sirmarksalot

I won't disagree that MacOS has been getting worse, but Windows is even worse than you remember it. It's clearly a race to the bottom, but Windows 11 is full of ads, and you can't even search the Start menu for your installed programs anymore. MacOS hasn't gotten that bad yet, as frustrating as the new "Apps" menu is.

I switched my desktop to Ubuntu about a year ago, and while it's not 100% free of trouble, I still can't imagine running Windows 11 again. My MBP still runs MacOS and I haven't been pushed far enough to want to try installing a Linux distro on it.

Yeah, the the characters kind of feel like Doonesbury characters, where they just slot in wherever they're needed at a particular moment in history. Each season's story by itself feels authentic, but when you watch their character arcs from start to finish, each person involved would have to be a generational talent.

And it's not like that kind of thing never happens, like look at General Magic and its through-lines through the tech industry up until 2015 or so, but it just happens too conveniently in the show. Particularly Bosworth's role seems far-fetched to me. He's already at the end of his career in season 1, and somehow he remains relevant through the internet age?

The "Phoenix" monologue in the last episode evokes nostalgia for everything Donna and Cameron have been through, but it also breaks suspension of disbelief by pointing out just how much of history these two people have been involved with firsthand.

At the end of the day the viewer should get to see what they want to see. But in my case I usually want to see what the author had in mind, and I want my TV to respect that preference.

I wanted to like The Hobbit in 48, but it really didn't work for me. It made everything look fake, from the effects to the acting. I lost suspension of disbelief. If we want high frame rate to be a thing, then filmmakers need to figure out a way to direct that looks plausible at a more realistic speed, and that probably means less theatrics.

Not sure if it's the same thing, but nearly all cinemas are digital nowadays, and panning artifacts are absolutely still there

I keep all that stuff off my LG TV by keeping the ethernet cable unplugged and let Apple TV handle all the streaming stuff. I still somewhat resent that I need to wait for the software to boot up just to change inputs, but at least I don't get ads. Hopefully Samsung works the same way?

I tried this for a little while but quickly stopped as a critical mass of websites broke when I tried using it to sign in. Special characters in your email address is an edge case that produces inconsistent results even within a single product

Consistency is often helpful, but you also need to be wary of cargo culting. For example, you see a server back end that uses an ORM model and you figure you'll implement your new feature using the same patterns you see there. Then a month later the author of the original code you cribbed comes by and asks you, "just out of curiosity, why did you feel the need to create five new database tables for your feature?"

I know, that's a pretty specific "hypothetical," but that experience taught me that copying for the sake of consistency only works if you actually understand what it is you're copying. And I was also lucky that the senior engineer was nice about it.

As with any of these LLM workflow automation tools, it raises a few questions about each potential use case, and the likely long-term outcomes.

1. Is this working around friction due to a lack of interoperability between tools? For example, is this something that would be more efficient if the owner of the website exposed a REST service? Will the existence of this tool disincentivize companies from exposing services when it makes sense?

2. If there is a good reason for the lack of a service endpoint, perhaps for security reasons, will your automation workflow be used to bypass those security measures? Could your tool be used by malicious actors to disable major services? Are you that malicious actor yourself? Will your tool be used by scalpers to prevent consumers from buying high-demand products?

3. If this is being used to work around deferred maintenance with internal tools and processes, will the existence of these kind of tools be used by management to justify further deferral of that maintenance? Will your tool become a critical piece of the support staff's workflow?

4. If your tool is being used in good faith to work around anti-patterns in website design, will the owner of the website be incentivized to break your workflow? Is your use case just a step in an arms race?

These are the thoughts that go through my head whenever I hear about software being laid on top of complicated processes, where instead of simplifying the underlying processes, we add another layer of complexity to sweep it under the rug. I'm sure that people will find your project useful, but I wonder what the longer-term effects will be.

Unless we want all those ISPs to be digging up all the streets all the time, that means we need strict regulations on sharing of physical infrastructure then, which brings us back to the CLEC/ILEC wars of the late 90s. Having each company maintaining its own last-mile access is an extremely inefficient use of resources.

