coffeecat

> To me it looks like it’s just marketing that those 2 are popular.

And that's the killer feature! Librem/Pine have managed to build a community around their hardware. In theory, I could buy a Meizu phone and pick up its PostMarket OS port at the point where the last guy who tried it gave up. But trying to do it without a community would be no fun at all, and finding answers once you run into a roadblock will be an uphill battle. For instance, one of Meizu's kernel repositories has an unanswered issue from a few years ago, asking if they can release more up-to-date kernel code.

You're just focusing on the hardware's specs, but the community is what gives Librem/Pine's hardware its value.

The newest car I've ever owned was a 2005 model, so at the risk of sounding ridiculous: Why do cars have cellular radios built-in? Just for the GPS, or for actual communication?

> Not sure how a subset would work in practice.

What I'm imagining is a specification, defining which subset of HTML should be included, together with a <meta> tag which indicates a document's intention to be compliant with the standard.

Can any Gemini proponents explain what its benefits are compared to just adopting a minimalist subset of HTML? The goal of bringing back the early web (hyperlinked text documents without all the other junk) is great, but making it incompatible with existing browsers makes it unlikely to grow beyond a small, walled-off community of enthusiasts. Is that considered a feature rather than a bug?

I assume the parent comment is sarcasm, but unfortunately, it's the internet and therefore Poe's law applies.

> The problem is the government allowing private corporations to poison the environment to benefit the bottom line of the corporations.

I disagree with the notion that regulations are inherently harmful to corporate profits. Foreign competitors do generally exist in other countries with different regulations, which complicates the matter in the real world; but in a healthy, homogeneously regulated market, a new regulation should increase the operating costs of all suppliers more or less equally. Assuming that there's a sufficient amount of competition to keep profit margins reasonably thin, the increased cost of regulatory compliance should be passed onto customers in the form of higher prices.

I'm not sure I follow your logic; if you're concerned with buying a house now, then prices from years ago are irrelevant. You can speculate that prices have risen too quickly and that they'll revert back to their earlier level, but that's ultimately just speculation. Comparable sale prices from the past few months are the thing to look at, to determine an offer that's likely to be accepted.

One thing to keep in mind about list prices: if the sellers do a good job of estimating the current market price, then the house will sell quickly. If you're checking listings infrequently, there's going to be some sampling bias in the listings you see; overpriced houses that aren't selling will be disproportionately represented in active listings.

My parents had an ozone-producing air purifier when I was a child. I liked the smell, and I thought the ozone was healthy (nobody ever told me otherwise!), so I had the habit of turning the ozone knob all the way up, sticking my face in front of it, and taking deep breaths.

It didn't cause any health issues as far as I know, but in retrospect, I really wish regulators and/or my parents would have prevented that from happening.

> If chromium is open-source, why not strip it from telemetry and other “badness” and use it as a base to build a browser

That's exactly how qt-webengine is packaged. And qutebrowser (based on qt-webengine) is fantastic for a volunteer effort, but memory leaks and other issues, too much stuff for one volunteer to realistically address, make it difficult to use as a daily driver. And that's just building a UI around an existing rendering engine!

The root of the issue is: W3C specifications are >100 million words, and growing at a rate of hundreds of new standards per year. So even if the Chromium code base were forked from its current state, a team of full-time developers would be required just to keep up with new W3C standards.

What I find tragic about the Mozilla mismanagement is, if one guy is willing to develop and maintain qutebrowser as a volunteer, then surely Mozilla can find developers who would be willing to work on Firefox at sub-FAANG-but-reasonable salaries without the waterfront San Francisco office.

Building on my previous comment, I think it's more useful to say not that we caricaturize opposing viewpoints, but that we compress them using our own internal, lossy compression algorithms. And the original viewpoint is inaccessible to us; we only have access to the compressed representation that our minds generate.

It's impossible for us to understand the beliefs/priorities/values of others from any perspective other than our own. Actually, my conjecture is that the only way to see things from another perspective is to internalize some aspects that perspective.

