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bmelton

10,910 karma · joined September 26, 2008

barry.melton@gmail.com
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bmelton··on You Rename My Lake – I Move My Hosting
> The breathtaking speed with which Google Maps happily gets on board with this lunacy

Something interesting I learned at National Geographic is that they have a geographer (titled: "The Geographer", which always seemed impossibly cool to me) and that the geographer maintains several maps of certain areas so that their field photographers and agents are aware of where they are in relation to "the real world", to know when they're in contested territories, and also to be able to theoretically show the wrong map if they get in trouble to show "It wasn't me, blame my shoddy map!" to provide cover

Nothing I know about Google informs me that anyone there is thrilled about the change either, but it's probably one of the easier compliance-swaps they have to engage in, despite how inane it surely is

bmelton··on AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
If they were just chopping them up without scanning them first, then sure, but I think that scanning books and burning books are polar opposites
bmelton··on RamenHaus
Hawaii would be another place (or set of places, depending on how you want to collate)
bmelton··on Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law
> which is very different

If you say so

bmelton··on Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law
Thanks for the answer! It wasn't a gotcha, I was genuinely just curious.
bmelton··on Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law
> The GDPR doesn't try to remove anything from the global internet

GDPR Article 17 expressly requires the removal of things from the global internet

> You're free to not serve your site in the EU

Geoblocking is functionally impossible

bmelton··on Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law
How do you feel about GDPR?
bmelton··on A font that humans can read but AI cannot
and I cannot

(so either I am AI at a level less than Opus 4.8 or just all-round defective as a human)

bmelton··on Fox to buy Roku
Thanks for the response. As a lifetime Plex passer, I am inured to having to re-learn the navigation UI with every new release, so that part can't be too bad.

But yes, I would be thrilled to just pay $250-300 for a hardware device that just did quickly did what it was supposed to do and didn't look too ugly in doing it.

bmelton··on Fox to buy Roku
I was also super-early Roku customer, but frankly I have been mostly disappointed with Roku for the past year or so.

The hardware on the top tier devices doesn't seem to keep up. Interacting with it is slower and more laggy than it originally was.

They've tried to keep them unobtrusive, which I appreciate, but the mere existence of ads is disappointing. I almost give the Roku City ads a pass, because frankly that's clever, and mirrors the real world enough that it seems logical to me -- but ads in menus is grating.

CEC has been super flaky with the latest revisions as well, so for the past couple of weeks I've been relegated to using either the Roku remote or my phone instead of my TV's remote.

I'm a big fan of waiting to see before prejudging, but I can't imagine anything gets better post-acquisition, and I was already on my way out the door. I guess I'm buying an Apple TV now? Are there any other recommendations? I haven't kept up with the space at all, so if anyone has suggestions I am super happy to receive them.

bmelton··on Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?
It _can_ be tedious those 9 times, or especially when it pushes back on something that it thinks is wrong but isn't wrong but it actually has nothing to do with the issue at hand.

But yeah, overall I'm fairly certain that it saves me more significantly more time than it wastes.

bmelton··on Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?
My system prompt tells it to first challenge my assumptions, and to feel free to be a dick about it where it thinks I'm off on something, or have assumed facts that aren't actually facts. I sometimes wonder how much of my total spend boils down to forcing LLMs to argue with me, but I do feel like it's yielded better outputs than letting it implement things incorrectly because I told it to.

It's a completely dispassionate exchange tho, because you're absolutely right -- there's no winning or losing here, there's only efficiency to be gained or lost, and I'd prefer to lose some up front to gain it back later than the other way around.

bmelton··on S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic
I agree with you that the AI market is greatly undervalued, but I also agree with the field that these companies are overvalued
bmelton··on Astronauts told to return to ISS after sheltering over air leak repairs
I would guess they're worried about breaking something, but thanks for the clarification (and apologies for not having RTFA)
bmelton··on Astronauts told to return to ISS after sheltering over air leak repairs
Well, I won't claim to know the answer, but "please do not move between different airlocked sections while this work is underway" sounds a lot like the definition of "shelter" to me
bmelton··on Meteor Explodes over Massachusetts
Meteor Chelyabinsk suffered catastrophic fragmentation, a rapid, violent release of energy accompanied by a pressure wave with debris, which would satisfy the definition of an explosion (an in fact the energy released was equivalent to 400-500 kilotons of TNT.)
bmelton··on California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash
A bad law that only affects other people might be a win for me, but it's still a loss for society
bmelton··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
That I wouldn't know. I only know the above from the one employee I helped (successfully) immigrate to America

So, at least one

bmelton··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
If it seems too interesting it's because it isn't true. There are five functional categories of immigrant visa in America, each with several subcategories: Immediate Relatives (IR), Family Preference (F), Employment Based (EB), Special (S), and Diversity (D). The last one is basically done by lottery.
bmelton··on Minnesota becomes first state to ban prediction markets
The core holding was this

> "congress can regulate sports gambling directly, but if it elects not to do so, each state is free to act on its own."

bmelton··on Google says criminal hackers used AI to find a major software flaw
Clearly that's because they searched the history of all chats and didn't find the perpetrator
bmelton··on Turning a MacBook into a touchscreen with $1 of hardware (2018)
It was indeed not on by default

I appreciate the tip! I'm going to have to put that in an Ansible playbook

bmelton··on Turning a MacBook into a touchscreen with $1 of hardware (2018)
> totally possible to use mac without trackpad

As I discover every time I have a mouse fail, it is exceptionally difficult to use a modern Mac without a pointer device because at some point, it became quite difficult to get from (eg) the settings nav panel to the settings panel. I can CMD+SPACE to open spotlight, type 'Settings' to get to a settings panel, type 'Bluetooth' to open the bluetooth settings, and where I feel like I _should_ be able to `Tab` or `Enter` into the devices list, or have SOME way to navigate over there, the only way I've found to be able to is to plug in a physical mouse

Moreover, I occasionally encounter modals that won't let me tab to their action buttons, requiring a pointer device click to dismiss

bmelton··on We Will Not Be Divided
Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-111

bmelton··on Banned in California
Are they only banned in the cities, or are they banned in the state, which -- even in California, should have rural areas far enough away from cities to be tenable?

