ravenstine

Good thing those gold plates give aliens the wrong directions to Earth anyway.

Exactly. There's a sucker born every minute. I'm not saying people deserve to be taken advantage of. The reality is that there will always be people who can be lead off a cliff with minimal effort. There will always be people who believe that a guy with a thick Indian accent and broken English is a representative of Microsoft and that he can fix their computer in exchange for gift card codes. There comes a point where society sacrifices too much under the pretense of protecting the gullible. Prevent people from using technology at all and they'll go back to buying actual snake oil.

This has nothing to do with keeping people safe. If it did then power users could continue to install their own software by being given that ability as a developer setting. The fact that some people are gullible enough to go into a hidden setting on their phone and enable that in order to install an app from a random Chinese website is not a good reason to take away everyone's freedom. Consolidation of power is all this is about.

> How come this is trying to install its own vendored dependencies, including executable binaries, instead of checking for what's already installed? That approach can lead to both security and performance issues.

I've been sympathetic to your viewpoint, and I can see why this kind of thing is becoming more common.

The idea that users can reliably supply their own vendor libs/execs for applications is a bit of a fantasy. Devs working on fixing issues caused by the user having a strange issue due to the version of Python or whatever that they have installed is largely a waste of time when the application can "simply" ship with the exact dependencies it expects. This is especially true when it comes to open source work. Dealing with weird edge cases because the user has a version of FFMPEG installed that, for whatever reason, is missing h264, is work that nobody asked for. Given that the audience of this kind of app is a general one (not specific at all to devs) then it doesn't make sense to require other system packages to be present; if things like Python and FFMPEG are not required and will be downloaded anyway as part of the app install process, then there's no point in not always doing that. If you think about it, it's hardly different from any other sort of software dependency. The dependencies are just relatively bigger.

Personally, I have no desire for my applications to use other executables on my system unless I request that they do so explicitly. I'm sympathetic to the idea from a mere efficiency perspective, especially when it comes to developer tooling. But a karaoke app? No offense, but why care? A Python interpreter will be anywhere between 50 and 200 megabytes. FFMPEG is even smaller, especially if you don't enable every single feature and codec. Compared to how ridiculously bloated your average basic mobile app is (without anything like a built in JIT), bundling a desktop application with something like Python provides a lot of power relative to the number of bytes added.

That's totally fair, though I personally don't share your experience. It could be that we just use search for slightly different reasons.

One of the reasons I love Kagi is that it respects double-quotes for exact matches. This might seem trivial except I remember being frustrated with both Google and DDG years ago for throwing irrelevant results at me even when I'm querying for an exact match. When Kagi was in beta and I got invited as an early adopter, my feedback to them was that I want a search engine that won't throw crap at me when I'm looking for an exact string match. They've honored that feedback! Even though Kagi doesn't necessarily have the most results, I want double-quotes and things like intitle to actually work as expected.

Another awesome thing about Kagi is how it lets you prioritize certain domain names. Likewise, it's great for blocking domains completely. All of this has made my search results very clean.

To each their own. I'm not saying you're wrong, but to me there's no comparison between Kagi's results and every alternative I've tried.

Oh, another thing I like about Kagi is that it's less censored than Google, Bing, and DDG these days. I used to be a fan of DDG until I noticed that results were sparse or nonexistent for anything even remotely controversial I queried. It became too PG-rated.

Wow, I had no idea the reason my peers and I can't find another position in less than 12 months is because the market for software developers is growing faster than average!

This is something I already knew, but I realized it even more upon seeing the film Wendy and Lucy.

Yes, it's an arthouse flick. No, it won't be everyone's cup of tea. No, it's not blockbuster material. But, what it does show is how filmmakers can do a lot with very little. It's a simple story with a bittersweet ending and no VFX. I'm certain it cost relatively nothing to make. And it's unfortunate that we don't get anything like it in mainstream theaters.

Hollywood has been pricing itself out of existence but they still have the surprised Pikachu face while things decline.

I had a conversation with a bunch of Hollywood people last year. Some were writers, actors, etc. A handful of film personnel. They were all quabbling about what was going to win at the Academy Awards, who was getting good and bad attention from the Hollywood Reporter, and so on. Simultaneously, they were lamenting about how bad things were in their industry.

I then asked the group if the industry had thought about making a good movie for a change instead of giving a shit what the Hollywood Reporter has to say. They were dumbstruck, probably due to a combination of my rudeness and not having a good counterargument. If people are losing their jobs and not making money then it's hard to deny how self-congratulatory the entertainment industry is.

When I write JavaScript, I make as many things immutable as I can. Sometimes it adds verbosity and leads to less efficient computational patterns, but overall I believe I run into far fewer bugs that are hard to make sense of. There are things about the design of Temporal I don't really like, but immutability was a solid move.

What I don't understand is why they had to make string formatting so rigid. Maybe it has to do with internationalization? I'd have liked if it included a sort of templating system to make the construction of rendered date-time strings much easier.

I honestly don't look forward to the day that we can do that. It may redefine our very existence more so than even automation.

I have a GMRS license, which isn't "amateur radio" per se, but can be used in much the same way. The main differences are that you're limited to a narrow band of "channels", and repeaters are not allowed to form networks. The tradeoff is that the license is basically just a fee and requires no test or advanced knowledge.

I like the desktop app, but the android app is such ass. It's bad enough that I wonder why they even bother.

I take methylphenidate, actually. I experienced the appetite suppressing effect, but I would say that after ~3 to 5 months on the drug that basically went away. There's still a noticeable benefit for attention, but otherwise I eat just about as much as ever. But yeah, different experiences for different folks.

