mindslight

Don't mistake a lack of vibrancy for civilization.

And physician, heal thyself! It's a bit rich to bemoan "archetypal third world behavior" while applying your own third world sense of order, don't you think?

If you think the escalators are slow, just wait until you have to suffer the prevailing walking speed.

Even if so, this would seem to be a positive use of LLMs. Something traumatic happened, and she wants to put her perspective into the public dialog rather than continuing to be a passive subject of the social media industry's two minute hate. I know in such a position I myself would be at a loss for words, with the perfect being the enemy of the good enough.

While I agree with where you're coming from, I think you're overstating it just a little. It only seems like something that should be considered a public utility because Google has anticompetitively bundled what should be several distinct types of products together as one take-it-or-leave-it package. Android (really Google Play Services) should not be tied to the Play Store App (think how MS was forced to include a browser choice screen in the EU). Likewise the Play Store Curation/Hosting Service should not be tied to the Play Store App (ie Aurora store etc should work and be fully supported by Play Store Curation/Hosting Service through the Service having a well-documented open API). Then Play Store Curation/Hosting Service would have to compete on its own merits, rather than anticompetitive tying with two instances of Metcalfe's law (Android users plus app developers).

This is the real crux of the mattter. The rule of law means nothing when the autocratic authoritarians have installed corrupt judges that just rubber stamp the dictator's decrees. At every level, it's a bad faith execution of all the trappings of law, but with none of the ideals or justice. We see the same setup in every authoritarian country - it's not like Russia or China is lacking for laws - rather the authoritarian dynamic is always about how they're bent and abused to serve naked power.

The real problem is how many people eagerly eat and repeat the nonsensical bullshit, as if they are airtight logical deductions rather than mere rationalizations promulgated by the party's apparatchiks. I don't know if most people still just want to feel power from being on the "winning team" or if they're really unable to mentally model situations with independent parties that have their own rights while government has restrictions in order to preserve those rights, or what. Alas, it does not bode well.

Sure. The genocide has also been made so much worse, despite it being a point of criticism again Democrats.

There is a deeper point to my comment - the damage caused by Republicans often circularly benefits them, and isn't so easy to fix. If we have a "blue wave" now, but oil prices stay high as the strategic damage of giving the Strait to Iran can't simply be undone as easily as it was done, then voters need to remember this in a short 2/4/6 years rather than falling for media campaigns attributing the high prices to the future incumbents.

(Note I'm not coming from a partisan perspective here. I personally am a centrist libertarian! I was both-sidesing up to 2020 or so, but at this point it's only responsible to acknowledge that the Republican party has completely jumped the shark. And as much as the government is frustrating - when it's simply eliminated this doesn't make things more free, rather it leaves a power vacuum that often results in things become less free - ie corporate government).

> Does your air conditioner use water?

Yes, it does. As far as water is concerned, air conditioners are open loop. Air conditioners make water from condensation forming on the inside (cool) coils. Modern window air conditioners then splash that water on the outside hot coils, to benefit from evaporative cooling. I haven't looked into the details about data center water usage, but I would guess the cited usage is from evaporative cooling.

I was just naming general concepts, or describing on how one thinks of a service. It seems like you're using the terms as specific labels for a logical group of machines (eg a proxmox cluster), so I understand the need for a third name there for the specific hardware that's providing the common services.

The real problem is that people need to not forget in a few short years. This is exactly what the Republican party has become, completely. You can find quotes from like half of Republican senators before they were on the Grump train, saying how if they let this guy take over the party they were done for. And yet one by one they fell in line, and here we are - trashed or outright destroyed institutions, smashed economy, pointless forever war, our traditional allies moving on to a world in which we're not the global leader, pathetic response to 21st century industrial competition, etc.

His first term should have been widely recognized as the abjectly terrible leadership it was (dividership, really), but Covid was one hell of an excuse - and if there is one thing Grump is actually good at, it's making excuses. So instead four years later it was forgotten about because of the price of eggs, or her laugh, or the woke, or Palestine, or who really knows. Let's not make that mistake again!

> That ain't gonna fly - you're going to have engineering requirements for a 100' span wither it's a shade structure or a solar panel

Bingo. "cheap shade" is doing a lot of work. Typical for this kind of drive by "I've thought about it for 5 minutes but the people who worked on this project must be stupid".

Putting aside the awesomeness of the term homebase, what exactly differentiates the base from the prod? Aren't those ZFS pools just production? Or something like an MQTT broker that supports home automation - you're likely running experimental devices/services over that as well, right? And to the extent that experimental MQTT or NAS traffic could inadvertently disrupt the production services, you could separate those out if you really cared. But that would still just be lab and prod.

