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mzmzmzm

453 karma · joined April 21, 2020

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mzmzmzm··on The darker side of being a doctor
Speculating, but it could be a spiral where the shortage places more responsibilities on existing doctors, making the field less appealing to potential doctors. For too many people no amount of income compensates for a difficult lifestyle (we see this with air traffic control). If this were the case it would be productive to redesign medical systems to unburden doctors, but the current for-profit, scarcity-oriented system (in the US anyway) seems calibrated to squeeze everyone.
mzmzmzm··on The case against JPEG XL
I feel like JPEG XL could be a good RAW format for mirrorless cameras... something with huge flexibility but with the perk of being easier to view casually on other devices. And then that in turn could make it a more useful web format? Camera vendors are of course notoriously proprietary/stubborn.
mzmzmzm··on K2 Horizon: A connected fleet of six open models
Accessibility isn't "solved," but there are certainly standards for things like color contrast. Maybe inbetween taste and coding there are better targets still being missed.
mzmzmzm··on GPT-6 Astra
I think "able to" anthropomorphizes a little too much for a system that is "prone to" evade.
mzmzmzm··on Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau
That's my thought when I see the Census downplayed -- a massive amount of social sciences research revolves around the ACS. And it gets worse! Census data doesn't just control reapportionment (and/or gerrymandering), it directs how federal dollars trickle down to huge programs like Medicare and Medicaid that are then administered by states. Eroding more detailed household data like income throws programs designed to help people more out of whack, likely harming civic engagement even more.
mzmzmzm··on Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses
I recently noticed that there are a ton of gig jobs (like this https://newyork.craigslist.org/brk/lbg/d/brooklyn-office-err...) that pay manual laborers to do their ordinary work with a wearable in order to train world/vision/robotics models. So expect a lot more of this horrifying intrusion unless the cutlure shifts.
mzmzmzm··on Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
I use Fastmail for personal email, but my org is a Google shop. If you have "smart features and personalization" turned off it doesn't even try with AI tools, and I toggled that years ago to get it to stop doing the smart category stuff. The horrifying thing as they pile on "AI" features lately is realizing that most of my coworkers have a totally different email experience.
mzmzmzm··on Show HN: A free Linux adaptation of NETworkManager by BornToBeRoot
Thanks from an Arch user for also putting it on the user repository
mzmzmzm··on Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra
My first thought on seeing this was that it could be great for Linux. If the hardware is a little more standard than Apple's, it wouldn't need all the tricks Asahi has figure out. Finally you could have the best performance without compromising on fine details.
mzmzmzm··on Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?
I always thought the grey Noctua Redux fans were their nicest looking offerring, despite being their lower end. I don't understand how they settled on that.
mzmzmzm··on Online age verification is the hill to die on
If you don't use X/Twitter anymore, XCancel makes it possible to read threads when not logged in: https://xcancel.com/GlennMeder/status/2049088498163216560
mzmzmzm··on Firefox Has Integrated Brave's Adblock Engine
I recently switched from Android to iOS... no comment except all of the browsers just being a wrapper for Safari is really limiting. I love Firefox and still use it on desktop but I couldn't handle it without extensions on mobile and switched to Brave. Somehow Brave on iOS can do content blocking really well. Will this change make it to the iOS version? I would love to switch back to Firefox where all my stuff is synced.
mzmzmzm··on All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027
I wonder if this is part of why Apple is behind most competitors in terms of fast charging. Would almost make marketing sense to come out and say it at this point.
mzmzmzm··on WebUSB Extension for Firefox
I felt that way too, but having used it a few devices as an end user I enjoy being able to close the browser and have the whole stack disappear. Instead of having to install a creepy Logitech tool to pair a mouse with a receiver, as soon as that task is done, goodbye Logitech. I guess a real concern is manufacturers stop offering native drivers, but for the majority of hardware the PnP or the Linux kernel just handle it.
mzmzmzm··on Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
Dropbox and GDrive desktop clients can be configured to sync files to a local directory. Backing them up with an additional platform would probably need some sort of logic like you described for VCS.
mzmzmzm··on Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March
Personally, after using Windows at home since I was in kindergarten (3.1), having an employer-provided Macbook the last 15 years, and every few years dipping a toe into Linux for various projects, I can say they finally did it. I panic built a new PC for gaming, video editing, and messing with LLMs just at the start of the RAM crisis and thought what the heck, why not CachyOS. I might not be the average user, but it has been so much more convenient, snappy, and fun to troubleshoot than any other time I can remember. KDE just works and has sane defaults. The Arch repository has almost everything you can imagine, and usually the Cachy maintained "safe" repos do too. I downloaded Steam and immediately jumped into my saves from BG3, Cyberpunk, Claire Obscur, and more, like nothing happened. QGIS, Affinity apps (bye Adeobe), LM Studio can take advantage of my GPU. DaVinci Resolve is wonky, but Kdenlive is fine as a stopgap. I want to evangelize now as much as possible since it's all so starkly different from even 5 years ago, largely but not wholly thanks to Steam's Proton work. Microsoft really doesn't care about Win users (fine, it doesn't make them any money), and now is our chance.
mzmzmzm··on Universal vaccine against respiratory infections and allergens
It's hard not to get incredibly excited about the second order benefit of this. Remember the first year of COVID when lockdowns actually reduced the common cold and other less lethal bugs? Imagine if this thing worked well at scale--in a generation you could have people straining to remember getting colds all the time.
mzmzmzm··on Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid
So it's an MVNO mostly on the AT&T network with extra privacy features? I think it still all then comes down to how you use your phone and how much you can trust the whole pipeline. I use Credo Mobile which doesn't seem totally different. https://www.credomobile.com/our-story
mzmzmzm··on Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android
There are some things that are hugely better on the iPhone, like accessibility setting that can be set on a per-app basis. Overall though, I expect the whole UX feeling to differ, but I am surprised that both camps have sort of given up on feature parity. Back in the days when "pull down to refresh" was novel it seems like iOS and Android meticulously copied each other's innovations.
mzmzmzm··on Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android
I find the shortcuts extremely powerful all over different parts of the system, but I wish the contours of what it can and can't do were less opaque. Feels like a lot of time-wasting trial and error to discover what is or isn't possible on an iPhone.
mzmzmzm··on Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android
I recently switched to iPhone for network reasons, and some UI/UX things are really shocking. There is no way to toggle location services without going into settings. The alarms are tricky to set and don't have niceties like telling you the time until your morning alarm. There is no clipboard history. They want you to use swipe gestures so much, the touch targets to exit fullscreen media are barely functional. If you use browser extensions and a browser other than Safari, to change their settings you don't open the app that bundles the extension; you don't look in the menus of your browser or Safari; you dig several layers into Safari's app preferences to find the extension's settings. After such praise, there are so many rough edges I can't believe iOS users just put up with.
mzmzmzm··on Who owns Rudolph's nose?
"Robert L. May died in 1976. But before he did, he established The Rudolph C ompany that holds the rights to Rudolph. Licenses are managed by a professional agency all to the benefit of Mr. May's children and grandchildren.

