phantasmish

If you're not subject to the batshit insanity of the broader software market, and you crank the planning up a little closer to what "real" engineering does, software delivery gets extremely predictable. See: NASA's Space Shuttle software development processes.

(There are actual, not self-inflicted, problems with software development that "real" engineering doesn't see, though—for one thing, you can't on a whim completely restructure a building that's already been built, and for another, you generally don't have to design real-world engineering projects to defend against the case of intentional sabotage by someone who's just e.g. using the bathroom—it may happen, but it's rare and short of wacky Mission Impossible type plans, busting a water pipe in the bathroom isn't going to get you access to super-secret documents or anything like that)

ONLY?! Rabies cases are really uncommon! I’m seeing 17 in the us from 2015-2024. Even assume double or triple the rates in earlier decades and, what, maybe 200 since 1978? 2-4% chance a given person who dies of rabies has their organs given to someone else? That’s an order of magnitude higher than I’d have guessed. WTF.

Useful kind preserved, evil kind squashed.

This won’t work too well for most stuff. They don’t have to treat anything you present with, and don’t have to fully treat even e.g. a heart attack. They just have to stabilize you. So they can turn you away under most medical circumstances. Like you’re not going to get free chemo or (non-emergency) prenatal care or what have you. They also can triage you into the “maybe in twelve hours… maybe” group until you go away if you don’t seem like you’re dying, or likely to pay.

It's probably got something to do with copyright. Like the way it interacts with markets makes this sort of arrangement net-harmful pretty much any time you see it.

Exactly the correct solution.

We did something similar with movie theaters and film studios for decades, up until a couple years ago. Same sort of problem, same solution should work.

I’m ok with that for things where I don’t care that much about how it looks (do I give a shit if I lose just a little detail on Happy Gilmore? Probably not) and agree that faking the grain probably gets you a closer look to the original if you’re gonna erase the grain for better compression, but if I want actual high quality for a film source then faked grain is no good, since if you’re having to fake it you definitely already sacrificed a lot of picture quality (because, again, the grain is the picture, you only get rid of it by discarding information from the picture)

The long talking-in-circles conversations, especially.

That’s in addition to repeating everything several times, which is just a Netflix bad-on-purpose thing to account for people who aren’t paying much attention.

Me, I’d need two or three more lifetimes to get through my probably-good list of movies and tv, just for single watches… but I’m up for just about any genre.

I do sometimes end up with av1 for streaming-only stuff, but most of that looks like shit anyway, so some (more) digital smudging isn’t going to make it much worse.

Now you can't even fit a browser doing nothing into that memory...

Like I mean maybe, but also he was a bored rich aristocrat before TV was invented, and sometimes there are no parties going on or everyone's hiding in their country estates because of a cholera outbreak or whatever, and "making shitloads of drawings and organizing them" was like 50% of scientific work at the time. So. Maybe he just had a lot of time to kill.

Going by randos posting online, "liking things" and "knowing stuff" and "caring about things" are all autistic traits when present in any but the tiniest of degrees. It's ridiculous.

I appreciate the way you distinguish this from actual revealed preference, which I think is key to understanding why what tech is doing is so wrong (and, bluntly, evil) despite it being what "people want". I like the term "revealed impulse" for this distinction.

It's the difference between choosing not to buy a bag of chips at the store or a box of cookies, because you know it'll be a problem and your actual preference is not to eat those things, and having someone leave chips and cookies at your house without your asking, and giving in to the impulse to eat too many of them when you did not want them in the first place.

Example from social media: My "revealed preference" is that I sometimes look at and read comments from shit on my Instagram algo feed. My actual preference is that I have no algo feed, just posts on my "following" tab, or at least that I could default my view to that. But IG's gone out of their way (going so far as disabling deep link shortcuts to the following tab, which used to work) to make sure I don't get any version of my preference.

So I "revealed" that my preference is to look at those algo posts sometimes, but if you gave me the option to use the app to follow the few accounts I care about (local businesses, largely) but never see algo posts at all, ever, I'd hit that toggle and never turn it off. That's my actual preference, despite whatever was "revealed". That other preference isn't "revealed" because it's not even an option.

Instant buy $700 or under. Probably buy up to $850. At, like, $1,100, though… solid no. And I’m counting on that thing to take the power-hog giant older Windows PC tower so bulky it’s unplugged and in a closet half the time, out of my house.

I’d be very surprised if they haven’t had several of the root trust entities compromised from day one. I wouldn’t rely on TLS with any of the typical widely-deployed trust chains for any secrecy at all if your opponent is US intelligence.

Something like slurring the word “internationalization” combined with 18. “Ill-ateen-yon”

(In general I hate these numeric abbreviations, they’re terribly opaque to anyone who’s not clued in)

Of course 100% of that cpu is probably 1/10 of one core on any of my modern machines, so an ordinary and not-broken ad laden page routinely eats several times as many cycles now. Progress!

Clearly it’s “Kates”. Like “sk8er boy”.

Last I checked there hadn’t been major shifts away from the perspective this represents, in anthropology.

It was used as a core text in one of my classes in college, though that was a couple decades ago. I recall being confused about why it was such a big deal, because I’d not encountered the “peaceful savage” idea in any serious context, but I gather it was widespread in the ‘80s and earlier.

What’s the total cost of all road maintenance vs amount spent on groceries? How about vs all groceries plus all home goods?

Some (like, one or two per hundred students or so) may occasionally call their kid when they know they’re in class. Not because there’s a family emergency or something (and c’mon, you can still call the office for that) but just to shoot the shit. Talk about a WTF.

… but the official command line tools had show-stopper bugs if you were deploying Java to this service, that’d been known for months, and some features couldn’t be used in Java, and the docs were only like 20% complete.

But this work-in-progress alpha (not even beta quality because it couldn’t plausibly be considered feature complete) counted as “supported” alongside other languages that were actually supported.

(This was a few years ago and this particular thing might be a lot better now, but it shows how little you can trust their marketing pages and GUI AWS dashboards)