Maybe the division is more apparent if you're using containers, and/or have more of a social group to communicate support levels to? Personally I'm just using NixOS and am still at the stage of "I'm going to reboot the router now, it might take ten minutes or it might take days" [0]

If we don't need this distinction, then perhaps "homebase" could actually make more sense than "homeprod" ? Slightly different connotations, less putting on a show for lots of people but more homey like for a small family?

[0] from a technical perspective I'd love to separate the router out onto its own machine, but I want fast wireguard/openvpn/TOR/etc so it's a VM on a larger machine and I'm not really looking to expand my power consumption footprint to another large machine. I suppose I could split it out to two routers, one with straight NAT+wireguard and one with openvpn/TOR/etc, then the main could run on its own low-power box.

Re names, I like "homeprod". The main goal isn't to experiment and learn, and you're not scrapping to get a pair of Cisco 2501's to study for your CCNA. Rather the main goal is providing services that support your family's larger existence, independent of the surveillance industry - the tinkering is an (unfortunately necessary) side effect.

Why technology sucks in '26.

Truthfulness does not imply that something is not partisan. That it's brought up as a talking point to motivate a certain line of thinking is what makes it partisan.

> You should read up on game theory. It doesn't matter what I do

How does this differ from "I might as well drop my trash on the ground in the park, because everyone else is going to do it anyway" ?

You're fallaciously excluding the middle - there will always be some people who drop their trash on the ground. So a clean park must employ groundskeepers to pick it up. But such centralized action can never make up for mass distributed behavior, so it behooves us all to adhere to and propagate good culture that keeps most people from throwing their trash on the ground. And the same dynamic applies to basically every societal construct.

So no, I do not buy your [self-serving] argument that the culture you're simultaneously bemoaning and also engaging in is inevitable.

Honestly telling your kid going off to college (or elsewhere) "you have to take everything from you care about, the rest is going to go away" seems like a good way to stunt their independence. The natural reaction would be to take as much as they can of their current life, which is then going to be a burden preventing them from growing into a new life.

I really wish articles like this wouldn't anchor around this refrain of "... while their wealth increased by $XXX". It's a staple of tax law that you're only taxed when income is actually realized, and there are a few glaring loopholes that allow people to avoid realizing capital gains. At the very least, things should be changed such that taking a loan against an asset beyond its basis is considered a realization of income - similar to how if you take a loan against your IRA it is considered a distribution.

But we already knew all that! We don't need numbers calculating out infinitesimally small fictitious "tax rates" (for a tax regime that doesn't actually exist) to illustrate it. Unless someone is actively selling the stock they own, they are not paying any income tax on its value, period end of story.

And so rather it feels like a wasted analysis to keep focusing on the value of zero divided by $big_number, when there are going to be far more interesting things like exactly what income did they realize, and what type of expenses did they use to offset it, what amounts did they actually pay tax on, and so on. Because capital gains deferral is not the only way the tax code skews towards the rich by far, yet it's currently using up all the air in the room.

I like the article, but I'd say it has left out descriptions of those people who weren't in the social Matrices it described (either because they didn't want to be, like "one family who had moved out of the West End into an aging lower-middle-class town" or because they couldn't like those lower orders in "volunteer work is part of what separates them from the lower orders".

In fact I'd say that angst from this type of person (I consider myself one) is a good chunk vocalizing concerns about "a world without work". "Going your own way" is a large part of the American psyche, so what happens in a world where there is not work that needs to be done, which had been laying out straightforward paths for "your own way" ?

I'm personally not feeling too much of this angst, being both happy working on the kinds of physical things that aren't going to be automated away any time soon, and also having the engineering knowledge/skills to effectively use LLMs and benefit from the automation. But I'm also not looking so far into the future as to worry about those endeavors becoming trite.

Your game here seems to be throwing out simplistic partisan tripe, to either prompt an equally-inflammatory opposite-partisan response that will leave you feeling vindicated, or you can always fall back to arguing the shreds of truth in it while continuing to ignore the big picture.

I would ask you to "do better", but the whole problem is that once you've bought into the contradictions of destructionism, there is no doing better without coming to terms with what you're actually advocating. Talking about an "an Argentina-like reset" you're closer than most, but I suspect that's due to a better ability for rationalization.

In other conversations of ours, you've gone on about the need to preserve American culture in the face of immigration. So once again I will implore you personally, to do your part by working to adopt our culture rather than proudly championing the exact zero-sum politics you're bemoaning (regardless of having changed the color of the partisan flag you're waving). A core tenet of American culture is personal responsibility (for better and for worse), and so these types of choices right here are where the rubber meets the road.