I sympathize with your situation, and I appreciate that you're trying to be a cool parent who accepts your daughter unconditionally for who she is, but I wonder if it's even possible to know where the limits are on that, or how much she feels that way. Personally, I grew up in a really supportive family, but I still had a whole lot of hangups as a teenager that meant I didn't always want my parents to see what I was doing or looking into on the internet. Some of those private interests turned into major parts of who I am, and I don't really want to imagine the world where I had to worry about what my parents saw.

Would it have been better if I'd talked these things out with my parents? Maybe, but would I have? Or would I have just self-censored my dreams rather than face that conflict?

I guess maybe as a middle ground, maybe keep watching while she's young but pull back as she gets older?

I saw that demonstrated at the Toyota Museum of Industry and Technology in Nagoya. One of the tradeoffs with that is that you can't use cotton because it won't interact cleanly with the water, so it only works for synthetic fibers.

If you ever find yourself in that part of the world, I highly recommend visiting the textile pavilion there. They basically show you 1000x throughput improvement developed over the course of a century, demonstrated in about an hour.

The cadence and format of this video actually makes it look AI-generated. The content is padded and repeats itself quite a lot, the video is pretty much all stock footage, and the audio lacks any kind of variation in style like you'd expect even if someone were reading off a script. It sounds exactly like what you'd hear if you fed a script into a modern TTS.

My guess is that startup costs represent the bulk of the cost of a show. Just filming one episode probably costs somewhere on the same order of magnitude as an entire season.

I think this is a straw man. I don't think any politician would ever suggest such a thing at face value unless couched in some other argument. For example, after 9/11 a politician would have said, "I respect your need for privacy, but we live in extraordinary times, and we need to temporarily lift the restrictions on our agencies to effectively combat an imminent threat."

The real argument being made isn't that we should give all our secrets to the government, but that we should trust that the government will comply with our 4th Amendment protections and avoid gathering this data without a valid warrant issued by an impartial judge. If you're reading this, I'm guessing that like me, you don't believe a word of that. But that's the argument that's being made, and that's what needs to be debunked loudly and publicly.

It's hard to say without actually knowing the internal workings of the police departments, but one thing that's happened in Seattle is that although the police budget did go up, the SPD is having a really hard time hiring, and a lot of that money has gone to headcount that has remained vacant.

I've certainly read theories that it's a malicious strategy of the police union to make the city council look bad, and the SPOG president has made some pretty shocking political statements, so it honestly wouldn't be that surprising.

I'm guessing it's a mix of both, but I can't really prove anything.

I thought the issue was that "broken windows" was used as a metaphor for all low-level infractions, and not literally interpreted as "fix the windows and clean up the graffiti" as the studies recommended. This then got implemented as quotas on police departments, leading to opportunistic, biased policing and the de facto criminalization of poverty.

As a result, the term "broken windows" now carries a ton of baggage, and is sometimes used as a racist dog whistle.

I think that's a bit reductive. Part of what's missing here is personality, or what I would call unique mediocrity. People who have no idea what they're doing just deciding to paint a wall yellow because they feel like it. The issue isn't just that some apartments have craftsmanship and others don't: it's that the high-skill and low-skill efforts look superficially the same.

Think about it with Marvel or Star Wars movies. There are some really good ones, and some really boring ones, and although you can definitely say "Thor Ragnarok" was better than "Iron Man: Age of Ultron", that doesn't change the fact that when you zoom out, it seems all we're getting is superhero and Star Wars movies, and maybe it would be nice to watch something else now and again.

We want more than just good craftsmanship. We need people of mediocre skill to be making things that are weird and interesting.

The bigger issue is that because of the market power of these digital storefronts, it doesn't matter what your mental model of the transaction is, you don't have a choice in the matter. Yes, online stores with better terms exist, but they don't tend to have the games that you'd want to buy.

I always get a warm feeling when a game I'm interested in has an itch.io link, but I'm not gonna delude myself into thinking it'll ever replace Steam, even if Steam had to stop calling itself a store. Steam is just far too established, and the network effect is just way too strong.

I take any equity language guides with a grain of salt, but how people respond to them speaks volumes about who they are. Obviously there are problems with it. It's largely performative, it can distract from bigger advocacy work, and it's often a lazy attempt by a large organization or corporation to avoid having to make meaningful changes. The thing is, when you add terms like "victimhood culture" to your response, it makes it extremely clear that you're not taking issue with awkward terminology, but with the entire concept of equity itself.

