dijit

Come now, lets be real.

How many esoteric tools are needed for proper development?

“save my file” should not need a phd level awareness of the save model, yet it seems to because its so easy to fall off the happy path.

it does kind of suck though. (and he was talking about gamedev, which is not the only kind of development that deals with more than just plaintext, but its the one you can probably understand best).

Git solves a problem that we immediately unsolve constantly, and so we end up with the warts of both.

Its so ubiquitous though that people literally can’t even step back and realise this fact unless they are forcefully exposed to other paradigms (which they fight against the whole time).

Theres a lot of psychology to be learned here, its not sunk cost fallacy, its something deeper than that. Like rewiring the brain, even for a simpler paradigm, is almost painful for people.

How can you even know whats better if your brain is wired to know Git and distributed version control (yet not distributed)? It’s like imagining what it would feel like to smell electrical currents, the brain isn’t wired to know it.

not sure why this is flagged, the accidental omission of “game” devs can’t be it. it’s extremely true that game devs either use perforce, or they’re trying to use SVN because their company is cheap… perforce is strictly superior to SVN and miles better than GitLFS- and they’ve been sitting on that fact for over a decade.

I think they must have some kind of patent protection because their software is buggy too.. i have no idea how this company can survive with what is, honestly, an unfinished product and a directionless, soulless and bloated organisation attached to it…

… but it is the industry standard in game dev and automotive …

what a lucky position to be in.

it can be, if you control with the Geni coefficient.

However large parts of many countries is rural, and different amounts for different countries, and that tends cause control issues.

But in general, a low Geni coefficient and a high GDP per capita means labour costs are high.

depends.

With Mango or Guava its even easier.

With the other models, they don’t generate pictures of Uranium because of the aggressive censorship.

If you don’t allow the colour pink, sure, you prevent a lot of porn, but you also prevent a lot of legitimate pictures of roses. Nobody knows how to properly censor these models so most are leaning towards caution, better a lot of false positives than the alternative.

This is most obvious with Fable. It barely functions.

FWIW Grok used to have aggressive controls too- and they loosened them after a lot of feedback because it was barely functional at showing humans, even if it was a popular figure in a non-risque situation, and this is the fallout.

as an aside, I have a shimano e-bike and a bosch one, and the bosch one is leagues superior.

Which feels weird when you consider the pedigree of shimano, but it makes sense when you think what kind of internals an ebike motor would need.. I guess.

the part where you claim they could “prevent this”, and imply it would be trivial.

Generative AI, famously, has difficult guardrails and there are constant “jailbreaks”.

I guess you mean that they could have been overzealous with the prevention of all “spicy” content to prevent this, but I don’t think thats even as true as you claim.

Tumblr also permitted some more risqué content.

Yet we (rightly) condemned those that used this leniency to do nefarious things.

I'm really ready to get on the Elon hate train, and I will grant you that there was a problem that needs fixing, but I'm really not happy with the amount of censorship on these generative AI platforms.

Groks harness also clearly biases towards Elons views, Yet the washington post claims it's the most even handed and least likely to give politically biased answers: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0...

idk how to interpret all this, despite being genuinely anti-Elon, I don't think I'm personally willing to immolate a company forever because the guardrails were temporarily too loose.

I'm not trying to make an equivalency for facts vs deepfake porn, but there is one there unfortunately, and overall internet freedom has been curtailed a lot by advertising friendliness.

I find the premise of your comment completely incredulous.

I totally understand tribalism, and Elon and X aren't exactly well favoured. (not even by me)

But what you're saying right now is that they advertised the fact that they can create child pornography and deepfakes..

I simply don't believe it, unless you provide evidence.

oh, we're just making shit up now because we don't like a company..

ok then.

It's really not very far, maybe 15 meters.

I'm actually super annoyed that popular devices no longer show bluetooth signal strength at all... it's completely absent from the UI.

Impossible to know how well connected my headphones are when I keep hearing popping or distortion... you need special apps to realise how weak the connection actually is (and how absurdly busy the environment is: there are so many bluetooth devices around us.. it's crazy!)

If I use a shovel to kill a man, the shovel maker did not engage in intentionally crafting a weapon of war.

How tools are used are a reflection of the people who use them, and I definitely sympathise that tools should have guardrails to not enable this, or at least detect it.

But if a pedophile uses Whatsapp to groom a child; I don't go after Whatsapp for being a neutral service... I go after the pedophile.

so you can disable or mitigate it…

Escape from docker containers is trivially easy, if you are able to run as the root user in the container itself.

Many (maybe most) containers actually default to running programs as root. Kernel exploit not required.

Always super interesting to see how "powerful people" communicate.

big tech CEOs and major politicians use email almost as if it's an instant messenger: short, informal, to the point.

