indymike

> the only option is to cave

Or sue, or organize and protest, or win the next election. Not every government problem warrants revolution, and not needing to revolt is not a failing of the people.

> Americans/Westerners (left, right, center) are way too comfortable for a revolution

A better read is that the situation for most Americans and "Westerners" whatever that means, is that things are good enough that the people do not see value in revolution, or they are able to adjust the government's course enough through elections, redress, courts and other political feedback mechanisms.

> This is unsurprising to me, since people are often quite resistant to learning.

This is an attitude I had when I was 19 and had spent a bunch of time and money going to school. I had a life event that made me leave school and take on a huge debt that had to be paid. Most people learn - they just learn in context of their necessity and their own passions. For other things, they lean on the community around them (doctors, lawyers, accountants, software engineers etc...)

> AI seems to be a good tool for people who are already good at learning and critical thinking to use to accelerate their learning.

I'm watching the huddled masses start to figure it out. AI is going to be to arrogant intellectualism what the gun was to the knight. Now anyone who can operate a mobile phone (and literacy is not required) has access to a shocking level of expertise and contextualized knowledge. And as AI improves this will be more and more the case.

> constantly missing words due to a lacking vocabulary

First prompts of non developer employees were "what does ___ mean?". Real time vocabulary is a thing now.

> “well, maybe literacy is actually not so important,” is so utterly ridiculous that I hope it’s satire and I’m just missing the joke.

It's not a joke. AI is going to reshape society. It's just started. Back to the gun analogy - the knights are just now starting to realize that proficiency with a sword and 70kg of armor are no match for a peasant with a pistol. Likewise, I suspect that Joe six-pack with AI in his pocket can do knowledge work at a "way good enough" level. I don't want to accept it, but that seems to be reality.

> It kind of seems like an insane TLD structure to begin with, right?

It's been around for years. I seem to remember this issue coming up around 2001 where originally .name was for third level registration (i.e. john.doe.name) and changed to second level it a few years later and caused some problems... https://publicsuffix.org/ talks about it in light of architectural limitations of domain names.

> can Joe set a cookie on all of .smith.name?

That can happen. I seem to remember ancient browsers made it so .name (and other non-generic TLDs) required three periods. I think country code domains and new generic TLDS caused the browsers to change it.

It's pretty screwed up, but a lot of the people with .name domains have had them for a very long time. Sad to see them all lose their identity online that way.

> Foldable phones still feel like a novelty that is expensive and fragile, among other tradeoffs.

I've had a Moto Razr Pro for three years now. No signs of wearing out and it's taken quite a bit of abuse. The only tradeoff is probably water resistance and the crease in the screen (which you get used to but is a trade-off). The positive: same size a a wallet when folded, outer screen makes checking notifications fast, and the outer screen lets you use the outer camera for selfies and video recording. I'll probably get another one when the battery dwindles away.

The author is Gregg Miner, and Gregg has an extensive library of harp guitar music. A long time ago I met Gregg when one of my friends Brad Hoyt (a keyboard and harp guitarist as well) hosted a harp guitar convention here in Indianapolis, and I got recruited to help. Gregg and the rest of the artists that were there were extremely approachable, and most of the crowd were musicians (some pretty famous ones, too) checking out one of the more interesting variations of the guitar... and what you could do with one. Fun times.

It's not that as much as the usual something new, complain about rapid change.

It is hard to get vendors to give up revenue no matter how illegal the source of revenue is.

A few small things (from the perspective of the suburbs in a large flyover city), as in most things design the real drivers are usually material driven, and often a byproduct of a trend.

I'll sum up by saying modern interiors feel temporary, where old decor seems permanent in comparison. This leads to you feeling like a hotel guest instead of being home. You have to really work at it to make a modern interior feel like home:

- Modern homes have lots of closet space and storage, so there's little need for "storage furniture like bookshelves, curios, hutches, sideboards and cabinets (you can get $5000+ china cabinets on marketplace for $200 here). When we moved in, I got rid of probably 14 pieces of (mostly beautiful) storage furniture because we just didn't need them. So it's hard to pile up the artifacts of life where they are easy to see and even grab.

- Living areas are large and open, and fantastic for having guests over or a family movie night, but not cozy for a lazy night of reading a book by the fireplace. You have to make a space for this and fight the floorplan to do so.

- Electronics have shrunk, a modern TV is the size of a painting on the wall, and needs only no horizontal space. Likewise, outside of my son's gaming rig, all the computers are laptops, so, out with the beautiful wood desks and in with the modern ergonomic stand-up desk.

As far as the new home went, almost a year later, the areas where we've made effort to put "life on display" feel great - A huge photo wall with shelves for chotskys and nicnaks, a loft decorated with posters and props from my kid's theater productions, an office with a wall covered with photos and guitars. Life is kind of messy. I guess making home a little more like life really helps.

