daedalus_j

Third party starts to look a lot more appetizing then it's not a clear cut sane-vs-lunatic scenario. When there is no lesser of the two evils people will go looking elsewhere rather than take the easy path.

It gives me a LITTLE hope that this third party support is so high. It means we may have fewer "party no matter what" voters, and the politicians MAY have to actually pay attention to the people...

The original of this game is probably the thing that made me a programmer. When I realized I could edit the game to do things like change the banana speed or explosion radius all hope was lost, and I've been writing and editing code ever since!

I see this comment a lot recently and it perplexes me every time...

I don't see how LLMs are search tools. Am I using them wrong? I've asked them for information with sources and they've hallucinated entire answers including accurate-looking but entirely non-existant URLs as sources.

They've been great for getting some ideas, and summarizing things, but if I venture into an area that I'm not a domain expert in an LLM seems like a terrible way to get info.

But everyone seems to think they're the next search replacement... So I have to wonder if I've just got bad luck with them, or somehow haven't groked how to get them to give valid truthful info.

Just run Firefox in HTTPS only mode. [0]

You'll get a warning for any site that CAN'T be upgraded to HTTPS, but any site that supports both you'll just go straight to the HTTPS version.

[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/https-only-prefs

If you play music on a half decent car stereo, or home sound system, yes, you can 100% tell the difference. Spotify "high" sounds absolutely flat compared to a lossless rip of the same track. (and doesn't have anywhere near the bass)

On earbuds? No.

I saw a suggestion somewhere once that I've never nene modeled and would be interested in: checked bags are free, carryon bags cost. Make it more desirable to simply board the plane and sit down.

As someone who flies all carryon, I hate the idea, but I am curious about potential efficiency gains.

What would we do differently if we were green-fielding the entire thing, knowing what we know now? Would we even allow carryon? What if baggage was loaded into trays at the gate, and those trays were simply uploaded into the plane, and then offloaded right away upon arrival for access at the gate, entirely removing the "baggage claim" and lost luggage separation anxiety?

Ultimately without some kind of massive change like this I think what we've got is about as good as we're going to get.

And in any case: I've been screwed over by the airline itself far more often than the boarding process. Alaska and Delta keep re-assigning seats with no notice and my group finds ourselves scattered all over the plane on departure day. American I fear checked bags on because they miss my connections so often. The Southwest all-carryon experience is about the best way to travel.

Of all the irritating things about air travel "boarding process" really isn't high up on my list of issues that should be addressed.

There's a lot of customers still to be served, especially once you have laser-comm interlink between the satellites. Currently a user has to have a view of a satellite that has a view of a ground-downlink station. Once that limitation is gone it opens up lots of things, like middle of the ocean airplane links, etc.

Plus with laser interconnects they can actually beat fiber optic speed for cross-continent or cross-ocean back haul. (speed of light in vaccum, with fewer switches)

There's a lot of use-cases. I bet on them being able to make money long term.

You're right, but they're currently at what looks from the outside to be at pretty severe risk of losing their FCC spectrum license, much requires them to have a certain number of satellites by a certain date.

That, compounded by the fact that "their" rocket company (blue origin) is well behind schedule, makes it seem a bit foolish. If they weren't Amazon, trying to spend their money on another Bezos business, their absolute refusal to launch even their demo/pathfinder sats on a spacex rocket would look a bit suicidal...

By launch volume they are their own biggest customer with Starlink.

However, if Amazon wasn't so up their own ass about not using Spacex rockets, they'd probably be buying almost as many launches to get their project Kuiper constellation up. If they're able to manufacture enough satellites that is.

Which is where the whole "who are their customers" story gets interesting. There aren't any customers of spacex rockets who do as many launches as Starlink does, because the industry hasn't yet caught up to the launch capabilities spacex provides. But they launch for a number of governments, as well as commercial companies.

And not just satellites, but manned missions too! Axiom space has flown non-governmental missions to the ISS, and is planning their own space station. The inspiration 4 mission was a privately-purchased free-flight with only civilians onboard, and was the furthest away any human had been from earth since STS-103 in 1999, at 380 miles.

