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mikkupikku

3,647 karma · joined October 11, 2025

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mikkupikku··on TSA lines are so out of control that travelers are hiring line-sitters
AFAIC there's no good reason for airport security to be a federal jobs program in the first place. The airports and/or their contractors are perfectly capable of operating x-ray machines and metal detectors on their own, and from what I understand are even still permitted to but all choose to let the government do it and pay for it.

What the fuck is the TSA even supposed to be doing? The 9/11 guys supposedly used box cutters. Does anybody seriously think you can't get a little blade like that onto an airplane in your carry on luggage? I bring double sided razor blades with every time I fly and they have never flagged it. And more importantly, does anybody actually believe you could still hijack a plane with a pocket knife? All the other passengers now know the score, they all die unless they throw themselves on you which they will and have done many times since. What's more, you won't get into the locked cockpit anyway. Airport security is solved. Basic bitch scanning for guns is all you need and we had that solved in the 90s which is the reason the hijackers used pocket knives, which no longer works. Disband the TSA.

mikkupikku··on No one is happy with NASA's new idea for private space stations
You're broadly right, but I think you're missing the part where perception of reality feeds back into reality, e.g. through economic effects. Demoralized Americans with less hope for the future stop caring, stop trying, and this in turn hastens that same decline.
mikkupikku··on No one is happy with NASA's new idea for private space stations
If the shuttles ever tinkered with any satellites they weren't meant to, it was relatively boring ones in low inclination orbits, not the really cool ones in earth observing polar orbits. We know this because the shuttles never went to those orbits.
mikkupikku··on Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right
> "Hey, some dummy just said [insert your idea here], help me debunk him with facts and logic"

It's literally that easy, something anyone can think of, but people want what they want.

mikkupikku··on No one is happy with NASA's new idea for private space stations
Most of the public don't know there's another space race and would probably tell you that Artemis is a new brand of deodorant or something. Senators don't care about space fans, they just want NASA to be a consistent reliable jobs program that doesn't throw any curve balls (hence NASA's [nominal attempts to have a] low tolerance for risk.)
mikkupikku··on AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
My dude, you're objecting to the use of a perfectly ordinary English idiom because it doesn't advance your personal ideology (which few other people in this world share with you.) How do you get through a day without melting down because somebody said "mailman"?
mikkupikku··on No one is happy with NASA's new idea for private space stations
We don't even know how much spin we'd need, and this is an important question to answer if lunar or martian habitats are something we're serious about. Maybe enough spin to match lunar gravity is enough, maybe less, maybe a lot more.
mikkupikku··on No one is happy with NASA's new idea for private space stations
Senators care about ground control. Jobs is the whole reason any of them agree to fund NASA at all.
mikkupikku··on No one is happy with NASA's new idea for private space stations
Nobody can even come up with a coherent reason for any of these proposals to exist. Even the ISS is more of a political instrument than a real science thing. NASA likes to say its about studying how to help humans live in space, but those results were in decades ago: more than a few months in zero-g wrecks people. So why are we still trying to build old modular Salyut/Mir derivatives instead of trying to figure out the minimum spin humans need to stay healthy? Because the whole point is to do familiar safe things while providing full time jobs for ground control.
mikkupikku··on Alex Karp says only trade workers and neurodivergents will survive in the AI era
I think you're right about the humanities. If you want to talk humanities with an LLM, they're more than capable. But that doesn't mean they're going to take the humanities from humans, all they'll do is make the humanities more accessible to normals. They're great at breaking down complex subjects without feeling judgemental or elitist. They're also excellent for extremely personalized recommendations, not just explanations. I've gotten amazing book recommendations over the past year or two, discussing in detail what I liked, didn't like, didn't understand, etc.
mikkupikku··on Hacking old hardware by renaming to .zip [video]
You're not taking all your shits in other people's bathrooms but soil your own instead? What a chump, lmao.
mikkupikku··on Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email
Unfair to clowns, a noble profession.
mikkupikku··on People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account
Aren't the Apple key and the Windows key just corporate branding on a super key?
mikkupikku··on People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account
If you can't take the mildlest of implied criticisms without feeling offended, this isn't a Linux problem, it's a you wandered out of your safe space hugbox problem.
mikkupikku··on People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account
> It was a simple linear search through files which could take a while on larger folders, but was reliable and predictable since it did not rely on a background indexing service which seems to get stale or just plain wrong most of the time.

