phantasmish

My son picked up and used one effectively having about the same level of experience you do (none, but he knew the basic idea and had read the label). Can’t remember if he was 7 or 8 at the time, but either way I’m pretty sure you’ll be ok.

I mean, still doesn’t hurt to get more familiar, but…

It's a lower bar by the day. I expect by the time I'm, perhaps, retiring (which isn't even that far off), "millionaire" won't be enough qualification to tell if someone's comfortable in retirement, or mightily struggling. Especially if we just mean a net-worth millionaire.

I find this as a reaction to the quoted passage (not to some hypothetical other passage, perhaps) so confusing that I can't wrap my head around it without categorizing it as the result of misreading. "Gutturally revolting"? But your objections hardly seem related to the text at all. To something you feel was suggested (a couple steps removed, and not necessarily) by it, or some expansion of it you're making, maybe, but to that text? I'm at a loss.

There used to be a lot more “hustle culture” and “growth hacking” stuff on here (10+ years ago) most of which I find disgusting, so I’m glad for that shift.

If the take was intended as conservative, I’d say it’s actually leaning pretty far into “accidentally left-wing”.

Market forces ruin fucking everything in their attempt to paperclip-maximize, if you don’t keep them on a leash. That includes sexiness. What’s described is an outcome of a system where “it makes number go up” is sufficient justification for almost anything.

Horror, action-horror, and comedy-horror are in a really great place and have been for a while. Drama’s doing fine. Comedy’s been a bit weak for many years IMO. All the good ones I can think of are comedy/something—like, Red Rocket is very good and quite funny but also… damn dark and leans drama often enough that I’m not sure just “dark comedy” covers the difference between it and a straight comedy, it’s more a dark-comedy/drama. Or, uh, is The Art of Self Defense a comedy? Like… sorta? I can think of a couple alright ordinary comedies but nothing that stands out.

Oh damn, this has been causing me trouble when working in half-and-half and quartered windows as recently as this week. I’ll be installing the one you linked, or the one the thread-link points to. Thanks, didn’t occur to me this would be a thing but of course it is.

“Here’s some free food”

Cool!

“And a side of literal shit, plus a slip of paper with the number of my cousin who’ll try to swindle you”

… coo… ool.

Quietly tosses the shit and phone number in the trash, keeps the free food

Several hundred new movies see significant distribution or screenings every year. Folks who say “there are no good movies now” have really narrow taste or aren’t looking hard enough.

I have seen tons of great movies made after 2010, but must admit I’m having trouble thinking of any blockbuster-type movies that stand up to the best of the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

Does Fury Road count? I dunno. The closest I can get aside from that are a couple Tarantino movies. Jurassic Park, the first Mission Impossible movie, Aliens, Jaws, hell even Independence Day. Nothing’s quite up there. Lots that are a kind of janky B-movie sort of good, but nothing as solid as those. Almost all are marred by lots of CG that might look ok at the time but seem dodgy and very distracting within 5 years max, for one thing (to be fair, Jurassic Park suffers from that in a couple scenes, too)

Other business models are fine. I would support almost any amount of legal push-back on ads, though, and don’t care what happens to ad brokers.

If you think our ability to measure developer productivity is bad, look into what we can do to measure manager productivity.

TL;DR your realistic options are snake oil that doesn’t work, or nothing.

Keep that in mind next time anyone’s talking about managing through metrics & data or whatever bullshit. All that stuff’s kayfabe, companies mostly run on vibes outside a very-few things.

Iraq had one of the largest militaries in the world at the time of Desert Storm. They had tons and tons of arms and equipment and a huge standing army to counter the persistent threat (and/or to provide their own threat) of resumed hostilities with Iran (that war was still pretty recent when Desert Storm took place)

I would agree that the US is notably terrible at occupations and getting involved in civil wars, at least since WWII, but Desert Storm was pretty much an unqualified slam-dunk take-a-victory-lap success against one of the top armies in the world that wasn’t an ally or a nuclear state—carried out on the other side of the planet from the US, to boot. Like I think Iraq was ranked top-10 at the time by many ways of reckoning military strength, and that wasn’t enough to effectively resist the US effort at all, really.

If that war seems small, it’s only possible for it to seem that way from the victor’s perspective, and only because we did such an amazingly good job of totally destroying Iraq’s substantial capacity to fight in a matter of weeks. In terms of deployed and engaged men and materiel it was really big, just fast because it was so very one-sided, and “cheap” in terms of casualties on the US side for the same reason.

This is less like paying for a gym membership and more like paying some kind of fat-fairy not to come inject you with fat while you’re sleeping every night.

Paying for things that help you is good. Paying someone not to try to scam you is… fucked up.

Every one of these discussions: “But without ad revenue a bunch of sites might vanish!”

Me: But not internet archive, Wikipedia, or Library Genesis, right? So 90ish% of the Web’s value is safe? Ok sounds good to me, let’s do this.

TIL when I watch YouTube I’m distributing things.

Unless they moved some things forward because they knew it was ending ending, I agree. As much as part of me wants to see where some of that goes, I know it wouldn’t have been good. Not like the rest of it was.

Separate topic: The way the show handled Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral got one of the biggest laughs out of me of any TV show ever.