I guess it kinda bites them in the ass because the way I know this is via email leaks or subpoenas...

But it does mean that people can use whatever clients they like, and they can be across multiple organisations without weirdly expensive plans and administrators bridging instances or what have you.

These articles are what makes me say that,

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.23841

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0... (X post about it: https://x.com/genejchan/status/2070099701547090340)

https://www.promptfoo.dev/blog/grok-4-political-bias/

I don't want to go into it, because I agree that Elon is a very disturbing person, and there's clear evidence that Grok's harness attempts to bias towards his views.

However, Grok also seems to come out consistently as the most balanced of the chat-based LLMs...

So I'm not sure how to reconcile that.. maybe that's in line with "free speech absolutism", and if so, that's something I can get behind.

Usually if you’re using a NAS you don’t want to lose data, ZFS is not significantly more sensitive than everything else.

But everything is actually quite sensitive.

We’ve accepted lack of ECC because Intel decided it would be a product line differentiator, and serious customers who didn’t want random crashes or to lose data would buy chips with ECC.

It’s actually less of an issue these days because DDR5 has (by spec) some in-line ECC; won’t help with multi-bit errors but its an improvement on what came before.

their eyes are firmly on Africa.

Not being able to stand on our own feet is going to be a major problem because of the implied soft power. It nerfs our ability to ever have a spine on any issue.

"You are not immune to propaganda" is a phrase that doesn't hit hard enough.

It applies to you dear reader, yes you, not u/baggachipz.. YOU.

I am also not immune, I believe myself to be, constantly. My worldview is truth and I am "open to other ideas"- yet I have very obviously anchored myself to things the first time I hear of them, despite actively making steps to try to see all angles and explain away facts with alternative theories. (which is exhausting) I definitely believe what someone wants me to believe.

It's plain, it's obvious, and yet it continually happens. It's only with a decade of distance that I even realise what had happened.

And people call me "balanced" and "intelligent", theoretically I have more tools to deal with this than the majority of the population.

Yet... I am not immune to propaganda.

Ah, sorry, I was confused, it was Italy.

https://www.thewoodword.org/entertainment/2023/04/03/reeling...

They are banned somewhere and the library is open in Portugal.

If they were banned in Portugal it would run afoul of the legal system, and probably be closed down, obviously.

But if the criteria of being in the library - that the book be banned somewhere in the world; that's a reason to visit the library in of itself.

Though I think there's going to be a lot of garbage, one need only remember that Life of Brian (the Monty Python movie) is banned in the Vatican. (along with a bunch more).

Sometimes just seeing what is banned and where is a sort of art in of itself.

> System based on trust eventually get abused.

This is true. The tyrrany of the untrustworthy is that they destroy society for the rest of us.

The best thing we can do is control our spaces where it can be controlled. Don't hire untrustworthy people, be extremely punishing to those who break trust.

Rule 0 of any good community is: don't act in a way that makes me create a new rule. Workspaces are as much community as anywhere else, as much as Americans promote the idea that we're not actually fully human when working.

Yes, but I still think we've been talking passed each other.

I doubled down on "it's fine but not excellent" when I should have pulled away and explained that the main issues I have are about bitlocker as a user.

regardless of anything else, whether what you said is true or not: blocking program execution based on the detected environment is a runtime behaviour change.

> How many don't know your Timezone?

The timezone fetch was to alter program behaviour at runtime, not to send arbitrary timezones for tracking reasons.

It was one way of detecting if it was a chinese person using the program and then behaving differently.

Malware behaves this way. STUXNET for example was wired to do nothing except propagate unless the environment had the right conditions.

We're sort of talking about two things and conflating them.

I'm sort of talking about my user experience of the system, and I'm getting it in the neck from helpdesk.

Enterprise rollouts are different from anything I actually deliver, despite pushing out thousands of windows servers: I have complete control over those.

Same as my local PC.

But as a user on a PC I'd buy from a store, I'm not going to forget my password without expecting to lose access to my system.

> The United States is 85 times larger than Switzerland.

All other things being equal; it's a lot easier to dig huge amounts of fibre runs (following roads) where there isn't a heavy density of people.

Distance is practically meaningless for fibre optic cabling, but digging up historic cities, digging through mountain ranges, avoiding subways, plumbing and ensuring you have enough cables for the density of humans is hard.

Much harder than running cables between buildings that house 10 people which are 50ft away from each other.

If you use your key every day you tend not to forget it.

If I as an admin give you your key: it is “leaked” effectively.

Can.

If you click "Allow my iCloud account to unlock my disk", your recovery key is escrowed to Apple, tied to your Apple Account.

If you don't select that option it never does.

I should have said "without your explicit permission", but I assumed we were all adults and understood that.

The main point is that it's using your account password to unlock, the recovery key is for if you forget your account password.