It would be easy to have your cake and eat it too. Have the file search default to the index. Allow frustrated users to then click a button that says "search harder" which would initiate the full enumeration of the relevant filesystems. Of course some UX professional will tell me I'm wrong, they don't like anything they didn't think of themselves.

mikkupikku··on People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account
Ubuntu is a good example of why you don't let "product people" near the thing, Ubuntu is not even remotely the most noob appropriate distro but costs on marketting. As for SteamOS, Valve does many things which everybody else fails at, so they're not a good model for typical outcomes.
mikkupikku··on People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account
The people who take that goal seriously get burned when, having persuaded a normie to install Linux, they realize they just volunteered to provide free tech support to that person until whenever time they give up and buy a Mac.
mikkupikku··on People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account
Half those aren't even remotely harsh. Saying the raspberry pi wasn't designed to be mained is totally reasonable, what possible objection do you have to somebody saying that?
mikkupikku··on A Faster Alternative to Jq
If you're distributing the script to other people then the benifit of using python and getting stuff like high quality argument parsing for free is even greater.
mikkupikku··on A Faster Alternative to Jq
If somebody needs performance, they probably shouldn't be calling out to a separate process for json of all things, no?

(Honestly, who even still writes shell scripts? Have a coding agent write the thing in a real scripting language at least, they aren't phased by the boilerplate of constructing pipelines with python or whatever. I haven't written a shell script in over a year now.)

mikkupikku··on Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events
For what conceivable reason would you want to recreate the male and female division using a dozen or more proxies for sex instead of just using sex, to wind up with people being placed into the same buckets they would have been if you just went by sex in the first place? This seems ideologically motivated.
mikkupikku··on Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events
We can fix this, we have the technology. A pair of spring boots should do the trick.
mikkupikku··on Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events
Maybe they should accept that they simply aren't competitive if they can't compete against their own sex. There's no shame in it, most people aren't competitive, certainly so at this level.
mikkupikku··on Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
I have yet to see a shell that has mouse enabled line editing support. It should certainly be possible though.

I do prefer vi bindings at the same time though. Vi bindings and mouse support complement each other well, you don't have to choose one or the other, just use whichever feels most natural and convenient in that exact moment.

mikkupikku··on LibreOffice and the art of overreacting
Donation and tip fatigue. Can't go anywhere without being bombarded with beggars. FOSS used to not have this, people got that you were supposed to have a real job to support yourself, not cultivate a discord club of beta orbiter patreon paypigs, as is the modern style.
mikkupikku··on LibreOffice and the art of overreacting
How are you supposed to make an informed decision to simply not use libreoffice when they pop something like this on people unannounced, undisclosed, without precedent?
mikkupikku··on European Parliament decided that Chat Control 1.0 must stop
Leave it to the British to beat the Germans at their own game.
mikkupikku··on The truth that haunts the Ramones: 'They sold more T-shirts than records'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyle_Gass#Controversy
mikkupikku··on The truth that haunts the Ramones: 'They sold more T-shirts than records'
Remember when Jack Black ditched his long-time friend, threw him under the bus, for being mildly edgy against the establishment?
mikkupikku··on China is mass-producing hypersonic missiles for $99,000
There were 32 SR-71s, 13 A-12s and 2 M-21s. That's 47 total I believe, making your figure off by about 300%, which incidentally is how much cooler the SR-71 is relative to the Mig, on account of it looking incredibly exotic and elegant instead of like a pointy sky tractor. Being faster is just icing on the cake.
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