As an end user, I would prefer to live in a world where I don't have to wait for software to respond. If forced to, I would also continue to use software where I do have to wait. Your argument that economics will dictate the best solution and lead to a happy balance doesn't work. It will tend towards a borderline tolerable world, where your product only has to be better than the other guy's.

This is separate from the discussion about tradeoffs between flexible design patterns and low-level performance.

People see something like this and say "wow, <basic human emotion/instinct> isn't doing anything for me, how can I get rid of it?" and it becomes a sort of self-gaslighting. You're worrying about the future because it serves a function, or has served a function in the past. Find out what it's doing for you, and figure out something else you can do instead. Or maybe come to the conclusion that it actually is helping you, and accept that part of yourself.

Maybe you can acknowledge your worry, and rather than ruminating on it and letting it eat at you, you can come up with a plan to deal with the thing that's worrying you. Maybe that plan is to wait until it specifically requires your action, and give yourself permission to not worry about it for now.

It all depends on where their wage is on the cost/value curve. It's true that if the company is paying their employees close to their contributed value, increasing the minimum wage will put them out of a job, there often isn't a force that reliably pushes a wage near that point. Regardless of the value provided, if a company can get away with paying their employees less, then they will. The forces that determine wages have more to do with available supply of various skills than they do with the demand for the actual value provided.

not all companies of course, but as an aggregate, companies will follow this rule

I guess this is a distinction between intent and results. Typescript is intended to be a strict superset of Javascript. In practice, there are edge cases like these.

This is technically correct, but I suspect it's pretty rare that you would choose "unknown" over a generic parameter. Even if you're writing an algorithm that doesn't care about the data type, it's still probably going to be used by application code that does care, and you'll want to support that need by passing the type through, otherwise the application will be forced to downcast.

Because Typescript is designed to accept any valid Javascript program, the set of valid statements in a Typescript program is a superset of the set of valid statements in a Javascript program. Typescript contains all the rules of Javascript, and then adds some more, but never in a way that contradicts the requirement that a plain Javascript program should compile, so that also means the language specification itself is a strict superset of Javascript.

The thing is every project has mistakes. Things that aren't where they're supposed to be, that somebody means to tidy up sometime later, but just hasn't gotten around to yet. Every project has at least a little bit of a mess somewhere. When all you have to go off of is the code itself, then can be hard to tell the difference between the mess and the design.

A junior dev who comes in without much coaching, might just reference an anti-pattern from the "mess" section and replicate it throughout the code base. And then do that enough times, and a senior dev who gets brought in might conclude that there's no design at all, and that what it really needs is a rewrite.

You're arguing two separate points as if they're the same thing.

Point 1: the TSA in particular is not at fault for the modern state of airport security

Point 2: airport security is better than it has been since the 60s

You spent most of your first post arguing point 2, which is counter to my own experience, and which GP contradicted. Rather than address their points, you've ignored their argument and switched to point 1, which they didn't even challenge.

My summary of the situation: the culture of fear that arose in the wake of 9/11 has resulted in a slough of changes that as a whole have made the experience of getting on a plane materially worse than it was prior to 9/11. One of those changes was the establishment of the TSA. While the TSA does not itself bear much if any of the responsibility for the problems with the security process, they do serve as a figurehead for all of those changes. And yes, I agree with GP that airport security is much more inconvenient than it was in the 90s.

My indicator is how early you're advised to arrive before a flight. In the 80s and 90s, the common wisdom was to show up an hour early, or an hour and a half to two hours for international flights. After 9/11, that bumped up to an hour and a half for domestic, and now after COVID, they recommend 2 hours or more for a domestic flight, 3 during holidays.

I'm also reluctant to tell managers about my ADHD because even if they're supportive, they often have a very shallow understanding of how it works. That means they'll suggest strategies that make sense for solving the problem of "easily distracted," but fail when the problem is "motivation is interest-based, and starting on new things is difficult."

The explosion of resources for ADHD adults has made it a lot easier to understand ourselves and how we work, but that information hasn't necessarily made it out to the neurotypical world.

Unions can run on autopilot for a long time, though, and their management can coast to victory if the membership is sufficiently disengaged. Old unions in particular can have a silent majority problem, where most of their members are just trying to do their job and get a paycheck, and will never even hear the people who are trying to get involved and fix things. Fixing a union involves a lot of the same work as starting one in the first place, with a lot of the same difficulties.