deanCommie

Yeah, keep in mind at athletics competition, a "false start" is deemed to be anything within 100m of the actual firing gun - because that is deemed to be below the level of human perception, and therefore someone "bet" or "guessed".

So I can't imagine a human can take a conscious step to get a FIVE millisecond advantage over another.

Tell me you're Italian without telling me you're Italian lol.

The Amazon "2 pizzas" are Two Large American pizzas. Something with 8-12 slices where 2 slices is enough for a meal.

How is it all funded by debt? OP says the IRS collected $4.7T in taxes. So the military budget is 17% of the collected taxes, and the aide to Israel/Ukraine is <2% of all the collected taxes.

Why does debt matter?

What do you need Alexa to do with your smart home that it can't do today? https://www.amazon.com/alexa-smart-home/b?ie=UTF8&node=21442...

Seems like the voice-smart-home problem is the same as the voice-shopping problem: There is a limit to how many features you can/want to support in a voice interface.

The question isn't whether it was OK to turn the gun emoji into a water pistol in the first place.

It doesn't matter if it wasn't. It was done, and it was done at a time when there was political will for everyone to follow suit and be consistent.

The question is whether it's OK to turn it back. Because there ISN'T the same political will. And other emoji providers will NOT follow X in this.

Having X "go back" because the original change was "unjust" doesn't fix the underlying problem. It creates a new one.

Literally perfect application of the concept of "two wrongs don't make a right"

Boosting this.

I recently tried to use Expedia to book a flight from Vancouver to Toronto on Porter Airlines because then I could use my TD Reward points.

The default prices that showed up in the results looked the same on Expedia or directly on Porter, so it didn't seem like I was losing anything.

Except that base flight included no carry-on and no checked-baggage, which I needed to do. On Porter directly fixing that cost an extra $40. Expedia said it cost $60.

For this particular flight I also needed to be able to make changes after booking. On Porter that increased the cost by $100. On Expedia, $150.

I still did it, cuz, y'know - points. But I shook my fist at Expedia the entire time.

I think this is the perfect example. You're absolutely right in every example. But what's changed by having these fruits having less flavour but lower costs, and longer shelf life, is that now much MORE of humanity has access to nutritious and delicious fruits the entire year round, with international supply chains resilient to individual incremental weather phenomenon.

I'm not even going to go down the route that most people in the world didn't have grandparents with a huge garden - let's accept as a baseline that maybe there was a time in human history when every human had access to something like this.

Before the modern world, a single frost, blight, or death in the family, could have wiped out an entire harvest and everyone in a community would starve.

That's less likely today.

Result: Probably a net benefit for humanity overall. Worth it? Highly subjective but as a humnist, i think I have to say yes.

At various points throughout human history it was also common for people to forage/hunt/grow their own food, too.

I resonate with the rest of your post - I do think having a connection to society is vital, and I also think that the US has become too much of a me-first, get-ahead-at-all-costs hustle culture that devalues social bonds. But I see people still forming very deep cultural identities.

I also agree with you that pride in one's accomplishments and a sense of purpose is important and home ownership is ONE way to achieve that - to have control over at least that facet of your life.

But it's far from the only one.

Fascinating!

So it's possible most of Google didn't even know this was possible until know.

Until know.

Now there's probably DOZENS of Product Managers approaching their product's tech lead going "OK, now...hear me out...."

So DocumentDB? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18870397

I think framing the ethical considerations of this based on geographical borders is unnecessarily limiting.

Political borders should not be relevant to evaluate the ethics of what each person did.

Manning & Snowden ultimately to me acted ethically (And subjectively history has not been kind to the things that Snowden has had to do or chose to do since he got asylum in Russia)

Assange ultimately acted UN-ethically by being selective in some cases (leaking DNC data but not RNC), and "non partisan" in others (Leaking data that contained info on US war crimes; while also risking the lives of unrelated US intelligence agents and informants NOT complicit in war crimes)

I think the 90's Antitrust battle was long and painful for everyone, and the hope was that the lessons from the fallout of it from it would carry forward in OS design.

But the staff has turned over and nobody remembers it anymore, so here we go again. (see also: The rise of Fascism worldwide as WW2 veterans die off)

That said, a Web Browser was/is a disproportionately significant application for the OS, where preferential defaults and bundling raise anti-trust concerns. Not so with a cloud backup option. TBH, Apple has been/remains equally annoying with iCloud integration/upsells on both OSX and iOS. And nobody cares.