What makes this a holly-jolly Christmas story for me is knowing that the heirs of someone who would have been an unknown author are still benefiting from copyright protection, properly registered and renewed,"

I'm sorry but this is perverse. It's bad enough that we pretend ordinary property should be heritable, much less intangible knowledge.

mzmzmzm··on The Napoleon Technique: Postponing things to increase productivity
Surely you could have found a source for this concept not entirely generated by an LLM?
mzmzmzm··on Volkswagen Brings Back Physical Buttons
And so the arms race continues!
mzmzmzm··on Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union
The featured article today on Wikipedia's Main Page is "Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons," iD's pre-DOOM side-scroller. I like when Wikipedia editors land on subtle topicality with featured articles and images; it makes it more fun to check the page everyday.
mzmzmzm··on The RSS feed reader landscape
One of the "I wish I'd paid for premium sooner" services I use is Newsblur. The UI is not the most modern, but it centralizes, organizes, offlines, etc with enough power features to handle edge cases that I can feel like I "read everything today" the way I used to with Google Reader.
mzmzmzm··on Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account
I've used Win 11 for years and never had an MS account. If you just get the right European/enterprise/education image the first time you don't even have to do anything to skip OOBE. But it feels like the walls are closing in, and the day I finally can't do anything without an MS account, I'll finally daily drive Linux. Hopefully the part of my Steam library that will still need Proton will run smoothly--that's the main thing I'm scared of.
mzmzmzm··on When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”
There's a Group Policy setting in Windows: Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\File Explorer\Turn off numerical sorting in File Explorer Group Policy has so many essential settings I hurry to change with every isntall. I wish Windows would expose more of them to the user in ordinary settings.
mzmzmzm··on Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck – Native Version
Not to overly praise Valve which does have a profit motive, but their ecosystem + the Steam Deck + the openness of SteamOS really changes the landscape to where the "gaming on linux" punch line could really clear the hump and reach critical mass for developers. Something to fantasize about with each Windows update that adds new privacy converns and nothing else.
mzmzmzm··on Super-Resolution with Structured Motion
Brown University team uses motion blur as a tool to construct super-resolution images (sensor motion data is combined with the "blurry" image to produce an image with higher resolution than the sensor itself)
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