erikw

I think more competition in this space is great, and overall we'll all benefit. However, notice that when you open up Steam, the default view is your library of games, whereas when you open the Epic Games Launcher, your default view is the store. This suggests to me that BD folks are running the show, rather than folks who are interested in games. Valve has spent the better part of the last 20 years proving that they generally make decisions for Steam that put gamers first- enough so to convince me, a dedicated FOSS and free culture supporter to pay for DRMed games. I've also purchased a game from the Epic Game Store, and while the experience wasn't as good (the Epic Games Launcher is pretty half-baked software), I expect them to iterate and improve it, unlike EA's Origin software which is almost comically broken.

The incentive to care (in the US at least) is called tort law. Punitive damages against a company the size of Amazon for what sounds to me like theft should be very large. I'm sure that a lawyer would be interested in taking up this case, based on the size of the potential settlement.

For the basics of how electricity works (as well as for an in depth understanding) my recommendation is Electricity 1-7. It's a textbook originally published in 1966, so it doesn't cover anything digital, just good old analog electricity.

https://www.amazon.com/Electricity-One-Seven-Harry-Mileaf/dp...

This is so frustrating to hear. A lot of comments mention the IA "overreaching" with this. While I agree from a legal perspective, I don't agree morally. The IP lobby overreached when they got life of author + 70 years / 120 years corporate copyright monopolies passed into law. Is there any individual who argues that 120 years of monopoly is reasonable?

The worst part for me is the lack of agency I feel. I see something so vehement being enforced globally, and it makes me feel like I'm being ruled by some enemy mafia, not a representative democracy. Similar to the war on drugs in the US, I see this as actively sabotaging society for the benefit of a few.

I see readability as a key advantage of TS. Once you are able to comfortably read type signatures, it is trivial to see what a function is supposed to do, or what a library is supposed to provide. When things don't work as expected, then it's just a matter of hopping into the debugger to inspect data inflight to find where the typings aren't matching up with reality.

I did WISP work for a while in snowy rural California. My biggest surprise is that my time was 90% construction (drilling through walls, snowshoeing out to climb towers, running cables, etc) & customer support, and about 10% fun networking and hardware configuration. We used mostly Mikrotik equipment for the backbone because it is dirt cheap, with a combination of Ubiquiti and Cambium radios. My favorite tool that I discovered is the open source "Splat! HD"[1], a radio viewshed generator that you can use to optimally place your towers, and find out if an end user should be a able to connect. Ubiquiti also has a similar tool commercially available.

[1] https://www.qsl.net/kd2bd/splat.html

Something I'd like to see massive companies do to is offer lower skilled internships. I had a tough time convincing anyone to hire me coming out of a bootcamp, and I saw a lot of other people in similar situations- even people who I know are much better developers than I am. Internships also tend to require someone to be enrolled in an accredited institution. Offering a simple coding test and a small stipend seems like it would be pretty low risk for a company that has the cash and manpower to run a program like this. Large companies seen uniquely positioned to be able to try something of this size.

Unfortunately AMD video cards don't really support PCI passthrough- I'm in the same boat as OP with an RX 5700. The issue has been present for several years, and is somewhat fixed by community patches, which makes me suspect that this is being intentionally overlooked by AMD so as to not allow their consumer video cards to be used in the data center.

Great point that I forgot to mention, because I take it for granted- this laptop is upgradeable (SATA, NVMe, and RAM), so you don't have to commit 100% upfront, but can upgrade over the life of the computer.

Regarding an above comment about the resale value of the Lemur, I'll be interested in how my e495 depreciates over time. It included Windows 10 Pro, which I left on a partition, expecting to dual-boot into. I haven't ended up needing it yet, but it will probably contribute a higher resale price- just delete my Linux partition, resize Windows back to 100%, and toss onto eBay.

A Lenovo E495 Ryzen 7 U3700 with 32GB RAM and an NVMe will set you back around $600-700 today. Actually more expensive now than it was several months ago, but I would expect these to be inexpensive used within a year. Zero hardware issues in NixOS or Ubuntu, USB-C charging, outputs to 2 external displays plus the internal without any additional fan noise.

I've got zero complaints, especially since this is not Lenovo's top business line.

Yeah, having been much more productive in a previous remote position, I had thought that I was always more productive working from home. During a recent remote stint in my current position (which is normally onsite), I realized how much company culture and having a dedicated home office (which I don't have set up now) were a part of my productivity.

One cool trick: the USB standard [0] dictates that USB A type ports should be oriented "toward the host". On a computer, this means that the thick part of the plug should be facing toward the top surface motherboard. As long as you start in this position, you've got a good change of getting it in correctly on the first try, assuming you aren't blindly feeling and end up putting it in an RJ45 or HDMI port.

[0] https://www.phoenixcontact.com/assets/downloads_ed/global/we...

That reminds me of Google Buzz. I used it with a group of maybe 5-6 other people, and it felt like Google had built this product just for us- deep integration into Google Chat and Gmail, everything was solid, and no one else was using it, so it felt like our own private ghost-town.

This article is pretty substanceless, but especially since it references Bill Gates, got me thinking- why is no one calling for a tax on intellectual property? The article implies that a lack of income tax is regressive, but it seems that the value of the monopoly on IP accrues to a tiny slice of the populace.

I don't have specific insight into the machine learning aspects of Alexa, but based on my experience developing Alexa applications, I believe that the individual voices are trained on specific ML models. Most voices are unilingual, but there are bilingual voices as well, for example Hindi / English for India.

