kstrauser

How’s that GCC backend coming along? I could look it up, but I bet others would like to hear about it too.

So their tracking is OK because it's immobile. That's an interesting and novel defense of a surveillance state which I hadn't heard before.

In my opinion, yes, that makes you a radical. I don’t want an armed organization with a trillion dollar budget stalking me. That’s the common stance in America. We even put it in our constitution.

What broke and affected you?

That’s literally exactly what Flock does. I can’t find sympathy for the company on this.

And the sign along the highway says my speed might be monitored by airplane, but I don’t want to live where that means a surveillance drone is flying along side me at all times. Consenting to let a taxi record me in case it comes up later that I did something bad and they want to have footage of it is one thing. But now we know Waymo is a little Flock tattletale, and people generally aren’t ok with their robocab proactively narcing on them.

Those are bad examples of things where a computer should make a judgement call.

> Going to shoot up a place? Take your guns on a waymo. It won't complain.

I take my kid to go skeet shooting. You’d call the police on us for having legal guns? What about my pocket knife?

> Guy wants to take an obviously distressed and co-erced girl to an abandoned lot? No complaints.

My wife is scared by someone on the sidewalk. We’re riding to where we parked our car for the evening. There’s a scared woman with me as we commute to our vehicle. BART wouldn’t call the cops on me.

> Person with obvious head injury and slurring speech wants to go home instead of the hospital? Sure.

What’s “obvious” here? I have drinks with friends and bump my head on a cabinet, and now I’m bleeding like a stuck pig. I’m not remotely about to die. Dammit, Waymo, I just want to go home and shower and let me wife laugh at me while she tapes me up.

> Person has heart attack and passes out in back? We'll just drive your limp body 45 minutes in traffic to your destination.

Person’s exhausted after work and wants to nap on the way home. They look identical to the dead guy. BART lets you nap.

If we had ubiquitous taxi and subway police, maybe they’d spent 5 seconds assessing each situation and move on. In no other real-life situation do we expect empty subways or taxi drivers to call the cops and investigate every possible bad scenario, nor should we.

Yes. Well, not exactly wave guns around, but say and do stupid stuff? Not in a taxi around a human driver, no. And not in a subway car with people other than me and my friends, no. But your question had an “or” in it. If we had nerf guns and no one else was there to witness? It’s not unimaginable that someone might get a nerf dart to the ear when they didn’t expect it.

My wife and I like watching real-life police detective shows. Sometimes we discuss mistakes the killer made, and how we’d avoid them. “I wouldn’t kill anyone, but if I did, I wouldn’t cheap out and keep the clothes I wore to do it instead of tossing them into a river.” Of course we’re not going to do that, but it’s a puzzle to solve, so we try to solve it. We would not have those conversations around a taxi driver or a crowded subway, lest someone overhear and get the wrong idea. On an empty subway or Waymo? Yeah, sure. And if BART or my cab reported us for planning a murder, I’d be livid enough to plan how to murder the computer that made the decision to rat me out.

I remember this, and my stubborn side rejoiced in the hack.

This right there. No, you're right, it's not a panacea. However, it absolutely fixed the period back problems I've dealt with most of my adult life. Now if I do something to tweak my lower back, I can't wait to get to a treadmill or out onto the sidewalk. It's the one thing I know will make it feel better.

Of course, that's going to be different for everyone. It'll make some people worse. For me, though (and apparently for you, too), it is the right way to treat those issues.

For those with knees not tolerant of running, I've taken to also rucking around with a heavy backpack. It's fantastic for building torso strength, and "your body weight plus 30 pounds" is still far less impact than "your body weight, but running". Walk up some hills steep enough to make you pant and wonder if you can make it to the top and your body may thank you for it, the way mine thanks me.

BTW, doctors have a saying: "motion is lotion". Also, "when you stop moving, you die". We are not evolved to take root on a sofa. Our bodies are meant to move and jostle and bounce and twist. Absent specific reasons not to, it can make a huge difference in physical comfort.

Ugh. Yeah, I'd have that back at the store an hour later. I did not agree to this before handing over my money, therefore the sale was fraudulent.

Good grief. "Bet I don't!"

And in any circumstances, the ludicrous notion of adding a contract after a purchase is made is unconscionable.

You buy a car. You pay cash. It’s yours. Afterward, the seller says “oh, and you have to agree to these terms before you’re allowed to start it.” Proper response: fuck off, I already paid you. It’s the same here. If you want to apply extra terms and conditions, negotiate them before the conclusion of the purchase. Anything afterward should be utterly laughed out of court.

This vulnerability, which doesn’t affect my installation, would take approximately 5 minutes to patch if it did. With that exception, my server will have had approximately 99.999% uptime over the last several years.

It would take a boatload of such events to equal the opex of GitHub hosting. That’s not an excuse to run amok, but it’s far from tipping the scales in GitHub’s cost favor.

Wait until you find out about smoke detectors. Or microwave ovens. Or light bulbs. Or anything with nonzero temperature.

That’s the most insecure thing I’ve heard in a while. What other things randomly flashing across your screen disturb you? Do you imagine your coworkers keeping count of which ads are displayed in your browsers? Do you imagine that they don’t also see the Anubis loading screens?

