwise people wouldn’t pay it money). In the process company might increase customers’ standard of living and productivity which in turn causes positive effects and growth elsewhere.