StrangeATractor

If he isn't he'll need to find new work anyway. Imagine searching that guy's name while looking for an attorney.

That guy has some work to do on his resume.

I have a neighbor who was looking at those plastic boards some people will use instead of wood for a patio. He goes to the factory for this big presentation with an audience and they start talking about the boards being made from recycled plastic. My neighbor wants to know how much recycled plastic was in each board...the guy gets evasive and the neighbor presses him, and come to find out it was the bare minimum legal requirement to label them as being made from recycled material. It was some stupidly low amount, like a single water bottle or plastic bag per batch.

I love the idea of Gemini, but I feel like you could do the same thing, but better, with git and plaintext or markdown, maybe make a specialized client for browsing/rendering these git pages. "Gemini" as a protocol and name is just there for the community to nucleate around.

If you're interested in this sort of thing you'd probably like David Kahn's The Codebreakers. It's pretty much the authoritative source of what's publicly known about the history of cryptography. I believe he had some trouble getting it published at first, actually, because he made what was considered sensitive material more accessible.

> Definitely, it's one of those technologies that needs to be dumb and reliable because of how life and death it's use is.

This is why a lot of people still use revolvers instead of automatics. Doesn't get much simpler.

Weird fact about Stalker, they were shooting in disused USSR factories that had just been left as-is -- a lot of people on set got cancer not much longer after shooting, likely from being around so much industrial waste.

It's also way better than the book it was based on IMO (Roadside Picnic).

Depends on if you pay before or after you receive your food.

Smartphones are incomparable with other forms of media. You don't have a TV within 3 feet of you 24 hours a day that you can pull out at any time. A TV doesn't ding to get your attention. TV channels aren't individually tailored for you to suck in your attention and hold it for as long as possible. There are fundamental limitations to TV which do not apply to smartphones. It's the same with radio.

I grew up with TV, the number of people spending almost all their free time on a phone completely dwarfs any TV consumption I've ever seen.

A lot of comments in this thread remind of cigarette companies dismissing health concerns with tobacco.

In my circle of friends and family I've seen the majority of them go from being people you could talk to and spend time with to people that just stare at their phones constantly, I've heard others say the same about their circles. Parents let Youtube raise their kids because they don't want to get their eyes off the screen themselves. You could be on a luxury vacation on a yacht in the Mediterranean but they never get off their damn phones. There's no way that's healthy.

That's not even getting into how social media shapes your mind at a young age. I have two teachers in the family and they both say that kids have become borderline retarded since around 2010.

The multi billion dollar attention economy wants to dodge responsibility by holding an unrealistic standard of evidence for their externalities but use your common sense. Humanity has never had anything that constantly demands your attention, are we just supposed to pretend it will have no effect on our mental health?

I expect it'll happen in my lifetime, there was a senator a few years ago making a push to ban the $100 bill because he felt it enabled crime by allowing larger amounts of physical currency to be moved in a smaller package.

I'm personally of the opinion we're better off with the crime -- the psychic burden of knowing that there is no way to make a financial transaction, even for a pack of gum, without an overbearing control-freak government knowing about it is just too much for me. There's other ways to catch criminals without mistreating your citizens, anyway.

> I'd put in the same category as falling from a great height

Yeah, onto the surface of the sun.

Baudrillard is cackling from the grave.

Hah, I'll have to give this a read, I've got Wholeness and the Implicate Order on my reading shortlist.

I think Bruce Schneider recommended that most people should just keep their password in their wallet.

Ugh, another reason to not trust the legal system. Sorry for your troubles.

Probably should have lawyered up. Illegally gathered evidence is supposed to be inadmissible in court. At least in the US.

People get off on murder charges because of this, like that lady that killed her infant but the cop searched her trunk without a warrant or probable cause. She obviously killed it, but the only evidence was inadmissible, so she walked.

Have you tried searching through your call history on a Google phone? It's awful. You'd think they'd have a solid search built in but it's nearly useless. Especially considering you're usually searching for that number you only dialed once and isn't in your contacts and is for some reason excluded from your recents, so you go into your call history (strangely hidden behind a menu) and...there's no search function. WTF? You'd think you could filter by area code, date or a general time which the call took place, Google is a search company after all, right? Or am I subtly being nudged to use some of their more profitable products to try and find it again?

FOSS dialer recommendations are welcome btw.

In many of the burns which I've read about that get out of control, it's because the agency doing it (USFS, usually) had a plan to do it on that date and they didn't consider the actual conditions on the ground before they lit up.

Example: An Oregon sheriff arrested a USFS employee supervising a burn that got out of hand and torched private property. The FS was crying foul and saying it was an act of god, but there were warnings for burning that day because they conditions were so unfavorable (the county may have had an outright burn ban). The only reason the FS employee decided to burn is because that's what he was supposed to do that day. And he was legally okay, since it was federal property, but then it got onto private property next door...

For some reason the FS in particular has this problem. Most of them are alright people but the institution and culture needs serious reform.

The only gripe I have about this is that it appears to be dependent on a microsd card for storage. Is there an alternative? I've been burned one too many times by corrupted storage on those to go there again.

Other than that, I want five of these.

Fun story, I was in a loaner car from a dealership which had lane assist. I was driving in the desert around a corner against a cliff so I couldn't see around it very well. Right around the corner there was a small boulder in the road which I had to swerve to avoid, except the lane assist fought me on it since it would cross the painted lines. It wasn't like a near death experience or anything, but it really made me think on how the systems meant to protect us can be what causes a life threatening problem if they aren't designed well. If I had to swerve to avoid another rock or a wayward vehicle, compensating for my own vehicle's unexpected response to driver input is at the bottom of the list of things I'd want.

What? You download a blocklist. What gets sent back to ublock?

I'd like foldables if they had two separate screens which acted as one, like a miniature laptop with an extra screen where the keyboard would be. The bendy display makes me think I'll wear it out pretty quickly. Pretty sure Microsoft did this for one of their recent devices.

Ugh, dealing with Minecraft/Microsoft account management is a nightmare. I think somebody really just set out to make it as difficult, obtuse and frustrating as possible. How could Mojang make it painless but Microsoft make it "going to the dentist"?

It's a 4D gambit, think of all the lotr movies that will get filmed there without copyright restrictions.

TBF there's not many nice pictures that could be taken of Birmingham. Half that city is an apocalyptic hellscape.

They were GPLv2 for a while but changed course. I'd use the fork going forward:

https://github.com/LibreSprite/LibreSprite

I had some Odroids...about 9-10 years ago. What're the options like for operating systems nowadays?

I don't want to say making shit tons of money as a welder is easy by any means, but you can get hyper specific in that field with all the different metals and alloys so that you're one of a very small number of people worldwide qualified to weld something. It's supply and demand.

On this note, the data-set available if you start collecting today is tainted with experimental AI content. Not the biggest issue right now but as time goes on this problem will get worse and we'll be basing our simulations of intelligence on the output of our simulations of intelligence, a brave new abstraction.