Let's say Alice holds some internalized ideal of traditional family values, and Bob holds some internalized ideal of tolerance and inclusion of LGBT people. When Alice looks at Bob's views, all she sees is that it's an affront to an ideal that she cares about, and when Bob looks at Alice's views, all he sees is that it's an affront to an ideal that he cares about.

But how can Alice possibly understand Bob's point of view, unless she's able to tentatively drop her concern for traditional family values? I expect that even with effort to understand the other's perspective, unless that other perspective is internalized, Alice's thoughts on Bob's views will be centered around what she cares about: "I guess I understand what motivates Bob to hate family values", "I guess I understand what motivates Alice's bigoted views on LGBT issues", etc.

In Warren Buffett's case, I'd say there certainly is value in scouting out profitable, well-managed companies and giving them access to a large centralized pool of capital. Probably not $100 billion worth of value, but I do think the Berkshire Hathaway umbrella helps the acquired companies to grow beyond what they'd be able to achieve without it.

Reviews and anecdotes can be misleading in some cases. I bought a cheap secondhand Xerox Phaser printer, which has some horrible reviews online, and its previous owner was getting rid of it because of network connection issues. The network connectivity issue was fixed with a firmware update, and I've found it to be an excellent printer - useful documentation, supports every printing protocol under the sun, and the cost of aftermarket drum/toner replacements work out to less than half a cent per page.

> UBI is not fixing the underlying problem.

I disagree entirely. The practical and moral reason why it's difficult to fire workers is because it generally results in the worker losing his income and healthcare, leading to personal and familial hardship. If healthcare were de-coupled from employment, then the hardship experienced by a fired worker is reduced. If some amount of income is de-coupled from employment, then the hardship experienced by a fired worker is further reduced (unemployment insurance works fine enough as a temporary band-aid, but it's not the real deal).

If we can get enough social infrastructure in place so that fired workers experience minimal hardship, then it becomes morally acceptable to make our government and companies more efficient, by laying off inefficient or unnecessary workers. Society then gets to equitably reap the rewards of this increased efficiency.

I believe this is incorrect. Systemd-networkd handles layer-3 routing and some amount of layer-2 stuff (MAC addresses, etc), but it doesn't handle wifi connections. Wifi connections are handled by wpa_supplicant (the older, and still more common wifi daemon) or iwd (newer, but not yet widely adopted).

The vast majority of users control wpa_supplicant indirectly through NetworkManager, so it's not widely known that it can be configured using simple text files. But it can! On Arch linux, the default config file location (for network card wlan0) is: /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant-wlan0.conf.

iwd is similarly straightforward to configure using text files. Using the CLI front-end is typically a nicer experience, since you get to pick the SSID from scan results and you get quick feedback if you mess up the password. But if you want to do it manually, just create one file per wifi network (containing SSID, password, etc) in /var/lib/iwd/.

I hear the term "gaslighting" used a lot nowadays. Its textbook definition is a specific form of interpersonal manipulation that occurred in a movie.

But I've never been able to connect the dots between the term's textbook definition, and the way that people actually use it. The effective definition seems to be: "expressing a different perspective."

I'd be interested to learn how many biological neurons it takes to approximate one artificial neuron.

Mathematically, over some finite interval, approximating y=sin(x) using a Taylor series, or approximating y=x**n using a Fourier series, can both require a large number of terms. But this doesn't imply that a sine/cosine function is more computationally complex than a monomial, or vice versa.

Where's the auto-playing video that you can't get rid of, and which jumps into the sidebar and moves down along with you when you try to scroll past it?

I think a healthcare system based on the following model could work great:

* Federal government provides public health insurance to all taxpayers. * Every healthcare provider submits a list of tests/procedures they offer, and the price that they charge for each test/procedure. The prices are public data. Providers can charge whatever price they want. * When you need a test/procedure, you use a website provided by the public insurance system which looks up all providers within a reasonable distance (search radius would be algorithmically determined so that at least 3-5 providers are included in the comparison). The public insurance program covers the price of the cheapest option. Patients are free to choose any provider they want, but if they don't choose the cheapest, they need to pay the difference out of pocket.