The world is just starting to catch up to the capabilites offered by modern launch companies!

Just a for-the-record counterpoint:

I have a laptop that is running an Arch install that was first installed in 2011. It runs great. It has, to my memory, twice required manual intervention. (to be fair, it once required manual intervention when I moved the hard drive into an entirely new chassis, and once again when I migrated it from 32bit to 64bit, so 4 times total.)

And I have several other arch boxes that are less old but have had no trouble.

In fact, the distro that's given me the most trouble has been Fedora, but at least when its upgrades fail they now just roll back and make you try again...

Arch really wants you to keep up to date. Run those - Syu's. Often. Never more than a week. If you let it sit for months and months that's when things can get hairy.

I use a split keyboard (UHK) with the two halves on either side of a notebook. FWIW I have a mousepad/deskmat that sits between the halves and allows me to tuck the cord under it. This keeps it from moving around, with an added bonus of keeping my cats from playing with it. It also serves to align the two keyboard halves and keep them from moving around at all.

Might be worth looking in to, was a pretty major QOL improvement for me! Mine is some gaming mouse pad to get the XL size, but I got it specifically for the exact width I needed.

Assuming that the "barbenheimer" effect is what made people shy away seems to miss the occam's razor possibility: It's really not a great movie.

Okay, maybe that was just my opinion. Let's back that up.

The Barbie movie is incredibly dependent on cultural tropes, and targets both the nostalgia bone with its Barbie references and the cultural feelings of American women of a certain age.

Yes, the movie was very popular here. Because it targeted a very specific, yet very large, audience. It seems incredibly likely to me that the simple explanation for it's low acceptance in Japan is simply that the very specific audience it appeals to is quite small in Japan.

An n=1 sample of "stayed away due to oppenheimer marketing" makes this an entirely useless article.

just to n=1 in the other direction:

We had tons of issues with AT&T. Incorrect billing, getting random charges that weren't ours, and a huge pile of "you have full bars, but absolutely no data and calls can't go through" issues. (during the early iPhone days I worked at the Apple Store, we had a standing policy in several local stores of sending one of our sales reps to the AT&T store across the mall with a customer to get issues resolved because AT&T lied to customers so often to try and upsell them to something else, or out of sheer incompetence.)

After switching to T-Mobile we've had great service, no billing issues, no problems with international roaming or surprise charges, and a couple of cold-calls with offers to update to a new plan which was actually cheaper. The only issues we've ever had have turned out to be hardware related.

I think the truth may be that mobile carriers, much like ISP's, are a complete crapshoot, and reliability/service may entirely depend on which market you're in.

I'll admit I didn't look into it, but Helix sounds like something like LunarVim (https://www.lunarvim.org/)

Personally I much prefer that the editor NOT ship with something like that by default, especially when it's so easy to set up. I have several different vim config I use, including a pretty bare-bones one for headless systems, and I much prefer the ability to customize something very specifically.

Build tools that can compose together, rather than a single do-it-all tool. That is the power of the low level editors vs IDE's.

n=1 here of course, but:

I was told a similar thing by a primary care doctor in the late 90's. When I finally got fed up with my allergies again in 2014 or so and went to an allergist they were quite confident it was no problem at all to fix, and after several years of shots at various intervals I'm essentially cured of pretty severe grass/tree/pet allergies. At the end of it the allergist said there was a small chance that I might lose some of my immunity after about 5 years, and if that happened we'd simply plan to go back to once-a-month shots. It's been 7 years and I'm not showing any signs of increased symptoms, so according to him my immunity is most likely long-term.

When I first got tested they wiped off the grass scratch test after 2 minutes rather than waiting the normal 20, because I had already swelled up past the maximum amount. I was VERY allergic to grasses. Now I don't even think of them. Easily the single most life-changing thing I've ever done. HIGHLY recommend visiting an allergist to see if you're a good candidate.

Really depends on what you're trying to do, the hobby has so many different facets.