Do you feel like you have much agency in the economic and political systems that rule our lives? The problem does indeed always come down to humans, but the specific humans with the most agency are generally quite eager to take away the agency of everyone else to increase their own share. And by the time they themselves are actually affected, it's generally too late.

Right on! It's always frustrating reading articles framed in terms of "security breaches" and "dark web", invariably doing hand waving at unspecified harm, when the real threat actor for pretty much everybody is the "above board" surveillance industry. Random people who buy this info outside the law can't really hurt me - it's not like I'm a witch and my DL# is my "true (system-given) name" and I disappear when they say it or something. Rather the parties who can hurt me are the ones who pretend knowledge of this semi-public information is an authentication system, and then hassle me with legal nastygrams when they get defrauded. Or who keep comprehensive dossiers on my behavior to unaccountably sort me into corporate-defined boxes so they can better extract my wealth and otherwise form anti-competitive arrangements against me. These actual attackers operate mostly according to the (very broken) law, and they are what needs fixing. Not just scaremongering when some bogeyman "wrong people" get a small taste of the exact same information.

You really do seem to love this type of "Democrats made them do it" excuse. At a certain point you've got to ask yourself if you're trying to convince others or mainly just yourself.

So you were "simply" responding to one small part of my comment, with a narrative that sane-washes the whole larger picture.

If you personally don't care about the debt, that's fine. But there are a lot of people who had claimed to, who have now turned their denial circuits up to 11. My "$40T more in the hole" aside was aimed at them.

The Republican plan appears to be to run the de jure government into the ground so that the corporations can occupy more and more governmental roles, eliminating what little shreds still remain of our Constitutional/natural rights. So no, I wouldn't assume that there will be some clean collapse, nor that said collapse will leave a power vacuum in which a democratic government could be rebuilt.

Cool story bro? I remember a whole lot of people who complained about the debt during the Obama years (I was right there with them), who are now completely silent or even full-throated support. Perhaps a few of the more "honest" ones you might be able to get a "I don't like everything he does" out of them.

If I recall though, you personally did support Obama? Which would make your point doubly moot.

Also note that my condemnation wasn't just about the debt per se, but rather the decreasing creditworthiness. Say what you will about Obama (I certainly have), but at least he kept up relations with our allies so they saw us as a strong partner worthy of holding their wealth.

Did anybody think Grumpism was going to go somewhere other than here? It's merely been the spite choice the whole time - a way for economic losers to stick their thumbs in the eyes of people who had been mildly successful. Pure crab bucket mentality, now with $40T more in the hole - and still no actual solutions to the problems we are facing. But that certainly doesn't stop those problems from being brought up to rally support for the next con job. And the people at the top certainly aren't suffering! We have basically squandered the advantages our grandparents sacrificed for, to satisfy some kind of collective ego based around American exceptionalism and ignorant fundamentalism.

(edit: I guess a lot of people still aren't ready to hear it)

The Sharpie works!!

Games could clearly be an exception - they're the only place the locked down computing paradigm has a reasonable argument.

The multi-user productivity apps you listed would most certainly be better off as separate clients and services! The entire point is that you shouldn't be forced into using one (often terrible) piece of proprietary client software simply due to the network effects of other people using it. Wouldn't it be nice to use the Slack client in a Teams environment (or vice versa if that's your thing) ? This would produce more competition because companies would have to develop the client software to be compelling itself, rather than relying on the pull of installed deployments with captive victims^wusers.

> if someone writes an app with a backend service or library, should they be required to document the API for people to build their own tools on top of?

Yes. Network services and client software should be considered two separate products/markets, and tying between them should be seen as anti-competitive behavior worthy of anti-trust enforcement.

That the software industry has been able to develop some brazenly anti-competitive pratices does not constitute an argument that it should be allowed to continue.

Documentation for hardware subassemblies produced by different manufacturers isn't getting conveyed through hallway conversations. Pure software can indeed be quite sloppy, but for vehicles we're talking about large scale cross-stakeholder projects where these things do get formally documented.

At any rate, for things a manufacturer doesn't consider important enough to document themselves then there can be a clear alternative requirement - release whatever upstream documentation they did use to create it, plus the software source code they developed on top of it. If it's not important enough to have been documented as its own product, then it also isn't a significant part of the value they're actually selling, right?

> at what size or capacity should you be required to document and publish these things?

The reason there is an opaque number in that open source utility is precisely because of a lack of open documentation for that register definition. Independent black box analysis of the messages only got as far as "write this value to do effect X". Whomever developed that utility would have loved to spell that bitfield out, but not at the cost of more days reverse engineering.

But manufacturers aren't reverse engineering register definitions, they're working off of vendor datasheets or protocol definitions they themselves created. All of this documentation has already been produced, as it was used to develop the tractor from its various subsystems. It just needs to be published!