I don't really understand your last paragraph.

It is in no way expected that Art that "challenges" is going to challenge every viewer. Of course some wouldn't be, in this case you. That's not a bug. I wouldn't even necessarily say that the quality of art is measured by the % of audience it is able to successfully "challenge", that also incentivises shock for shock's sake.

But I also don't really understand the specifics of what you're saying - There are no fingernails shown in the gif, and I suppose maybe one person with upper-arm fat?

To be clear, I'm not advocating for the art or the artist. It does nothing for me either. I'm curious about your seeming vitriol to it tho. (Could be a misread of what you wrote)

No, I agree.

I think humans had exactly the same cognitive dissonance about slavery and racial-based discrimination (in all it's forms) for most of our history.

It wasn't so much that their HATE was so powerful that it superseded logical consistency, but rather the CONVENIENCE of this discrimination was so attractive. Classism is the same way.

We make up ipso facto justifications to continue to perpetuate inequality and exploitation that benefits us. The most recent version of this is globalization and all the arguments the west makes for how our reliance on 3rd world labour improves their livelihood. (It does; it's also more complex than that)

I'm not going to pretend that I WANT to be vegetarian or WANT to align my logical ethics with my actions. I clearly do not, I find eating meat too convenient and brings me too much joy.

But I do want to want to...

Good point.

You're talking about physical maturity, I'm talking about mental maturity.

Physical maturity is irrelevant when it comes to mental decisions of how to apply that physical maturity.

The challenge is that part of an advanced human society is creating black-and-white lines in structures to promote peace and prosperity.

For example, everything we associate with the magical age of 18 years old. "Adulthood", sexual consent, voting, drinking, smoking, conscription all begin on an arbitrary day and we take no consideration of the reality of the maturity of the person.

(Not to mention that "maturity" is entirely cultural and contextual. A harsher world (like one that most of humanity existed in for our entire history) causes earlier maturity. A gentler one (that we are obviously all trying to create) delays it.

So with animals, I see the spectrum, and I see that we are seeking to set a line...somewhere. Some set it just after humans. Humans are special, and everyone else is fair game. Vegans also have a pretty clear line.

Everything else, vegetarians included, are pretty "fuzzy". I'm an omnivore myself, but if you asked me for a concrete logical reason why my personal ethics allow me to eat pig but not dog, I don't think I could give you a ethically consistent one other than "pigs are delicious, and dogs are my friends".

Personally, I do believe that the same way that our generation asked our grandparents how they could've been ok with the racial discrimination & segregation that was ubiquitous in their youth, I think my grandchildren will ask me the same about my consumption of meat.

The reasons will likely be a mixture of climate impact (species of fish going extinct), and cost (because of the energy cost required to create pigs and cows). Society will form an ethical consensus about why it's not appropriate to eat animals to help reduce WW energy costs the same way that early people in the Levant found it helpful to create rules about not consuming pigs or shellfish (for sanitary reasons).

And there'll be "scandals" about rich people that have secret animal farms similar to what we have today about finding out about billionaires in dubai basically having secret house slaves. (AKA, outrage, but no meaningful change)

BTW from where I stand, it seems fairly reasonable to deduce that all mammals are in some way conscious/sentient, and have intelligence comparable to our own. Mammals play, mourn their dead, have a common signal that generally causes us to protect the young of all mammal species and find them cute.

I also think that there is a strong case for a very unique type of intelligence and conscience in Cephalopods. I have personally taken a stance to not eat cephalopods. Because I think they are in greater danger of going extinct vs. mammals (since their stock counts are so invisible to humanity), and I have decided (subjectively) that consuming a distinct type of intelligence from my own constitutes a form of crime. I don't know if I can defend that in court though.

I am not convinced about the rest of the animal kingdom.

I read the letter [0] and am deeply confused.

For context, I agree with the basic philosophical premise. I'm a Jew, but Israel is a repressive apartheid state, and while it had a right to defend itself, it's approach in Gaza absolutely meets the internationally accepted definition of genocide. The positions of individual Jews and Israelis are on a wide spectrum, but it's also not controversial to say that as far as the current Israeli leadership, this genocide is not an accident, not even from a lack of care. It is absolutely within their goals and desires to have all Palestenians eliminated from the territory administrated by Israel, and they're going as far as they can without losing the international support of the United States.