If you're interested in low-power stuff or doing remote mountaintop SOTA type stuff, KX3 and a Buddipole make a great kit. The usual Kenwood/Yaesu/Icom HT's are all pretty good for handhelds these days, mostly coming down to which modes/features you want support for to make the decision. (The low-budget chinese radio brands can be _okay_ in certain circumstances, but are largely pretty bad. Don't let them sour your experience of the hobby as a whole too much.)

If you're into digital modes there are tons of options to explore. Personally I'm pretty bearish on the "DMR" stuff as there's very little "Amateur" about it, but the DStar community is doing some fun stuff. http://js8call.com is interesting on the HF side.

If you want to get really crazy on HF, FlexRadio makes some pretty cool kit too.

There's no shortage of available gear, but it really depends on what you find fun. Best plan is to see if there are any clubs nearby that might be doing different types of events so you can experience different things like Earth-Moon-Earth, QRP, contesting, etc, and see what catches your fancy!

I really don't understand this one. I turn down clients with projects I don't want to do all the time. How is "I don't want to make your crypto-scam website." substantially different than "I don't want to make your same-sex wedding website."?

If you were a McDonalds of websites, and any person could walk in and order a stock website it would be a different matter entirely. To refuse to sell an item off of your shelf to a customer based on sex/religion/skin-color/etc would be entirely wrong, but to refuse to enter a contractual agreement with someone to create a bespoke thing seems different.

Then again, I may be some sort of terrible despicable bigot, because I've turned down *EVERY* contract to write PERL that I've ever been offered, so maybe I'm just a warped individual.

I'm intrigued by this. I own a 2017 forester and it is rock solid. I, my family, many friends, have all owned Subarus extensively, and build-quality/fit-and-finish have never been an issue, including on some quite old vehicles.

I would very much /like/ to own a Tesla, but I hear so many bad things about loose panels, road noise, touchscreen interface, problem getting repairs, and even that the Subaru's adaptive cruise control is better than the Tesla. It's hard to justify moving away from a brand which has been absolutely reliable though.

So I'm very interested in hearing that your experience is that the Tesla has actually been better. If you don't mind: which Tesla model/year do you have experience with? I'd be interesting in determining if they're getting better, or started out great and perhaps getting worse.

My business depends on my phone and computer too.

My Pixel 4a, and ThinkPad T480 (running Linux) are ancient, venerable, and have never failed me.

Your experience /may/ be the outlier.

MBPs do have fantastic battery life though. I look forward to an ARM based ThinkPad one day that can achieve similar.

Look for the "sponsorblock" browser extension. The arms race is already well underway.

True, and I'm all for punishing the platform. When we do so we're also punishing ourselves however. They're losing potential monetary value, we're the ones losing knowledge. (I'm assuming they have full backups and could trivially undo the deletions for purposes such as selling LLM training data, so the amount of harm we're doing them really is only limited to "engagement" numbers)

Much like the SO incident, it just makes me increasingly hesitant to contribute to any future platform where the only method of redress the users have is self-harm. Seem some good suggestions in this thread though, so maybe we can come up with something new.

This works, and I certainly respect your choice to do so, but if we ass start doing this it removes a huge amount of the value from the platform.

For example I just recently went searching for a solution to a problem, and found 3 reddit posts with what must've been solutions because there were "awesome, works great!" responses, but I'll never know what those solutions were because the user had deleted their posts.

I mean, we could all just use Signal with disappearing messages enabled I suppose, that would keep anyone from utilizing "our data"... I fear we'll just doom ourselves to asking the same questions over and over and over and over if we can't build lasting, searchable, repositories of knowledge.

I have had multiple problems with ISPs throttling/prioritizing traffic, such as games. In one case I had ping times to the steam servers that were so bad the game DC'd about every 5 minutes. Popped everything into a VPN endpoint in my own city and suddenly everything worked smoothly and flawlessly. And this wast not a high bandwidth game by any means. This has happened multiple times.

Also, hosting stuff at my house. Multiple times had ISPs that appeared to be degrading incoming connections where once again popping everything into a VPN tunnel fixed any problems. (for example when I set up a streaming website from my house with a webcam of our kittens to watch from work. Stream kept getting interrupted randomly until I routed it through a VPN)

I tend to use VPS based solutions rather than commercial VPN providers, but I've done both.

