digitalsushi

We don't need PCs or smartphones, we have AI now. They don't need to worry.

meddlesome priests?

there's always room for another software arms race. the personal area network is not ready and the evolution will be painful and good for someone - us, or them, without regard for what those divisions are, it's going to hurt.

if software engineers get displaced, they will eventually drift into other jobs that benefit from people who solve problems like software engineers. and if the former software engineers are willing to work at a rate reduced to their former positions, and if they bring better efficiencies with them, then there will be a slow cascade.

it doesn't follow that all software engineers are excellent at other work, please don't take that from my quip. but i could see the pattern, over time, being large enough to identify.

since software engineering jobs historically are very well paid, it does give some plausibility that former engineers working for less money would have this displacing effect.

its all icky no matter what i think, maybe someone else can tell me why i'm wrong and cheer me up

It's about as safe as trusting all the add-ons in your IDE, and all the packages your node app pulls from random package repos.

It's just the plausible blame that shifts.

If you read the script before you pipe it into your shell, it's safe.

And if that's not safe, then it's just as dangerous to trust that an unopened bottle of ketchup is safe.

Nothing is safe. Everything is a judgement. Being culpable is a professional service. Lucky people out-earn unlucky people. The world is a scary place.

This is an incredible tool.

As a child in the 1980s we'd go for long walks in the woods. One time a friend brought a pair of 30 inch bolt cutters with him, you know, as a personality extension. And of course, there was some dubious reason to use them, and he was a hero for being over-provisioned.

A solution like this is those bolt cutters - I can admire it, but the odds I'm out on a walk with it, is very, very low.

Now if you work in a bolt factory, sure, this can run on every laptop, every user account, every environment.

But I'd hope my edge firewalls are L7 scanning for cyrillic 'i' in my domains cause otherwise I'm just gonna connect and get myself hacked.

it's hypothetical remember, its just a fantasy solution

I know there's no single answer to this. But, if we wanted to mitigate this, do we have the geoengineering ability to execute on it?

I know 'wanted' is doing a lot of lifting there. Solve the hypothetical as a star trek culture, everyone wants this to work.

What would it look like?

I am under the belief that we get a lot of fresh water but because we baked the earth or paved it, and that an awful lot of water could be redirected into the ground if only we could slow it down.

Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california?

would it destroy the great lakes?

i dont know a thing about this topic other than from my arm chair, i'm just here to start a thread if there's interest, i'm sure interested to hear from people smarter than me

i started flossing religiously at 30 years old. i've missed three nights of flossing in the past 16 years

i have like 40 fillings; i havent had a filling since 30 years old (yeah so 46 now)

i am positive there's a bug in tahoe where the login screen passsword text input is waiting for something to settle in the background, either with my weird unicomp keyboard, a remap i do, or even the external monitors.

my password is always incorrect unless i count to about 20 or 30 seconds. once i have 'redocked' for the day, unlocking it subsequently doesnt have the requirement. but every dock insertion, it comes back.

ive got a desk full of octo coupler relays and an arduino learning kit and i'm using AI to goad me into making a cascading small motor starter thing with an air particulate sensor that's taking 180 days to show up from China, to automatically control my 6 small air scrubbers in my wood shop since i'm allergic to just about everything in there but love the hobby

i go wrestle the dogs or go toss some logs around in the woods, since i work at home.

i'm middle aged and my mind is a gelatin, not a liquid ... finding the time to carve through it is the most valuable use of my time

it is difficult for us to agree if there is a threshold to which a person who has accumulated wealth must have shifted from 'earning' it to 'taking' it, and whether 'taking' it is analogous to 'stealing' it.

sometimes people believe wealth transfer is a zero sum game, sometimes people believe it never is, and the truth is probably in between

if you believe that a single human can earn a thousand billion dollars, it follows you can believe a million people losing a million dollars is its just inverse

i dont know enough about people or money to make up my mind

i have a roaring vermont castings wood stove running, its -15C outside, and i am fine; i am 14 oak logs away from changing my world view

this system is fragile but we measure it instantaneously

This is a new years resolution question barely in disguise, but they're fun cause a lot of us are cooped up, barely 4 days into winter, 86ish to go, and we're champing at the bit for change.

I am pretty sure I'm a 50th percentiler. I'm mid 40s, kinda burned out but still struggling forward in my ok-but-not-hollywood IT career, I still have a passion for doing things well in a technical society that values doing things cheap (and well). The things I am known for being good at, I still google daily, and for a long time, I've been hungry for a change - any change - but especially one that isn't chaotically negative.

So in 2026, I wanna learn how dirt works.

I actually have a giant box of dirt sitting on a shelf at the UNH community co-op soil analysis lab, waiting to give me some kind of data about the soil behind my house. (Or is it dirt? I don't know what I'm getting into).

In 2024 I tried growing some corn. It never sprouted.

In 2025 I tried growing some corn. It sprouted and a few ears had enough kernels to make one full mouthful. Tasty, but maybe 7 calories of food for a year of effort.

So in 2026 I'd like to grow: one entire fully formed ear of sweet corn. Anything else is a bonus.

