Nope.
364 karma · joined August 2, 2022
My preference would be that spying and hoarding data about users simply be outlawed (plus a bunch of other things, some of which Apple does, unfortunately, allow) and those laws be well-enforced—and also the walled gardens opened up, by law if necessary, but I'd much rather not see the latter without the former happening first, since the current state of things in-fact lets me choose to have some protection against that bad behavior, without significant time investment on my part. If that private regulatory service breaks down for any reason, I'll simply be worse off, as things stand.
Absent government outlawing a bunch of the bad behavior Apple tries to curb, I like being free to have that choice to opt into their regime. When corporate dragnet spying and other hostile bullshit is outlawed and the laws are effectively enforced, sure, I'd want Apple to tear down the walls on their garden.
(please don't just post "but you wouldn't have to use alt stores!" in response—it's been done to death on here, and everywhere else, differences opinion are apparently irreconcilable and we're not likely to gain any ground here today, and Android's still kickin', so the option for that kind of environment does exist for those who want it)
Amusingly, advocacy of optional regulatory regimes enforced by corporations is usually a right-Libertarian position. Not that that's necessarily a point in its favor (see again: I'd much prefer this crap simply be illegal) but those folks do love free markets.
> Homescreen widgets: utterly useless, but can't get more iOS-y and less webapp-y than this, right?
This especially, but really the whole post reads like the system working as intended.
Granted (as the author notes) way too much shit gets through anyway, but that's not an excuse to do even worse. I do, as a user, wish they'd tighten up the rules a lot and improve enforcement. I'm quite sure it'd improve my experience on the store (and probably on the web—imagine how much better the Reddit site would get, probably overnight, if their app got pulled over not being well-justified).
The physical sciences (and social sciences) are core pillars of the liberal arts, so... yeah, I'd hope so.
> Show me that liberal arts types are on average more ethical than science types
Liberal arts types? Science types? More ethical?! I could pick out more but that was a fun, dense one, and anyway I don't want to engage on that level because I don't think it'd help this exchange a bit. Frustrating indeed.
Physician, et c., et c.
I'm not trying to argue, anyway—I answered one reasonable (if a touch hostile) clarifying question and have since been trying to communicate that "recite entire fields of the humanities to me" is unreasonable in this context. How would you react to my demanding proof that science is as good at getting at the truth as you seem to think it is? (incidentally, outside this for-the-sake-of-argument analogy, I do probably largely agree with you on that, so this isn't intended as an actual point of contention) If you've got the patience of a saint, maybe you point out some examples of evident successes, you explain the process—but I say that's not enough, examples of apparent successes aren't proof, and so on. At some point you probably ought to tell me to go read a damn book or take a few courses (i.e. get an education in the thing I'm dismissing but also have so many questions about). It'd be crazy to expect you to produce a philosophy of science course (at a minimum—we could, if I were obstinate, keep digging deeper forever) over HN posts.
My usual approach if a whole lot of apparently-smart-people-with-seemingly-decent-taste think something is valuable and that certain things are true about it and I don't see it is to assume I lack the necessary education and that if I want to be able to understand it and have an informed opinion on it, I need to seek out that education, and to engage with that thing a whole bunch even if it's unpleasant and seems pointless or even bad at first.
I picked that attitude up from... literature and philosophy, largely. I've found it useful. I've never gotten over that initial barrier by asking questions to which I think I already have the answers, on a web forum. Not even (hahaha) this one. In the case of the arts the usual argument for their value, as far as what convinces people, is precisely that kind of direct engagement, perhaps with some guidance from a teacher.
Practically no-one arrives at the conclusion that the arts are valuable and express truths or provide an improving education by reading some scientific paper. Yet, so very many people do reach that conclusion, plenty of them a hell of a lot smarter than me, and they keep doing it well into the scientific revolution—including tons of scientists ("science type"—smh). So the best I can write is that, if you actually want to be convinced, that's the thing to do.
What you seem to be doing instead is asking me to prove to a skeptic's satisfaction that general relativity is true, purely via slam poetry and using only the vocabulary contained in Doctor Seuss books. Be pretty fucking impressive if I pulled that off, right? Wrong tool, wrong approach, if that skeptic's actually interested in being convinced—not that such a thing couldn't be good, or even useful, if such a work existed, just as some kind of scientific examination of the value of the arts might be good and useful, but in either case I doubt it would suffice to convince anyone on its own.