Does anyone have Linux experience with the Dell Inspiron 15 5000 AMD laptop? I was looking to get a Lenovo X490 or T590, especially now that they have an AMD version, but they've removed a lot of features that longtime Thinkpad fans like myself loved the series for. I noticed that Dell has this Ryzen 7 based laptop available at about half the price of Lenovo, and am considering it now that the Thinkpad line seems effectively dead.

EDIT:

Dell Inspiron 5000: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/laptops/new-15-amd/spd/inspi...

Lenovo T495: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-t-ser...

The main advantage of the Lenovo is that it can be equipped with 32GB RAM (and has a Trackpoint), but adding more storage and a higher DPI display brings the price up to over $2k, while the Dell is priced at $774.39...

Inspiron is also Dell's more prosumer oriented brand, while the Lenovo T series is supposed to be enterprise grade, so not sure how the Dell would stack up in terms of longevity.

EDIT 2:

Apparently the Lenovo E495 can be configured with 64GB of RAM at around $1,500, so this might be a good option for me, as well as the OP as this is a 14" model. I don't see a 64GB option on Lenovo's site, but there is one listed at Newegg: https://www.newegg.com/p/1TS-000E-0EMS3

Newegg also has an HP Envy laptop with 64GB RAM for a similar price, but I'm not familiar with that brand.

Anyone familiar with a low carbon footprint meat brand or certification? Seems like an interesting market opportunity. I didn't find a source for child comment re "the West" not being a primary market for Brazilian beef exports, but it doesn't sound unreasonable. Nevertheless, my understanding is that the entire beef supply chain has a massive carbon footprint, and I would think that there is a market for upscale US-raised carbon neutral beef.

I like to set up mini dev environments in Alpine Docker containers when I'm testing or trying out a new stack, and for the most part really like this pattern. That said, I run into a lot of issues that I think are musl related. The best part though is that when I finally get things working, everything is documented nice and declaratively between the Dockerfile and the docker-compose file, so I can come back to it later or clone it for a different project and it just works.

Yes, I have the same experience. Accessing from Fremont, Ca.

I see this sentiment a lot- "yes patents are bad for individuals and from a macroeconomic perspective, but we need them so that Big Pharma can ultimately improve our quality of life."

I wonder though, has anyone studied to see if that holds up? I suspect that our quality of life improvements come from infrastructure like access to safe drinking water, and general accessibility to medicines not protected by intellectual property monopolies.

Yeah- the money per person is lower, but a lot of the effort of waiting is in managing tables- ie, the entire table usually pays a bill at the same time, and then the table needs to be cleared and prepped for the next customers.

I'd like to share some anecdotes from my experiences as a waiter.

1. The people who demand the most service ("This is too cold, take it back", "Bring me a different fork, this one has a spot on it", etc) tip significantly below average, and sometimes not at all. This pattern is present just about everywhere- I see it in IT all the time.

2. Groups, especially business meetings, are the highest tippers. Serving a table of 8 isn't significantly harder than serving a table of 2, yet groups usually still tip based on percentage.

3. People who use coupons are universally small tippers. I also suspect that folks with coupons are not likely to be return customers.

I think that economics will sort out the cost-of-living issues. Seattle doesn't seem to have the NIMBYism of the Bay Area, and Washington State actually requires that communities plan for growth under the state Growth Management Act. I'm not sure how this compares to California (witness the unencumbered sprawl of LA, or the inability to build anything in the Bay Area), but from what I've seen, local Washington governments are not pretending that population growth is a fantasy. Seattle's growth plan specifically mentions "directing growth to existing urban centers and villages", so I can see how the proposed Sound Transit line extensions would help facilitate urbanization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_State_Growth_Manage...

http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/cityplanning/completeprojectslist...

Living in Seattle or the Bay Area, most people "have to" have a car, so I see it as a sunk cost, rather than amortized. I'm impressed with the political will that it must have taken to plan a line from Everett to Tacoma. With that kind of community planning, the Puget Sound may be more like NYC than the Bay Area in 25 years. The duplicitous rail options interoperating within the Bay Area fiefdoms- Muni, VTA, Caltrain, BART... are ridiculous. Seattle can't do anything to improve their weather, but for those who don't mind being damp, I think it's an easy choice over the Bay Area, and they are proving that they can think long term.

Trains are very cool, and the idea of shared public transportation is probably noble, but there is an intractable economic problem. If my wife and I both take the train, it costs twice as much to us. If we drive somewhere, it costs half as much.

Additional issues that need to be solved to make pubtrans competitive with car ownership are scheduling, the ability to bring cargo, and negative class connotation. And this completely discounts the probable arrival of ubiquitous autonomous electric vehicles before Sound Transit even gets to finish this project. As much as I enjoy the romantic nature of trains, I think the Puget Sound is gearing up for a folly of a white elephant.

Great point- it seems like the NY Post is following standard whitehat full disclosure procedures. My takeaway is that for any security vulnerability, as long as you append "because terrorism / for the children", you're in the clear.

Interesting customer retention scheme Big Pharma has come up with. Find a pool of folks at risk for suicide, and then get them addicted to expensive chemicals that will exacerbate suicidal ideation if they try to quit.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4172306/

"The FDA requires two adequately conducted clinical trials showing a significant difference between drug and placebo. But there is a loophole: There is no limit to the number of trials that can be conducted in search of these two significant trials."

Required vacation time is a security best practice, especially for anyone handling money. This makes it more difficult to perpetrate fraud. It also prevents institutional knowledge from being trapped with individuals, as at least one other person must know how to perform the role of the vacationee.