> incredible development of the aesthetics of simplicity and emptiness compared to the ostentatious and sometimes baroque western aesthetics

We're just going to pretend that Japanese web design is identical to the rest of the world's, and that Japanese homes aren't half the size of elsewhere such that every horizontal and vertical service is commonly used for storage.

For the love of goodness, if I'm having a heart attack or something, please do not waste 5 to 7 seconds total of my life to screw around with footgear instead of just coming inside and getting me. I promise I'd vastly rather have your shoes touch my carpet than die because of "manners".

Where I grew up (suburbs in the Midwest in the US) no one took their shoes off, ever, until it was bedtime. I cannot remember a single time taking my shoes of at a friend's house, or when visiting somewhere with my parents, or going off to see family. I guess the only exception would be if the shoes were exceedingly dirty, like you'd just stepped in mud or such.

Similarly in the military. We got un-booted at bedtime, and put them back on when we got up the next morning. Even in the barracks, including the nice ones that were reasonably nice apartment buildings, I never took off my shoes to walk around my room or when visiting someone else's (and vice versa; no one took off their shoes to visit me).

The first time I bumped into that rule was when I met my wife, who'd moved to the area from New York. I was quite confused when she asked me to take my shoes off at the door, and more than a little anxious. Sure hope I'm wearing decent socks and my feet don't stink, lest I be traipsing dirty feet around her apartment. To this day, I'm not convinced that hardsole shoes that haven't walked through wet messes are substantially dirtier than a damp sock that's been inside a shoe all day long.

Forklift.

Lots of people like QSpace, but I’ve bumped into weird privacy issues with it every time I considered trying it. Life’s too short to worry that my file manager is spying on me.

Gotta agree. Turning tracking cookies off? Sure! Turning session cookies off and then complaining that the server doesn’t remember you? Uhhh…

And while I’m sympathetic to the idea of not wanting to run JS, to a first approximation modern browsers are JS engines that have graphical displays. How things should be vs how they are is a classic is/ought problem. The world took a vote on what a browser’s meant for and we lost. Fighting it today is rough; tomorrow, futile.

As government representatives, they’re limited to the behavior that the Constitution grants to the government. Here’s an explainer to said Constitution you may find useful: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/sec...

After reading that, please do tell where the power to poison water and lie about it is granted to the government, and the members of that government.

The US Constitution, by itself, grants US citizens everything as a right, then enumerates the exceptions to those all-encompassing rights carved out as necessary for the operation of a government.

The correct question is: Where does the US Constitution grant governments the power to poison and lie to residents?

This isn’t some pedantry but fundamental American civics. The US Constitution explicitly does not enumerate rights. It’s default-allow, explicit-deny regarding human rights. It’s rather alarming that anyone would think it’s default-deny, explicit-allow. That’s not how the Constitution is written.

That's true, but hear me out. I wear reasonably priced, "nice" watch — a Seiko 5 GMT. Quartz watches tell time better. I wear this one because I think it's a good looking watch and like the way it looks and feels on me. Although quite practical as far as such things go, it's definitely in the "jewelry" category. I paid more than a well-working quartz digital costs purely because I found it attractive, not because it's an objectively amazing watch. I get the appeal of jewely.

So... instead of spending $5k on that blood diamond, spend that much on a larger, prettier, flashier, objectively better lab diamond. Now you or your lady friend can enjoy a bigger, nicer, even more luxurious diamond for the same price. You can still spend $5k if you wish, but end up with something more mind-blowing.

It’s not only that. Lab diamonds are superior in every way I’ve heard of. The emotional appeal of their provenance is the sole remaining reason I’ve heard people claim that slave diamonds are superior. I contend that they’re worse there, too. In fact, the only reason I can imagine someone preferring mined diamonds is that they genuinely value the human suffering that goes into them.

I love a good cheeseburger. I’ve enjoyed ones from Michelin restaurants and from local holes in the wall; I’m not choosy. To me, the taste and texture of a cheeseburger is one of the best testing things on the planet.

I do not eat cheeseburgers to feel manly or dominant. I eat them because they are delicious. If I could have a plant-based or otherwise non-meat burger that tastes as good as the real thing, I’d eat it. Impossible burgers are getting close and I’ve had my fair share of them, but they’re not there yet. They’re near enough that I’m confident we’ll get there soon.

Given the infamous conditions of diamond mining, to me that reads like “won’t someone think of the jobless slaves?” Someone no longer being forced to slave away in the mines is not exactly a great loss to workers rights.

“De Beers: Because the tears of children make it sparkle!”

I personally find lab grown much more beautiful, in that they’re an amazing accomplishment of mankind’s science and technology. So a tree got squeezed underground until it turned into a crystal? Cool, I guess, but big deal. Humans learned enough about how matter works to recreate those conditions at industrial scale? That’s amazing!

I’d much rather wear a monument to our cleverness than a dinosaur mashed under a rock.

How severe should your workplace grievance be before you’re allowed to decide to protest? Are only coal miners allowed to grouse about their jobs?

Won't someone please think of the poor advertisers? /s