With all of that said, I have no idea what PEN has to do with this. If they are endorsing it, they should stop. If they're funding it, they should stop. If they're invested in organizations directly supporting the Israeli government, they should stop.

But if all they are is "an organization in the US", then their tax dollars are going to fund the genocide. And every single American taxpayer is equally complicit here, which is to say not at all. People SHOULD be fighting for change, and advocating for it. But not through empty speeches or statements. Statements from PEN do not protect or save the rights of Palestinians.

I also think this is meaningfully different from the BLM era when protestors stated that silence is violence, and a lack of a statement is a tacit rejection of the movement. BLM was/is about an inherently American problem of systemic racism. White Americans benefit from systemic racism through no action of their own, so acknowledging it and at least making an effort to get woke to it (the original meaning of the term) is at least a necessary step to choosing to helping to dismantle it. American Corporations do play a part in that.

But on Israel/Palestine, I just think these moves do not help the cause.

[0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VEF-Hrg8wN7WHiSljqwd9IqH...

What a short-sighted outlook

1) "homegrown systems are expensive to engineer, but cheap to run" misses the most important part - how much does it cost to maintain, and how much of a RISK is it?

Homegrown probably means you're depending on tribal knowledge from a few core people who if they leave you're hosed. That's a risk. You also have to train EVERYONE you hire to learn the homegrown systems, instead of hiring people with externally transferrable skills that can come in and hit the ground running.

2) all of the on-prem folks had to additionally take on that responsibility

Most transitions/migrations always end up with a period where you have both systems running. It's not surprising that at first everyone has additional responsibilities. It sounds like the "on-prem folks" either didn't have the skills to work in the cloud or refused to learn, and needed external hires. Well, that's one way to put themselves out of a job, and that would be the next step once the homegrown system is deprecated.

Obviously there's a reason why "not invented here" syndrome exists. There's a reason "build vs buy" is a complex discussion because of more than just buy costs. People always prefer the home-grown thing, DIY. Engineers especially. On this site, particularly. And, also, plenty of successful businesses exist by cutting out layers and going on a shallower stack ("your margin is my opportunity").

But at the end of the day, for the vast majority of businesses, companies, and software shops, managing their own in-house infrastructure is a worse decision than paying a cloud vendor.

Kafka is a disease.

It's a queue, it's a stream, it's a journal, it's an event bus, it's a database.

It's also apparently a workflow engine now?

It annoys me so much how appealing this is to a median developer. "Wow I just get to learn this one tool and then I can use it for EVERYTHING!" is not something competent craftsmen/professionals do in any other field, yet in software it's all the rage.

"The way we are building event-driven applications is misguided"

Maybe the way you are! Don't overcomplicate/overabstract things so much!

It can do more than 2.

Also you can then create a single multi-region endpoint for those so I don't know why this person says it doesn't exist: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/MultiR...

And that was totally a thing in the early 2000's

Companies were selling "Media PC's", and Windows ME stood for Millennium Edition or Media Edition depending on who you asked.

And people think the word "content" is overused now...

And so are ChatGPT and Gemini even the newest launched versions.

It was also, on the theme that you mentioned, incredibly, unnecessarily horny.

And Sama leaned into that, tweeting "her" yesterday -> https://twitter.com/sama/status/1790075827666796666

I'm not trying to cancel anyone, it wasn't malicious, and it wasn't offensive. But it's definitely something, and not everyone's chill about it.

But it's not a problem because Google doesn't compete with OpenAI (IMO). Google competes with Microsoft which will add all the necessary polish to de-hornify the OpenAI stuff for the corporate customers.

Meanwhile the core OpenAI tech ultimately demos better and offers it's value proposition to a legion of startups better than Google.

In summary, if you're an engineer of building on top of a model, OpenAI seems better.

And if you're a CTO/CIO trying to pick a horse to sign an enterprise contract with, Google seems better.

Well, presumably, from the service you decided to use first?

> Humans are more partial to talking than writing.

Amazon, Google, and Apple have sunk literally billions of dollars into this idea only to find out that, no, we aren't.

We are with other humans, yes. When socialization is part of the conversation. When I'm talking to my local barista I'm not just ordering a coffee, I'm also maintaining a relationship with someone in my community.

But when it comes to work, writing >>> talking. Writing is clarity of ideas. Talking is cult of personality.

And when it comes to inputs/outputs, typing is more precise and more efficient.