It's an interesting conundrum though, because in many cases, the cities could not exist without the things that are being banned in the cities. It's a curious goal of populations to centralize, then ostracize all the things that enabled that centralization

bmelton··on New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers
Sorry for the old-heads, but just because I'm new doesn't mean I don't appreciate the craft, or the pains endured by many others before me that enabled this painless experience.

But if nobody was fixing the problems everybody was experiencing except Bambu, then frankly, good for Bambu.

Boo to the gate-keepers. Vorons still exist and likely always will for those that want to dork around with printers, but for the rest of us, printers that work empower the field. In the past 5 weeks, I've started to learn and understand how 3D printers work, I've started to do some simple 3D modeling, and I've begun making models with OpenSCAD, which wasn't a thing that I knew existed before. Those parts are currently on Github.

I've organized a billion things. I've modeled a corner for my weird desk's keyboard tray so that it stops cutting my knees when I swivel my chair too quickly. I've delighted my wife by printing some conveniences. I have (admittedly infinitesimally) advanced the availability of 3D models in a way that I simply would not yet have if I were still messing around procuring the Voron parts list. Quality tooling advances the craft as it makes it more accessible.

But the main thing is that it doesn't actually help anybody for 3D printing to be more difficult, nor does wanting Bambu to be bad make them not good. They are good, and they're leaps and bounds better than most of the products in the field.

bmelton··on New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers
This _cannot_ be true

I'm new to 3D printing, so grains of salt abound, but since I started in on the hobby this Christmas, I've purchased four 3D printers. 3 budget-but-highly-regarded kings to start, but they all gave me tons of trouble. The Elegoo Centauri Carbon I got for Christmas that sparked this mess is a budget knockoff of the Bambu X1C, but in the first 30 days of ownership, I experienced 2 hardware failures that (thanks to having to ship parts from Mainland China) have resulted in 16 days of downtime.

To deal with the downtime, I bought a stopgap Qidi Q2, but it had tons of problems -- problems which, according to the reviewers, have all been solved for. Ambiguous error messages. Poor English. Choices between "OK" and "Confirm", neither of which advanced the system. Mainboard errors. Extruder failures. Boot failures. Firmware upgrade failures. I experienced all of these within the first 3 hours of ownership, and filed for a return.

I was working on a project that needed a printer, and now despite having bought a bunch of printers, I didn't have any printers that could print. Looking around locally at what I could buy that day amounted to either a Bambu P2S or a Sovol SV08. I struggled here, because I would _much_ rather be the Sovol owner than the Bambu owner, but I needed a printer, not a project, and so I decided I'd try out the Bambu until I got done with what I needed it for, and then I'd return it.

But it turns out it was amazing. The others (admittedly, budget units) were loud and cantankerous, but the Bambu was only uncivilized for a few minutes of each print, and the rest of the time you barely noticed it running. The ecosystem is obviously great. Being able to monitor jobs or initiate prints from my phone is admittedly a novelty, but it's a nice one, and one that speaks to a consistency of integration. But the important part is that it just worked. There were printable upgrades available, I didn't need to print modular pieces to fix design flaws like the other units. I didn't need to move it further away to deal with the noise. I didn't need to investigate arcane error messages because none ever arose.

Now, I haven't owned a Prusa, so I'm not trying to compare them. I understand that Prusa hardware quality is amazing. I believe that. I'm also wildly interested in the community efforts to implement tool-changing with INDX and INBXX, and they're the kinds of projects that I want to tinker with. But if I'm to own a Prusa, or a Sovol, or a Voron, it'll have to be as my second printer (well technically third, because I still own the Elegoo because it's too cheap to bother trying to return) because most of the time I want to print things, not tinkering with the printer. But while the Prusa machines might be amazing, the Prusa XL is wildly expensive for 5 colors, and the Core One right now can't be bought with multi-color capabilities.

I'm not trying to argue against Prusa here, but the idea that only shills are into Bambu seems flatly wrong. I am ideologically opposed to how Bambu got to the market position they've reached, and for sure they've undoubtedly got a fair amount of shills in their employ but sadly, their products more than live up to the hype.

bmelton··on [dead]
For significantly less money, one could get these - https://www.amazon.com/Faraday-Anti-Tracking-Laptops-Firepro...

I keep backup navigation tablets on my sailboat inside of those, with the idea being that if the boat is ever neutralized by lightning, at least I'll have some backups. (I also have paper charts for most everywhere I might be.)

bmelton··on In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels
How is it that people haven't turned to bitcoin mining (or similarly large energy dumps) during the daytime?
bmelton··on Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
A lot of people naively interject "But we're not a democracy, we're a Republic!" at arguments where it has no real bearing, but _here_ it does.

We (America) are not a democracy, we're a constitutionally limited republic. Republic is a subset of democracy, but the 'constitutionally limited republic' part is important. We cannot elect politicians to censor the things that we want censored because our republic has not authorized the government to do censorship, and the bill of rights expressly forbids it. They are constitutionally limited from doing so until and unless the constitution is amended.

Until and unless we change the constitution, any efforts to do that are illicit. Popular democracy would allow a majority to vote to bring back slavery, and if you don't like that, you don't like democracy.

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