This is why I disable automatic updates. Not just for browser extensions but everything. This whole "you gotta update immediately or you're gonna get hacked" thing is a charade. If anything, if you update you'll be hacked at this point.

Could the BMI thing be simply explained by the treated children expending less kinetic energy? In other words, they are less hyperactive, so it seems logical that they might actually be prone to some weight gain.

It reminds me of that principle of how people are more likely to be receptive to your request if you preface it with "because..."

There's this thing called the Wayback Machine, but I lol'd at your response. It's not untrue. xD

The difference with Reddit is it has way more persistent value. Everything on Discord is throwaway, but valuable posts on Reddit from years past are easily retrievable. The two aren't so comparable.

One of the unspoken reasons many people have for using Discord is they don't want what they say to easily be associated with them in perpetuity. Requiring ID really chips away at that, in spite of what Discord has to say about privacy around ID.

By no means am I saying that Discord will go extinct. I just haven't observed anything about it that's irreplaceable. Reddit, on the other hand, has a wealth of discussion dating back to the mid-to-late 00's.

Haven't cared about Discord in a long time. In fact I'm glad they're continuing to shoot themselves in the foot.

During the pandemic, I was on a Discord server for folks to socialize and blow off steam about the whole situation. Yes, there were some anti-vaxx wackos, but overall the place was civil and balanced, and I met some interesting people through it. We cracked jokes and it was a little bit of fun in a tough time.

One day I came to discover that Discord had banned the server for allegedly violating... something. I wish I had written down everyone's emails because I permanently lost contact with a bunch of friends in an instant.

I never signed in to Discord again, in spite of times where some other social group wanted to use it. I vowed never to use Discord again. Fuck those guys and the Teslas they rode in on. I hope this ID verification thing is another big step towards their irrelevancy.

I really think most of the criticism towards embedded Browser engines would be moot if there was an engine where anything unrelated to layout and rendering had to be imported piece by piece. Most of the time, we just desire what HTML and CSS give us (layout and styling) and an element node API in the DOM, or something like that. So many other things get wrapped into even the most stripped down browser engines that don't really have to do with layout and styling which increases the bloat. I don't really see why we can't have a GUI toolkit that just renders HTML and CSS and only be in the dozens of megabytes. I don't care that lots of existing Node modules wouldn't work out of the box. Give me HTML rendering without the kitchen sink. It seems we aren't capable of this. From what I can tell, this can't even be done easily enough with Servo.

Ginger with chamomile and tumeric is where it's at.

Having physical brains in the loop seems like a good thing.

Almost. We will see peek once a pyramid scheme proposing that everyone can profit off AI emerges.

Not for my Android phone, at least not by default (Pixel 9a a/ GrapheneOS). It leaves Bluetooth and WiFi on in airplane mode. I doubt this is specific to GrapheneOS and may say more about AOSP.

That depends on how you define "doomed". Most screwed up companies don't go belly up overnight. They get sold as fixer-uppers and passed between bigger firms and given different names until, finally, it is sold for parts. The way this works is that all parties behave as if the company is the opposite of doomed. It's in a sense correct. The situation hardly seems doomed if everyone has enough time to make their money and split before the company's final death twitches cannot be denied, in which case the company accomplished its mission. That of course doesn't mean everything from its codebase to its leadership didn't lack excellence the whole time.

I'm not sure that LLMs are going to [completely] replace the desire for JIT, even with relatively fast compilers.

Frameworks might go the way of the dinosaur. If an LLM can manage a lot of complex code without human-serving abstractions, why even use something like React?

People might still be reading, statistically speaking. But what are they reading?

Almost everyone I talk to offline either reads fantasy, trashy romance, or feel-good self help books. I gotta tell ya, we all have our cheap pleasures now and then, but rarely do I meet anyone who reads anything remotely profound or thought-provoking. The only exception might be my father who reads a lot of historical fiction and non-fiction.

Maybe I'm just hanging in the wrong crowds.

In terms of the sources the author cites, exactly how much should we trust them? For example, book sales may have increased in recent years, but are people actually reading them? I remember a recent statistic where it turned out most people who buy vinyl records don't even own a record player; what if people are buying books so they can sit on a shelf?

And what's so special about books in particular, anyway? What's wrong with reading articles and webpages? I'd be more interested in whether those are declining since they are less tethered to entertainment, like books are.

Ironically, I've found that blocking the attestation API for some apps that supposedly require it (such as the latest versions of Waymo) might make them work anyway. lol

Sounds too close to "rectum".

> There’s only one problem with the Bloomberg Terminal — it’s fucking expensive. And old. And clunky.

Yes and no.

Obviously I have nowhere near the wealth to afford a Bloomberg Terminal, but an ex of mine had a father who has one. He told me that the terminal itself is kinda bullshit but the real value from it came from the fact that it essentially provides a way for you to network with other wealthy investors. The terminal itself, according to him, is pretty ornamental these days.

I won't actively defend his opinion if someone here knows better, but what he said made sense based on what I saw of it.

I recently was convinced by colleagues to try Cursor at work for project planning. At first I was excited for something even better than Copilot Chat, but then I quickly realized it's just a shitty VS Code fork with maybe a few improvements that are by no means a moat for that company. Worse yet, it makes lots of bizarre mistakes, deletes lines for no good reason, and sometimes even deletes the entire project plan. The scroll on the chat history gets laggy very quickly, and I've found the whole program to be glitchy as hell.

The hype around Cursor is unreal. My suspicion is this company is little more than a parasite with no qualms about getting you to waste your tokens. It's one thing when a product is new, but Cursor has been around since 2023 I guess? The quality of their software is unacceptable.