But, I repeat yet again, if things are going swimmingly for you, disregarding the possibility of valuable truth or insight existing in the arts or their being improving, keep going as you are. Seriously. The arts are largely a kind of exercise in working through our collective existential confusion and trauma, and if you don't see the need for that, holy shit, that's great—or if you do see the need for it, and have genuinely sought comfort and answers and guidance across the liberal arts and found all but science wanting, well, that's too bad but is also an entirely fine place to end up.
At any rate, if you want to see if anyone has tried to address your questions from a scientific perspective, you're on the Internet. Have you gone looking for that information? (maybe you have, I really don't know—hell, I could well be communicating with a top researcher in some very-relevant, specialized discipline for all I know)
One aim of literature and poetry is (or may be) to open up that inner world—to do a better job of expressing those experiences than most folks manage to, to do so across a breadth of experience we may not all encounter, and to make explicit and examinable things we may not ourselves think to examine, or may otherwise think shameful or private and ours alone.
Like, say, the experience of taking a drug and not feeling at all like you changed, but that the world did, as in the original example.
The practical utility of this in communication is evident in that the well-read tend to reach for episodes from literature or passages of poetry to relate difficult concepts concerning that inner life, and this practice is in fact helpful to readers who have a similar background, or, if you will, a common language (as in the section of my post that you quoted). This is seen extensively in philosophy, for example, and is so helpful in religion that even those that try to downplay literature or scripture (Buddhism, for example) tend to end up with extensive literatures regardless, because they are so useful for relating difficult, very personal ideas and experiences, even if they can only ever be the "finger that points" and never directly the thing-in-itself. For the individual per se it can help us understand ourselves, help us feel less alone, act as a kind of therapy to some degree, be one factor in working out what exactly we're doing here, what we want or ought to be doing, expand or exercise our empathy, and provide ethical and moral guideposts more effectively than any kind of "do this, don't do that" list of bullet points.
About as comparable as a housefly is to an elephant.
When people with the motivation, mandate, and access, plus often full support of an entire state government, to find as much fraud as they can, go looking for it, that's typically all they find. A handful of cases, mostly accidental, not part of a big conspiracy or effort to swing the election.
Like when Kobach, a guy who'd made his entire political identity "voter fraud is rampant and super-serious" got clearance to go on a big crusade in Kansas. 6 convictions, mostly accidental, none part of a coordinated effort, mixed R and D (IIRC the cases actually leaned R, but small sample size, so either way, not that meaningful)
Rhetoric that it's a big deal (that stupid D'Souza "documentary"), but when they have to put up or shut up (i.e. take their evidence to the courts) there's simply nothing (meaningful) there.
One key (well, I mean, I'd want copies of it) for everything would be excellent.
Terrible analogy because I'd look at them like "damn, they've got it figured out!"
[EDIT] Thinking further, the only way this falls apart is if I want to give someone else a key to just one thing, but that's a non-issue with ssh, so the analogy is still comically backwards. "But what if someone gets ahold of one key! Same key for everything, that's access to all your stuff!" well shit man, that's about the same as getting one of them if they're all different, in most cases—where do you think I keep my extra keys? And the couple I carry, so are likely to get in someone else's hands by accident or whatever, are the "give you the kingdom" type anyway. Get my car key, you can get in my house (garage door opener). Get any house key, you can probably get in my car, plus the rest of my keys (e.g. safe) are in there because I don't carry them around all the time.
Yeah, letting someone borrow a key is the only time this might be inconvenient, and again, that's not a factor with SSH.
[EDIT] Gelatinous cubes, rather. Now I must read the Book of Shame.
I try desktop Linux again every year or two[0]. It's always just as bad as it's always been. Way more application crashes than I'm used to on macOS, jankiness galore, all the stuff I used to avoid doing out of habit because it often breaks things on Linux (and to some extent also on Windows) but am now used to doing because it's fine on macOS is still often a bad on Linux (e.g. drag-n-drop actions). Lots of little annoyances like the default US English keyboard layout being crap for no reason on most distros, which, sure, I can change it, but why not have a good default? Still nothing as good as Preview on any platform other than macOS, AFAIK, which hurts quite a bit.
I think there was about a two-year high point in the late '00s when Ubuntu was just curating good defaults and smoothing things out and the future looked really bright, then Ubuntu rapidly deteriorated and it's back to how it had been before then, now, just shinier because of all the mostly-mediocre-or-bad GUI changes in the major DEs since then.
My next attempt, I'll probably just shoot for the holy grail of FreeBSD on the desktop. Linux seems like a lost cause at this point. May not be any better but a lot about it sure is way saner than Linux-land, so, worth a shot. Great on servers, certainly. Not expecting much because it's mostly the same as Linux in the GUI department, though.