That is how it starts, trust is built on hobby projects.

When the legal reality does not align with actual reality, there is injustice of the worst kind.

The button says "buy" not "rent" or "license".

That should be enough to defeat all the fine print, click wrap hidden clause clever maneuvering bs. The merchant is lying to the buyer. The merchant should bear liability for deceiving the buyer. The merchant (Sony) knew what they were selling. They lied to make it seem like you'd have that video in your library forever. Sony needs to give a refund with interest. Simple as that.

> The snake oil is much more how LLMs are being weaponized and utilized

Calling something "snake oil" implies that the product only, at best, has a placebo effect (amplified, no doubt, by the sales presentation). LLMs seem to be much more useful than a placebo.

Another reason is their competitors didn't get it the value prop because everyone had been competing on rates, and little thought given to developer experience... early on a lot of Stripe's competition's apis used fixed field text as the format for transactions.

If you don't have pride in what you are making with AI, you will let a ton of bugs through. Likewise you will ship bad architecture.

UV is very, very good. The command line is very different than any other package manager I've used, and so it does make for some learning, often in the heat of trying to ship something.

This is the best question of all. Why are we allowing this?

Divorcing technical detail from how it is used does little good for humanity.

Why were we not doing this already?

Not really, now the social network can be immune from prosecution by checking the complies with bad regulation box.

An echo in the sounding chamber? Say it isn't so...

Byte was interesting because it editorially covered everything from home computers to high-end workstations. Byte was a favorite for me (at the time I was in high school) because it covered things that platform specific mags didn't.

> New York Times that criticizes the New York Times,

This has happened.

> the government to decide what is allowed to be banned and what isn't,

This is a civil lawsuit where people are trying to a) prove they were harmed and b) be compensated for that harm. The government is just the referee.

> Meta is removing these ads, because pretty much any advertising platform would do the same about ads that criticized it.

Which was not very smart because the next step will be a court order requiring them to put a banner on ever page with a link to sign up to join the lawsuit - for free.

I hate seeing this down-voted. It is such an important warning to people here. Severance agreements are pretty strong. Also, be very careful of snap settlement offers.

So many of the greatest tragedies I've seen inflicted on people come from accepting an expedient way to get what is really a small amount of money quickly. So often the drive is paying the rent/mortgage or fear of losing health benefits. If you are in a bad situation and offered a settlement and you really feel like something isn't right please talk to an employment lawyer. Most US States have expedited processes for quickly resolving these cases, and the lawyer can help you a lot when you feel like your only choice is to take the severance.

There was a body of evidence far before 2002 that dealing employees in was a good move.

> An empty justification, since a state has no interest apart from its citizen's interests.

Sometimes a government only cares about a few citizens, or in some cases one citizen.

Camcorders were not, but cameras and portable battery powered tape decks were.

Reply of the year. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to laugh or cry.

Yes, it is precisely misguided, and will be in five years, too. Software lasts way longer than people think it does.

> It seems the open-source experiment has failed

People have been saying this since the 80s. Reality is that without open source, this industry would be tiny compared to what it is. So many times open source has enabled an entire sub industry (i.e. ISPs in the 90s, Database, SaaS in the 2010s, now AI). And most of it is someone solving a problem that was worth solving for their own use, and for whatever reason made no sense to commercialize by selling licenses.

> on the backs of ten thousands of now-burnt-out maintainers.

Money isn't the motivation for most "free" open source. If it was, the authors would release as commercial software and maybe as "source available". That someone can use open source to build businesses has been the engine for the entire industry. In other words, the thought that maintainers quitting maintaining is some problem that can be fixed if we only paid them is non-sequitur. A lot of it is that people age out, get bored with their project, or simply want to do something else. Not accepting money for maintaining open source is a good way to ensure it stays something you can walk away from and something where the people attached to the money have zero leverage.

I do think that a lot of maintainers struggle with pushy and sometimes nasty people that take the fun out of what is a "labor of love."

> exploiting entities have never shared substantial or equitable profits back.

If I want to make money, I sell commercial software, SaaS or PaaS.

> they must compensate the creators proportional to the library's footprint in their codebase and/or its execution during daily operations

One of the more interesting uses of open source is to level the playing field. For example, there was a time when database was silly expensive. Several open source products emerged that never would have been viable commercially without the long term promise of "free" and the assurance of having source code. To have a license with a cost bomb on it would just ensure that people would use another choice.

> Actual evidence of kompromats?

Epstein.

I worked on a couple of projects with state workforce development agencies and federal agencies. I was always impressed with how much focus there was on the integrity of unemployment numbers, and especially with the emphasis on making sure methodologies ensure that data from the late 1800s can be compared against modern data.