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flanking_pajama

51 karma · joined October 10, 2021

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flanking_pajama··on Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions
Well it's always seemed pretty cut and dry that the whole "abortion" controversy is largely a religious crusade and that anyone pretending to favor the constitution would call it mixing church and state.

But, conservative justices clearly had a bone to pick there, despite obvious conflict with the words of the constitution. For some reason.

There's a long and storied history of things being in conflict with the constitution and justices simply not caring. Slavery and Dred Scott come to mind, and although I'm sure there's plenty examples peppered in from other parts of the grand political spectrum, it's never been a well kept secret that the conservative M.O. is noticeably bolder and shameless in almost all regards, its major strength actually being in its willingness to use every tool at its disposal with minimal concern for blowback or legitimacy.

The recent state law strike down coming across as highly ironic (but probably not to conservatives since it achieves the actual goal not of ethics or consistency, but of simple victory) because so much of what conservatives got away with for decades directly defying the constitutional rights was based heavily on the concept of state's rights. Like informal slavery/servitude after the war, or keeping your elections nice and extremely predictable until that awful civil rights movement.

"Textbook" has nothing to do with this, or any of the wild departure of rulings being made in recent times. It's all very, VERY simple strategy: use what you have; dismantle what you can; build defenses where you can; you're in this for the Party.

flanking_pajama··on Two Years of Life with PinePhone
"I think we need truly open hardware and someone with money willing to stand against "status quo" of industry, like Elon Musk did with cars."

I- huh? Open hardware? Elon Musk?

I can only find a vague legalese pledge that doesn't seem to be very attractive for real world use according to many, and I know that Tesla is starting to really enjoy being an Apple-like company with such hits like proprietary chargers.

I'm also seeing no Teslas are listed on the supported page for projects like openpilot.

What we need is general opinion to be against such closed ecosystems run by industrialists with world records for wealth concentration. Not dreams of Captain Save A Pleb.

flanking_pajama··on Ask HN: Why is Google Premium not a thing?
I'd feel bad if advertising law wasn't a joke, and ads weren't basically an aggressive waste of time/money as a result.

Like man, I always hear "so many people make their living on this" but uh, maybe if false advertising law is practically unenforced and most ads are practically usually lies pushed by the already established winners in their industry...

Which it certainly seems to be, then. I find it hard to feel too bad, especially when people in the advertising business are probably not going to end up street beggars if things suddenly changed.

edit: although that "makes a living" argument may go wayside a little with the inevitable AI-generated, focus-group tested future we'll be living in. Hmm.

flanking_pajama··on Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
Easily my choice for the OP's question.

I have set and forgotten it for a few things here and there, like making sure the photos I take on my phone are backed up and available on my laptop as soon as they're on the same network.

flanking_pajama··on Apple’s “Coda” Wins Historic Oscar for Best Picture at the Academy Awards
Which poses another question I was wondering, if netflix had acquired this, would it have still won? They've been famously treated as a bit less "prestigious" than legacy competitors.

Or does Apple get extra goodwill from the logo almost assuredly in many of the pockets and homes of people in the industry?

flanking_pajama··on Apple’s “Coda” Wins Historic Oscar for Best Picture at the Academy Awards
Unfortunately this is the confusing way of the world.

IIRC, Netflix is able to run a logo credit for themselves in Star Trek Discovery despite only having licensing rights, but it gives the impression that it's a Netflix show (that being said, their buying the rights to stream it is de facto a large swath of their production budget)

flanking_pajama··on Apple’s “Coda” Wins Historic Oscar for Best Picture at the Academy Awards
Kind of creeps me out that Apple gets to just slide in and immediately become oscar winning film/tv production company darling, as well.

I'm sure someone at Netflix is cheesed with how quickly and easily Apple can just start drinking their milkshake, though. I remember there being a lot of pushing of ROMA and felt like it was a major nail biter for Netflix to get that to take home anything. But if we're being honest...Netflix doesn't actually try to make a lot of very good things to begin with. Though The Power of the Dog was quite notable, still a bit...sterile.

All that being said, at least HBO has another "quality, not quantity" competitor in the ring, at long last.

flanking_pajama··on I hate what video games have become
In all fairness, Rocket League may be the only "free to play" game that warrants the term "amazing". I'm glad it keeps something like RL around, but let's be real: this game model tends to rake in the cash even with the most generic games.

Frankly I'm torn: people can buy digital stickerbomb skins if they want, but it's obviously a bit of a "cheat code" to a profitable game and probably takes a lot of developers/money away from more interesting parts of the industry.

It'd also be more forgivable if it didn't seem popularity creates nearly immortal games that too often become stagnant and overrun with toxic players despite still being profitable enough to "keep alive", i.e. payday 2, planetside 2

flanking_pajama··on Joro spiders likely to spread beyond Georgia
I know this article and the comments are pretty light about this, but I really do wonder what they eat and what we're eventually going to hear about being muscled out of the local ecosystems as a result of their success. At least their introduction wasn't intentional, which tbh is kind of scary in itself.

Globalism: it's for spiders, too.