dfansteel

It surely doesn’t help that Meta’s corporate behavior has them being flagged by Amnesty International.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/02/meta-new-poli...

The original was published as a one page story. It was later reprinted in a longer format.

For the lawyers: If an AI hacks a company, who should be charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?

The effort frontier model providers are going through to generate a permanent client base would make Philip Morris blush.

> Taylor Sheridan can do a new series where a Ranch owned by a family for many generations is targeted by a Datacentre company.

It’s all fun and games until the cost of beef and oil skyrockets.

Look at the host name and learn to temper your expectations.

That’s a pretty uninformed argument.

For most of the global south USAID was the arm of America they were most likely to interact with. It was food and schools and medicine and disaster relief. It was soft power and goodwill.

Not only has the longest charm campaign in history ended, but a door to China and others been opened.

Both are valuable and present in a well rounded life. The Diary of Anne Frank and Those Who Leave Omelas cause you to question life in different ways.

It still has a monopoly on my heart.

The University of Iowa has a Social Sciences department that has professors in for Political Science, Anthropology, Public Policy, and other fields. It’s an accredited institution.

Oh, how about that! I stopped checking because I maxed out long ago.

BTW - They’re still censoring human rights violations.

My computer lacks the ram.

Can anyone check its knowledge base for me? I’m honestly not able to run it and the Qwen models I can run censor information critical towards the Chinese government.

Tiananmen Square is the first place to start.

If Zuckerberg is trying to make you feel guilty, take it as supporting evidence that you’re doing the right thing.

I think people underestimate the loss of physical media in general and video stores in particular.

Physical media use to account for half of a films eventual gross. Some films even did better. See every cult classic (Office Space comes to mind easily).

When you’re making films that have to be produced for second run distribution on physical media they had to fit on VHS cassette.

Studio VHS production ended in 2006. Netflix VOD began in 2007. At that point the length of your film stopped mattering. It took a few more years for studios and directors to realize it, but that was the actual end of economic constraints.

SpaceX is profitable. Merging with xAI hides the absolute dumpster fire P&L xAI is bringing to the table. He can continue to fund his ego projects to the detriment of both orgs.

The actual most common crime is wage theft.

https://niwr.org/state-policy-clearinghouse/spc-wage-theft/

Frequently I’m told “A.I. will solve global warming.” Without remembering that we know how to solve global warming, we just choose not to.

There are so many more concerns around LLM use that for a lot of people the goals haven’t moved at all and that it remains there is no ethical use of A.I. not the least of which are:

There is no argument for A.I. that doesn’t amount to providing capital access to labor without providing labor a reciprocal access to capital.

The source material was ingested without permission or license of the copyright holder. No residuals are being paid. If your industry relies on crimes to exist it probably shouldn’t.

Hyperscalers are adding data centers to under developed and rural communities dramatically raising the cost of electricity while consuming water and providing few jobs.

A tragedy of the commons as the internet balkanizes into more and more walled gardens specifically to prevent the ingestion of intellectual property.

There are problems with YouTube and the library is free.

https://dataspace.princeton.edu/handle/88435/dsp01dz010t34x

You’ll notice their specific example, the Cybertruck, is easy to identify on any road. And, as far as I can tell, not being mandated by any government for purchase.

I feel you. For me it was a love of problem solving. Now that’s been taken away from me and people keep telling me how happy I should be about it.

If I’m going to pay for News, I want to never see another advertisement so long as I live.

I once used the Xcode feature to play a sound when a breakpoint was hit. My EM had a conversation with me.

It’s that there’s no life native to those environments. The authors is making the point that lay people, us, lack a frame of reference for how inhospitable Mars is.

Star Wars: The Customizable Card Game.

Of the 90’s era deck building games it had the most advanced mechanics. The unique, beautiful, brilliance of the game was an element of randomness built into the game be the cards themselves.

Your deck was a stack that you would often draw the top from to determine random elements. Then place the card on the bottom (there’s more to this rule, but good enough for now).

Experienced players could learn to count cards in the end game, creating either fast, dynamic play or hard fought chess battles, jockeying for positions slowly undermining your opponent.

Tournament games had a time limit, but I’ve played regulation decks for 3 hours.

Lucasfilm eventually pulled the license for lesser games, but for a while it was amazing.

1. Don't have massive VCs by not having massive VCs. That sounds unhelpful, but hear me out... You're asking the VC to do too much. Break that sucker down. Have many, many small classes that do small things. Use libraries for stuff. A VC should be a hub to transit data from the user to a model us MVVC, MVP, MVC... I don't care, every architecture has their acolyte.

2. No. Again not helpful. This is a domain specific problem. I will say I'm waging a now multi-decade war against singletons. Dependency injection is the way to go. For Swift checkout Swinject, it really superpowers your testing.

3. Haven't touched it... yet. My primary projects need to ship and my secondary projects haven't hit the point of UI. Won't until later this year. Then I'll deal with SwiftUI. Combine, however, is my new hawtness and I recommend diving into.

If I go to H-E-B and buy a rib eye steak for $15.99 a pound and cook it. I'm out less than $15.99, because I don't want a pound of steak. If I go to a mid range steak restaurant I'm going to get a rib-eye for $29.99 for 12 oz of steak. And it's going to be of lower grade and less seasoned. Why would I do that? Also, I'm not working all the time. Cooking is a way of relaxing.

I've been an iOS dev for... 12 years now. And I love it. I'm in a position now where I'm learning Android for the first time. It's Kotlin and I don't hate it. And I'm still trying to learn back end. I can't code my way out of a box using HTML. I guess you'd say I can't code my way out of a <div>

The ecosystem is amazing. I love the tools. Xcode is a joy of an IDE to work with. There's some room to improve, but compared to everything else... it's not even a question. The community is full of people who are full of wonder and excitement.

As a web dev, you probably already know some Ruby and have some familiarity with some build tools that I didn't when I came to iOS dev. That'll help. You won't be exclusive to Apple. You'll be using CocoaPods and Gradle and Bazel and Jenkins and Travis and god only knows what else. On any given day I code in Swift, Objective-C, Ruby, Kotlin, and Groovy.

At the end of the day, remember you'll be doing this 40 to 80 hours a week. Make sure you enjoy it.

I cook or eat left overs 6 nights a week at this point. Beyond saving a massive amount of money it's shocking how much better the steak I make myself is than one I can get out. Most cities have kitchen equipment stores (not just Bed Bath) that actually have cooking courses you can take.

Now "home made pasta" starts with flour and eggs.

Don’t underestimate the value of build tools. Just because you know Xcode and Swift or Android Studio and Kotlin (or their antecedent languages) are you done. Finally having a senior dev who knows what he’s talking about has done more for me in the past two years than the previous 8 of reading blog posts and hacking. He’s shown me the real value of build scripts. Today even my personal iOS projects are dependent on a combination of Swift, Ruby, YAML, and Kotlin to build. It’s complicated to set up but I can prove that my code works.