That's what I wanna develop in 2026 - learning how soil works enough to make it make a thing. Small moves, Ellie.

i'm probably using an informal fallacy but if online advertisers earn hundreds of billions of dollars, someone must be finding some return on their investment.

i might be wrong, it might just be a huge grift, but i dont know how to come to that conclusion

i got put on a statin 10 years ago and started to have blindness events, a migraine related symptom. the effect showed up within a few weeks of my first time taking the statin, at age 35

for ten years i lived with it

but then i experimented with coq10 and basically the day i started taking those the blindness and migraines disappeared

sharing out of a compulsion that it could help a wayward googler some day

this is not medical advice, this is an anecdote

well, what if an artist put something controversial in the lyrics, like, something that radicalizes a minor into developing something maligned like, agency, or self awareness

i have a passion for eating, i dont have a passion for dentistry

does anyone remember that episode of star trek tng where the kid is given a little laser engraver that carves a dolphin from a block of wood? and the kid is like "i didn't make this" and the teacher (who abducted him, ew) is like "yeah but it's what you wanted to make, the tool just guided you"

so in 2026 we're going to get in trouble doing code "the old way", the pleasurable way, the way an artist connects with the work. we're not to chefs any longer, we're a plumber now that pours food from a faucet.

we're annoyed because our output can suddenly be measured by the time unit. the jig is up. our secret clubhouse has a lightbulb the landlord controls.

some of us were already doing good work, saving money, making the right decisions. we'll be fine.

some of us don't know how to do those things - or won't do those things - and our options are funneled down. we're trashing at this, like dogs being led to the pound.

there's before, there's during, and there's after; the during is a thing we so seldom experience, and we're in it, and 2024 felt like nothing, 2025 feels like the struggle, and 2026 will be the reconciliation.

change sucks. but it's how we continue. we continue differently or we dont exist.

anyone else get big audio buzz relief using the extra, three prong cable on their normally two prong apple laptop charger? it felt as good as having my wisdom teeth out after i switched

if my operating system had an atomic Undo/Redo stack down to each register being flipped (so basically, impossible, star trek tier fantasy tech) i would let ai run commands without worrying about it. i could have a cool scrubber ui that lets me just unwind time like doctor strange using that green emerald necklace, and, i'd lose nothing, other than confuse my network with replay session noise. and probably many, many other inconsistencies i can't think of, and then another class that i dont know that i dont know about.

this is not always true. this is a dangerous fun fact to memorize.

and i don't mean because there's an override flag.

Wow, ads and smut in the same month? Cory Doctorow will have to invent a new term for this. Wait, he did 3 years ago, we can reuse it.

i havent been in a tier 1 ISP in 20 years. can anyone who is in that life give a little summary of how much infrastructure we have in the united states to implement the same level of control as what china has available for walling its garden?

like, if the direction came down from on high, to copy it ... how few things would have to get flipped on to have roughly the same thing in the united states?

i'd really appreciate an insider's summary. a lot has changed since 2004. probably.

Imagine what you could get away with if you owned the ledger of truth. Any time you made an offence, you could just update that ledger to say the people complaining are wrong, and that's the end of it.

I feel that the tech industry does not have sole ownership of this powerful tool

I, gen-x '79, was taught by Gen-z the reason we don't drink at the bars is cause someone'll make a video of us being weird and ruin us. Be weird at home. With the door locked. Fit in when the camera could be hiding and stay employed. Adequately satisfactory, A+.

I'm too old not to be weird. I get a lot of blank stares. I'm the only person I need the approval of. (For now. I worry the cameras find me more and more)

my winter project is to create a container pod at home that remixes media, maybe adds in some old or joke tv commercials between shows, and most importantly, shows the weather and the route to work at 7am. i think everything exists to do this, but it might take a few weeks to cobble together.

probably everyone since its been on their status page since before this was asked

counter point, think of how much more interesting movies would be if there were only like 3 a year and the rest of your time you were waiting for one

i call this model: everything before 1990

i'm not appealing to tradition, i'm just saying what if our focus is the source of enjoyment... what if 1000 things to pick for dinner is exhausting but 1 that you think about all day always ends up good

If we succeed in creating a Tilly that can replace a human actor, then human actors are at risk of becoming obsolete. Any finite resource that we can suitably convert to infinitely digital is in the same position.

When we invented photography, realistic paintings kinda ... well I'm not qualified to talk about art but I feel like realistic paintings were like the last horse trying to merge into the model T traffic jam.

I have a U4025QW and there's a glitch I'm typing here for google to pick up.

If my macbook (any macbook, perhaps any computer?) is plugged into the U4025QW and the power goes out, the U4025QW won't get the signal from the laptop and will remain blank. There's two ways to 'fix' this:

The first is to unplug the monitor for a long time, perhaps 2 to 4 hours. Sometimes I'll plug it back in at hour 2 and it wasn't long enough and I'll have to start over.

The second, and this works reliably, is to unplug the U4025QW, and then also unplug the monitor side of the HDMI cable, and then plug it back in with no signal, and then reinsert the HDMI cable. This gets the U4025QW to receive the signal after as long as the above operation takes, a minute or so.

I have had two U4025QW units. The first one was overheating and losing the signal as above on its own. I stopped having overheating issues when I stopped using an undersized UPS. I ran it straight into the wall.

But if there's a power outage (i live in an area with monthly power outages), the signal loss operation is how I restore functionality to the U4025QW.

I finally got one of those 300 dollar UPS units for the U4025QW and it's been very stable since then.

A multi variable episode that took me a very long time to reduce. U4025QW is a great monitor but dont give it bad power and it needs a little love after a power blip.