TL;DR: ISPs are shifty and untrustworthy.

> Really?? And these content creators willingly post their content on the site so that Youtube can steal from them?

Many no longer do because of this. YouTube "demonetizing" videos they don't like, while continuing to show ads on that exact video and keeping 100% of the reward for themselves is certainly not fully in the right here.

> Please tell me how Youtube is supposed to stay in business without using ads, without having premium services...

As I said, I would be more than happy to pay for a service that actually treated me as a customer rather than an inconvenience. Stop forcing creators to do dumb things like "Shorts" to keep their recommendations up. Stop forcing creators to make videos of a certain length so you can drop ads in. Stop hiding incredibly useful features like the downvote just so you can force me to view content I'm probably going to hate. Just show me the content I want and provide actually useful recommendations next to that, and I'd absolutely be willing to pay money.

I think the real problem is they can't because of the mixed model. They need those dark patterns and anti-features for the ad-supported half of the userbase. Maybe if they were building two entirely separate applications?

Or maybe I'm entirely wrong and Premium actually does what I'm asking for. But I've never seen anybody claim it does, so I haven't even given it a shot.

Not OP, but:

I have no desire to steal from /content creators/, which is why I support them via other means. (Patreon etc)

YouTube on the other hand, is an untrustworthy middleman who's going to to their level best to profit off of me and not pass the money on to the content creators. It's YouTube that's stealing from the content creators. If YouTube was a utility that would deliver me the bits that I wanted from the content creators I wanted I'd be happy to pay some sort of volume pricing for the resources they use to do it, however I have no problem "stealing" from them by using an adblocker considering all the user-hostile crap they do to both viewers and creators.

I will give them credit, it's gotten somewhat better in the last few years, but we went a LONG time with:

  * badly broken group chats
  * problems with long multi-part messages (sending and receiving both)
  * REALLY bad compression on images (well beyond common carrier size requirements)
  * missing basic features like read receipts
  * problems with messages not being sent/received correctly via carrier "wifi calling"
  * and of course some of the intentionally irritating features they added like the way iOS sends "reactions"

I've seen it from both the iOS and Android sides over the years, using both OSs myself, and helping others with issues, and I just can't draw any conclusion from it besides that Apple was either completely apathetic, or intentionally wanted to make SMS a bad experience.

I worked for the company for 10 years and was a big believer when iMessage first came out, but it still irks me that the promised of iMessage as an open standard never came to pass. In meme terms: "You were the chosen one Apple, you were supposed to bring balance to messaging, not leave it in darkness!"

Paywall, so couldn't read more than the first paragraph, but every one of these articles that doesn't put "because Apple intentionally breaks SMS usability, and Google is barely better" in the first paragraph is automatically wrong.

There's no social problem here, there's a usability problem. I'm a 40 year old nerd and I dread having to open the 3rd party SMS app on my android. (The official Google one won't even send an SMS, just gives me the "Couldn't send, tap to retry" error every time I try.)

And the fault is firmly on Apple and Google for having their collective heads so far up their walled gardens.

Similarly: I cannot convince Swiftkey to stop correcting "whole" into "whore". L and R are next to each other on the Dvorak layout, so I get it, but it does not matter how many times I tell it to never correct to whore, it for some reason always prefers that over whole...

I don't think it was as simple as "Booty shaking? Ewww.", it's just that the booty shaking scene serves as an excellent proxy for "this show isn't what we expected, wanted, or like".

By all means, write different shows for different people, there are plenty of shows that aren't for me and that's fine. You just have to be careful when you're counting on an existing audience to be your fans while also trying to write something that's not at all for them. Write a Star Trek spinoff crossed with The Bachelor if you want, but my TNG-loving self certainly isn't going to watch it, and I will be mad if you try and trick me into thinking it's more of something I love.

It's just that we don't communicate with any nuance anymore, maybe because it doesn't fit into our 140-character attention spans? So "ewww, booty shaking" is about the best we get.