> (Life built from phonon "particles" in a planet-size crystal, anyone?)

It seems unfathomable to me that life could be composed of bosonic particles, since Pauli exclusion seems to be one of the most important reasons why matter (never mind living organisms!) has the property of spontaneously structuring itself in a rich and complicated way.

Everyone loves to mock the flat Earthers, but I believe the theory deserves more respect.

For the typical person, who roams around on some small patch of the Earth's surface, but who isn't launching rockets or traveling between continents, the flat earth theory is more useful than the spheroid earth theory. When you walk a short distance, your path's deviation from planar geometry due to the earth's global curvature is orders of magnitude smaller than the deviation due to local surface roughness, and hence the global curvature is irrelevant in practice. Let's say you walk 5km (about 3 miles); the difference between your path as predicted by the planar-earth theory versus the spherical earth theory is about one tenth of a millimeter. For 99% of what we do, invoking the spheroid Earth theory would be like using general relativity to model a baseball's trajectory in the presence of air resistance.

And if you happen to be far from the earth, on a length scale greater than about 10**9 km, then the point-earth theory is probably going to be the most useful model to you.

In short, it's all a matter of perspective. "Objective truth" isn't a thing; all that matters is how effective your model is at describing the properties that are relevant to you.

I think you're on to something!

Personally, after a short amount of mindfulness meditation (perhaps about 10 hours cumulatively; never more than 30 minutes per day), I began to struggle with uncontrollable awareness of bodily sensations. My consciousness would gravitate uncontrollably toward a certain bodily sensation, and I became unable to decouple my consciousness from the sensation. The harder I'd try to focus on something and ignore the sensation, the more intense the sensation would become. This would culminate in a panic attack.

The issue mostly subsided after a month or two, but it never fully went away. I've become convinced that mindfulness meditation is precisely the opposite of what an anxious, inwardly-focused person needs. If there were a way to train the mind to selectively attenuate information/signals, on the other hand, that would be very helpful.

What other ways do you have in mind?

If you want your monthly payments to be low initially, and you intend to pay off the mortgage debt fully within 5 or 7 years, then a 5/1 or 7/1 ARM can be a good option.

> Progressive people believe that society is not fair but could be. Conservatives believe it is not possible, and it's silly to even try.

Having recently decided that I dislike leftist politics and that I align more with right-wing politics (in theory, if not in practice), the thing that switched in my mind is: why does it matter whether or not society is fair? I think that's the wrong question; I don't see any intrinsic value in fairness.

I think the right questions are: (1) how can we improve our average level of well-being, and (2) how can we reduce suffering?

So in my view, progressives incidentally get some important issues right including single-payer healthcare and environmental conservation. These policies tangibly improve our quality of life. But all the emphasis on equality, fairness, etc? Useless, in my view.

> I do not consider polyunsatured oils edible, and read labels to avoid them.

You avoid refined oils specifically, or any foods containing poly-unsaturated fat? How about omega-3?

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I realize that the term Kafka-esque is a bit overused nowadays... but this sounds exactly like a plot summary of Der Process.

If private companies can't compete with the government-run enterprise, this implies that the government-run enterprise is more efficient. And if the government-run enterprise is more efficient, why exactly should the private competitors even exist?

Not exactly a 1-3 year timescale, but Elon Musk tweeted something about Signal earlier this month, causing SIGL (completely unrelated to the messaging service to which he was referring) to spike from ~$0.50 to $40 per share. Three weeks later, and SIGL seems to have settled down at around $5 per share - 10x the original price. In other words, the price after the shock is not correlated with the price prior to the shock.

As a TA, I'm well aware that the students getting As are mostly collaborating and that the "lone wolf" students tend to do worse despite putting more effort in and possibly having a better understanding of the material. And I feel bad about it. But aside from horrible spyware, I don't see any good solution that would make exams more fair for the "lone wolf" students. My approach is to grade in a way that's disproportionately harsh when I see multiple similar-but-wrong answers and lenient when I see a unique wrong answer.