[0] Last time: Ubuntu and Fedora (I don't like rpm-based distros, but thought I'd give them another shot), plus tried Void for the first time which was pretty great actually but I just don't enjoy fiddling with configs anymore so, it's a no for me.
That's pretty similar to what installation media does anyway, really.
[EDIT] Oh you might need to install the bootloader too. But you can sort-of (your running kernel will still be the installation media's) do that from the rsync'd system once it's copied over, with some creative chrooting and mounting. Which, again, is something that Linux installers kinda do anyway, in ordinary operation, but you'd likely want to do it manually in this case. It's exactly what you used to do (probably still do?) installing Gentoo, even for a "stage 3" (least-painful) installation.
I'm not arguing against desktops for people who like them but this "I don't understand laptops" stuff (several posts, not just this one) is bizarre.
Complete disagreement here. Informative writing may serve as entertainment, but if it's done well, that's not all it is. It helps people understand the world, which can provide all kinds of benefits beyond keeping them from being bored for a few minutes.
In fact, this type of work is precisely how people learn almost everything, right up to grad school, which means it's the way the overwhelming majority of education is conducted. Most people going through that aren't doing it for entertainment. Hell, Spivak's Calculus is more on this level—presenting findings to non-experts—than it is an academic endeavor, and no one dismisses that as just being entertainment.
It may not be valuable to people who are already experts in a field, so may not be properly "academic", but this categorization of acoup (and anything like this work) as simply entertainment is going way too far.
I don't get what's with folks getting stuff related to covid very wrong—which is fine! Practically everyone was wrong about it at one point or another!—but then doubling down on their position when it's crystal clear they were wrong, instead of owning up to it and moving on. They do it to the point of completely wrecking their reputations and making having-been-wrong-about-covid-but-being-in-denial their entire public persona, as in this case. Why? Why do that?
The bit where he was insulting the appearance of a grad student, at length, in a goddamn peer reviewed paper—I mean, damn dude, how do you not realize you're fucking up when you start heading down that path? What must be going wrong with someone for them to look back at that writing and go, "yep, nailed it, time to submit, this is definitely gonna convince people"?
This makes very low-temp or delicate cooking in non-teflon pans a lot tougher, of course. Or anything for which starting from a low temp and slowly increasing is a nice thing to be able to do (tempering chocolate, for example)
[EDIT] Basically the value prop of teflon pans is that they can do just about everything at least well-enough (if not always being the best possible option) with just one type of pan, and that they are much more forgiving of lazy/untrained use or mistakes than stainless or cast iron. They can't do much that's impossible elsewhere, but it may require better technique and closer attention, and maybe having multiple types of pan, if you don't have a teflon option available. The above is one of the ways in which you have to apply some extra care and technique to avoid bad results, which can be all but totally ignored if you're using (undamaged) teflon.
Their main down-side (any health concerns aside) is that they are easily damaged by hard tools. With stainless and cast iron you can scramble your eggs with a metal fork, in a pinch, and it'll probably be entirely fine. Do that in teflon and you'll ruin the finish before long.
I've not seen any that were nonstick at low temp and with no fat in it, as teflon pans are. I can cold-start eggs in a bare teflon pan with no butter or bacon fat whatsoever, and make totally fine scrambled eggs while keeping the temp very low the entire time. I've seen some extremely well-seasoned cast iron pans (and they are damn nice, and quite nonstick, compared to steel or new cast iron) but they couldn't do that. Not without leaving a mess to clean up after and losing half your eggs to sticking. You could cook eggs in them and nothing would stick, but you had to start fairly hot and add a layer of fat first.
They also leach flavors into everything, which really comes through if you cook anything delicately-flavored in them, and even well-seasoned ones are vulnerable to anything acidic and will leach a ton of unwanted flavors if you cook with e.g. tomato sauce.
I still like them for lots of things, but they're not magic. Teflon... kinda is magic.
It became a running joke that any project attempting to start with yarn (we had lots of JS devs, so of course they all try the new shiny) was only going to make a it a couple weeks before they hit some baffling, misleading, hard-to-diagnose error that was entirely solved by running "npm install". Tons of npm features missing in yarn, tons of sanity checks that npm did that yarn simply omitted. Maybe it's gotten better but it's made me even more skeptical of "common wisdom" around these things.
(To be fair, it may be better now, but this was well in to the time when folks were starting to sneer at people still using npm and running around saying how much better yarn was and how there was no reason not to use it—I can only assume these folks weren't doing much with it, because it was really easy to hit those kinds of problems.)
But most homeowners don't have the house in a trust. That's mostly a rich-people thing. The default is that it's your personal name(s) on the documents, including in e.g. county tax records.