retrochameleon

I'm a heavy gamer. I like lots of strategy games. Sometimes I look at our country like a strategy game: where we are investing resources, infrastructure planning and investment, active problems or threats and how they are being prioritized and handled, managing citizen happiness, etc.

The last 10-20 years feel like a massive lost opportunity to invest in some of these improvements and forward-thinking planning. In the last few years, it feels like catastrophic decision after decision.

I can't help but look at the state of America and feel like I'm looking at an inexperienced amateur player taking a relatively strong game position and slowly throwing it away. Crumbling infrastructure, weak citizen cohesion and education, intentional weakening of our own national and cyber security in more than one way, not to mention all the harm being done to our reputation and relationships with other countries.

It feels like we are in a weaker position then ever: militaristically, economically, scientifically, and so on. Meanwhile the threats of China and Russia and what could happen in the next few years are quite concerning.

I'm pretty pessimistic right now. I know the world and the US is not as simple as a strategy game, but tons of principles from strategy games well-understood by experienced players sure could help with more wise use of resources. Attention and time are also incredibly valuable resources that feel like they are being thrown away right now.

Getting into a major conflict could help unify The People and put focus on more important problems in the country, but as far as I'm concerned, I think all the other NATO countries would be the ones holding the war effort together. I'm just ranting at this point though.

By what reasoning are you sure Americans are not the worst leeches?

It was argued that making the Flock data public violated everyone's privacy. It's important to stress and remind everyone the privacy violation occurred the moment pictures are indiscriminately taken, processed by AI, and stored for every single car that passes by. Not to mention family homes, pedestrians, and other things being captured in the process.

We are only a couple steps away from doing the same thing for pedestrians. Why not just take pictures of every single person walking by now? This already happens in some places. Flock is paving the way to make it a government sanctioned mass surveillance program.

Their financial stability all hinges on having lot's of user engagement. As we've seen, optimizing for engagement tends to be a pretty awful user experience. That doesn't matter to them if the numbers go up that they want to go up.

This.

If you really care about your content being scraped, you better start reading every TOS for the sites you frequent.

I recall the extra cost for heat pumps being criticized for being artificial by Technology Connections. The installers are to blame.

I'm more inclined to believe it's a foreign nation state actor with the goal of inciting more division over the issue. America's at a very hot point over the topic right now. Despite that, I don't feel like I see much support for Hamas; more so repeating calls to end fighting and negotiate peace. Both Israel and Hamas (not the innocent civilians of Palestine) have participated in condemnable atrocities.

Yes, chezmoi is for user configuration. System configuration is a drastically different domain. Personally, I manage that with Ansible.

Is the only source you read a republican politician's press release?

Strange. I use remmina heavily for RDP to Windows machines and have never had a notable complaint.

What the fu-

That's an insane legal requirement. I'll do the legal wedding in the most unceremonious, quickest manner possible, and then have my real ceremony in privacy and not tell anyone about it.

It's okay. This is a safe space. While you're at it, tell us how you feel the industry telling us to stop using words like "master" and "slave".

I installed Windows 11 LTSC for a work project recently. The experience left me shocked. The installer was shortened and brief, and upon first logging into the new OS, it was a thing of beauty. Clean desktop, empty start menu, no bloatware. Just a true clean slate to start from.

I hate Windows and Microsoft and switched to Linux years ago with no regrets. I can't help but wonder the goodwill they would garner if this was the typical user experience with Windows. If I had some path to using Windows like this, and was able to use GPOs as a home user, I might not have left in the first place.

It's a convoluted pain in the ass to get licenses for LTSC as a business, and it's basically a nonstarter as an individual. There is a 5 license minimum.

I'm tired of companies being determined to make everything shitty in the name of value extraction from customers.

I'm a fan of the browser becoming a sandbox for much more than "documents". It has the most developed, flexible, and powerful UI system ever, it established numerous standards that pervade modern software development, and it's already available as one of the most cross-platform standard utilities.

If the browser sandbox is a reliable cross-platform sandbox, the potential to develop and distribute software is huge. Progressive Web Apps are awesome because you can visit the website and use it normally, and then click a button to "install" the website to your device. If designed correctly, the website can work offline. By doing this, you get free distribution, automatic updates, no app stores, an excellent platform to develop an app on top of (the browser), etc.

I think PWAs are the future, but the web platform still has some ways to go. There are numerous amazing examples of what you can accomplish with PWAs in their current state, though.

Well, pie menus tend to work pretty well in video games in various contexts. Commo-rose style communication callout menus are a prime example.

Right-wing agenda. Simple as that. Maybe they would say something like all that monitoring is a gross waste of resources, and it's being done by liars falsifying data and misleading the public.

No, I just use (literally) 1-2 square of toilet paper. That's all that's needed to dry off. Because of the incredibly low TP usage, I splurge on nicer TP since having a bidet. A single large pack of TP can easily last many many months, if not an entire year.

I think this is near-future thinking and limited to the current presiding paradigm of "AI" being based on LLMs.

Without some drastic breakthrough in LLMs, I believe "AI is not going to do well in full autopilot" will remain true for the next 5-10 years. Reaching full autonomy is a definite. The question is how long it takes and what innovations have yet to be made needed to achieve the first effective implementation that is able to spread widely.

Unfortunately, I think military applications will push AI the fastest towards truly effective autonomy.

I use FreeCAD, but it definitely leaves some UX refinement to be desired. There are a couple of web based options like OnShape that seem to work well, too.

Well now it just sounds like you're describing a system backup and restore.

It kind of sounds like you're describing Ansible. You use modules for common tasks like ensuring a package is installed, a file is present or has certain content, etc. It's declarative and imdempotent.

I took a crapshot at asking chatgpt how I'd set the clock on my car radio by giving it a picture. Not only did it tell me the correct method, but it identified my radio as a "typical factory radio installed in early 2000 insert make here vehicles."

Strange. For all the AI I use and AI slop I DO see on the internet, this comment does not seem like AI.

Thanks for your work on Chezmoi! I've been using it for years. Straightforward tool with clear and concise documentation.

As others already pointed out, shopping for some types of things like this is just doesn't really work online when you need to feel and judge things with your hands.

I also noticed that lots of online stores have minimum order quantities.

Can't mount my ZFS system.

If I understand correctly, you wouldn't be allowed to prepackage it in your distributed software anyways.

Optimistic take: Big box stores closing opens a gap for local stores to fill.

Awful shortsighted and uninformed viewpoint that has been beaten into the ground ad nauseum.

Read a couple books. Privacy is a precondition to democracy.

I played a lot of Pokemon growing up, and I even played Ingress (the precursor to Pokemon Go) before Pokemon Go came around. I was excited to see a pervasive-type game getting popular and was excited to join the fun, but I tried playing for a week in the first couple of months and found it excruciatingly boring and unengaging. Swipe-tap battling felt so incredibly braindead and uninspired. No type match ups? No move selection? Just play a numbers game with all the gym leaders and swipe swipe swipe tap tap tap? Pass.

The only exciting part about the whole experience was going out to my college campus to catch something at a landmark in the evening and encountering a small group of other players.

I interpret uchuu as "space"