Don't get me wrong, this is an incredibly revolutionary piece of technology, but I don't think the benefits of talking you're describing (timing, subtext, inexplicit knowledge) are achievable here either (for now), since even that requires HOURS of interaction over days/weeks/months of experiences for humans to achieve with each other.

Depends on the cloud provider. Some take regional independence (and even further, availability-zone independence) more seriously than the others.

Or to state it even more definitively, only one of the public cloud providers offers clear guarantees of availability-zone disaster recovery independence, never mind regions.

And it's not Google's or Microsoft's.

It's a difficult problem.

I agree with 99% of what you said.

But "we live in a society". We can't completely segregate all the classes from one another. We can't just imprison or kill the drug addicts. (i'm sure some reading would disagree).

So what do we do? Well, we don't solve the root causes, that's for sure. We don't prioritize poverty reduction or mental health. We seem to think it's more important for a society to allow the possibility for someone to become a billionaire, than for NOONE to ever have to risk being homeless.

That seems to me to be the core problem. We claim we care about these problems but we don't actually prioritize solutions. Then we overreact to signals that are only loosely correlated with them. A fentanyl addict screaming on a bus aggressively actually is at least commiting a crime, though punishing them for it won't help his addiction or help address the root cause of why they became an addict.

But there are lots of other signals of visible poverty that we police even if they're not strictly speaking crime. We create hostile architecture to prevent homeless people from sleeping in public spaces. Why? Because we don't want them ruined for everyone else. Understandable. But again, dealing with the symptom, not the root cause.

So it's not that I don't care about the opinions of the sensible moderate taxpayer (i am one). It's that I don't think their preferences for solutions actually address the root cause unless taken to their logical conclusion and we put all the poors in an internment camp.

It turns out my actual question is "Do we really need this many different Linux distributions" and I'm sure this will sound even more wrong but it really feels like the answer is no.

OK different ones for different hardware devices, sure.

But I asked ChatGPT of the difference between openSUSE and Debian (since you mentioned those) and everything listed seems like it could be just variants within the same OS not a fundamentally different OS

> Package Management: > openSUSE uses the Zypper package manager and supports the RPM package format. > Debian uses the APT (Advanced Package Tool) package manager and supports the DEB package format.

This comes back to my original question - they need different package managers because the OS's are different, the OS's aren't different because they wanted different package managers

> Release Model: > openSUSE typically follows a fixed release model with regular releases of a stable version, like openSUSE Leap, which has a predictable release cycle. > Debian follows a more flexible "when it's ready" release model. There are three main branches: stable, testing, and unstable.

you could have unstable, testing, stable, and then on top of that have a predictable stable release cycle. These aren't incompatible with each other.

> Philosophy: > openSUSE is known for its strong integration with the open-source community and its adherence to the principles of the Free Software Movement. It emphasizes stability and ease of use. > Debian is known for its commitment to free software principles, as outlined in the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). It prioritizes stability, security, and freedom.

This just feels like a ChatGPT hallucination. It sounds like both are focused on Free Software. That said, I suppose noone is stopped from creating a Linux OS extremely focused on FSM, a commercial one not-at-all interested in FSM, and one somewhere in between.

> Default Desktop Environment: > openSUSE offers various desktop environments, including KDE Plasma and GNOME, but its default desktop environment may vary depending on the edition (Leap or Tumbleweed). > Debian offers a wide range of desktop environments, including GNOME, KDE Plasma, Xfce, LXQt, and more. Its default desktop environment is GNOME.

Like the package manager, inverted cause and effect.

> Community and Support: > Both distributions have active and supportive communities, offering forums, mailing lists, documentation, and other resources for users seeking help or guidance.

> System Configuration: > openSUSE uses YaST (Yet Another Setup Tool), a comprehensive system configuration tool that allows users to manage various aspects of the system through a graphical interface. > Debian relies more on manual configuration files and command-line tools for system administration, although there are also some graphical tools available.

I wonder what YaST uses underneath, I bet it's a series of...configuration files :)

No reason why both couldn't work on the same OS.

I don't understand people that aren't filled with dread with this concept.

And I understand why so many humans fall back to something like religion to cope. It's the only way it seems to become complacent with our role in the cosmic horror.

I know all the intellectual arguments for optimistic nihilism. I vote in elections even though my "one vote" doesn't matter amongst millions, and in some degree my single human life is the same on a timescale of (hopefully) trillions of humans by the time we get to the point of worrying about the receding observable universe.

And yet...