I think a lot of folks who haven’t looked in to pop culture and pop science in the ~1950s assume a lot more of Fallout is totally made-up than really is…

God, I’d love to once again be working at a company where coding speed mattered.

Meanwhile in non-tech Bigcos the slow part of everything isn’t writing the code, it’s sorting out access and keys and who you’re even supposed to be talking to, and figuring out WTF people even want to build (and no, they can’t just prompt an LLM to do it because they can’t articulate it well, and don’t have any concept of what various technologies can and cannot do).

The code is already like… 5% of the time, probably. Who gives a damn if that’s on average 2x as fast?

My wife and I are both paid to work on AI products and we both think the whole thing’s only sorta useful in-fact. Not nothing, but… not that much, either.

I’m not worried about AI taking our jobs, I’m worried about the market crash when the reality of the various failed (… to actually reduce payroll) or would’ve-been-cheaper-and-better-without-AI initiatives the two of us have been working on non-stop since this shit started break through the hype of investment and the music stops.

It’s just a very old-school luxury metal:

“Aluminium was difficult to refine and thus uncommon in actual use. Soon after its discovery, the price of aluminium exceeded that of gold. It was reduced only after the initiation of the first industrial production by French chemist Henri Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville in 1856.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aluminium

I dunno that it will be improved. ChromeOS is pretty bad on that front (or at least was a couple years ago when I set up a chrome book for my elderly dad).

Blue book was the norm for exams in my social science and humanities classes way after every assignment was typed on a computer (and probably a laptop, by that time) with Internet access.

I guess high schools and junior highs will have to adopt something similar, too. Better condition those wrists and fingers, kids :-)

The concept of “political fiction” exists and is important, yes, but we need not confuse it for reality.

[edit] I think I’ve used the wrong term here but I think I get the idea across. There are diplomatic lies maintained in many situations where everyone largely operates like it’s not true, and the situation with Taiwan is so quintessentially one of these that’s it’s a common first example to illustrate the point. In my defense it’s been a loooong time since my last international relations class.

They’re probably also such a large part of the active Twitter “user base” that substantially reigning them in would be enough to put the product into a permanent, sharp decline.

It’s widely known and reported this is happening. I guess this might get the message to people in the back who aren’t paying attention… but given we’ve had most of a decade of off-and-on coverage of this, anyone left is probably unreachable, and a bunch of them have been primed to ignore this exact sort of headline as “fake news”.

Maybe when I get that new Steam gaming computer (day 1 purchase… assuming the price isn’t crazy-high) I’ll get around to it.

I’m actually for trying to bring manufacturing back to the US. I’m for decoupling from (and hopefully weakening) China.

I’m entirely against Trump’s chaotic lunacy because it’s not going to accomplish any of the good things I’d hope for from such a thing. He’s got whole sectors treading water waiting for him to die, while smaller players simply shutter operations, because you can’t make huge capital investment decisions with this much uncertainty in the air. To say nothing of how bad an idea it is to try to decouple from China while also launching trade wars against your own allied trade bloc.

I dunno. American nicer-clothes brands were already consolidating, selling to foreign buyers (J. Press, now Japanese-owned), or moving down-market and shifting manufacturing overseas (Brooks Brothers, Hickey Freeman). This certainly hasn’t reversed any of that.

I don’t have any particular insight into their operations, but all the ones that still manufacture in the US that I pay attention to seem to be showing signs of distress more this year than ever. Shrinking product lines, steep sales, desperate-looking promotions, shifting more of their catalog to imported lower-quality products (despite the tariffs!). My current concern is that tariffs are going to cut the legs out from under what remains of that sector, and there’ll soon be way fewer US-made clothing options.

I think broad prosperity is a ton more important to their health than tariffs. When people don’t have much disposable income they’re not going to buy American-made leather shoes and wool shirts and suits and fine cotton shirts, they’re going to pay the 100% (or whatever) tariffs on a $50 (pre-tariff) Chinese outfit made mostly of petroleum and still pay way less than for a hypothetical similar outfit made in the US.

US labor only makes sense for pretty-decent or better goods (it’s the reason it’s an alright signal of quality, doesn’t make sense to spend up for American labor then use shit materials to save a penny, if you’re using US labor you’re already priced out of the lower half or more of the market) and those markets are getting fucked as prosperity concentrates to the top.

I expect the next shock to what’s left of the middle class is going to kill a bunch of these companies, and tariff chaos is rushing us into that. Plus almost all of them use foreign goods or labor in parts of their processes, so this shit’s forcing them to raise prices or eat reduced profit. Pendleton? The cloth is made in a US mill, but the shirts are assembled in the DR or wherever. Rochester suit makers? The cloth is Italian or maybe British, obviously, or why bother. Can you even get US-made linen? LOL.

I’ve personally got an ever-growing list of clothing items to get when tariffs come down. No US equivalents, and I don’t need them, so they can wait.

Britain, Canada, and one Nordic country or another are getting some business within a few months of tariffs dropping, lol. Maybe also Spain or Portugal.

What really blows is watching great stuff come up used on EBay overseas and not being able to buy it. It’s used, FFS! Sometimes it’s even US-made, which is extra goofy.