mFixman

I was very disappointed with Supernova in the East. What started as a telling of the Pacific War from the point of view of the Japanese empire morphed into the usual "war is bad but American soldiers are heroes" that's very common for this period.

I tuned out when he spent 30 minutes describing a famous photo-op of General MacArthur going ashore to the Philippines. That is the complete opposite of the original promise of the podcast.

Robin Pearson ended the 1000-year long epic of The History of Byzantium earlier this year: https://thehistoryofbyzantium.com/

The podcast started as a sequel to Mike Duncan's classic The History of Rome, and in my opinion surpassed it. Where THoR eventually falls into the narrative trap of turning into "The Lives of Roman Emperors", THoB spends a lot of time talking about economic, demographic, societal, and technological changes within the Empire and the world.

Extremely recommended if you want a proper history podcast.

The thing AI miss about the internet from the late 2000s and early 2010s was having so much useful data available, searchable, and scrappable. Even things like "which of my friends are currently living in New York?" are impossible to find now.

I always assumed this was a once-in-history event. Did this cycle of data openness and closure happen before?

You -> Gear icon -> Revanced Settings -> General -> Navigation Buttons -> Hide Shorts.

You need to also hide them from the feed and a few other places. You are not stupid; Revanced has too many options and the settings and large and confusing. It's easier to search "shorts" and toggle everything.

Search "YouTube Revanced" on Android. It's a bit of a pain to install, but it lets you customise your YouTube app and add or remove as many features as you want.

These kinds of customisations should be standard for apps people use every day.

Don't forget Consent-O-Matic if you live in the EU+UK, to auto-reject all cookie and GDPR forms.

I pay for YouTube Premium and I still use ReVanced on mobile.

Being able to remove Shorts from the app and to revert Alphabet's many incoherent design decisions makes the whole thing usable.

Everything on the internet is fake. That is as true now as it always was.

For every real post, I can make up a fake one that's more agreeable to the hivemind and therefore will be more upvoted. Since you see a limited amount of posts in a session, you will only see fake posts and the real ones will be hidden forever.

The author overlooked an interesting error in the second skull pancake image: the strawberry is on the right eye socket (to the left of the image), and the blackberry is on the left eye socket (to the right of the image)!

This looks like it's caused by 99% of the relative directions in image descriptions describing them from the looker's point of view, and that 99% of the ones that aren't it they refer to a human and not to a skull-shaped pancake.

> burger means civilian

I just realised this is probably the German etymological branch of "burgoise".

You need to have a restricted set of allowed syllables to prevent attackers from having names with similar pronounciation to common ones.

In unique name world I would totally for a scammer telling me "Hello, my name is Marck Zuckaberg, give me all your data".

Runescape tried this back in 2007 along with completely disabling PvP; it was a very unpopular change for the vast majority of players who were not buying items.

I stopped playing the game around that time, so I have to thank Jagex for getting my school grades up.

The Latin alphabet is not native to English, and it's a much worse fit for that language that it is for Vietnamese.

My theory is that Google wants to bake Gemini into Chrome to preempt a future antitrust ruling ordering them to spin the browser out, for the same reason Microsoft made IE an integral part of Windows 98.

Maybe it's a personal preference, but I don't want external programs to ever touch my package manager, even with permission. Besides, this will fail loudly for systems that don't use `apt-get`.

I would just ask the user to install the package, and _maybe_ show the command line to install it (but never run it).

Because benchmarks are meaningless and, despite having so many years of development, LLMs become crap at coding or producing anything productive as soon as you move a bit from the things being benchmarked.

I wouldn't mind if GPT-5 was 500% better than previous models, but it's a small iterative step from "bad" to "bad but more robotic".

The whole mess is a good example why benchmark-driven-development has negative consequences.

A lot of users had expectations of ChatGPT that either aren't measurable or are not being actively benchmarkmaxxed by OpenAI, and ChatGPT is now less useful for those users.

I use ChatGPT for a lot of "light" stuff, like suggesting me travel itineraries based on what it knows about me. I don't care about this version being 8.243% more precise, but I do miss the warmer tone of 4o.

The Syrian diaspora overwhelmingly opposed Assad while its population seemed to support the regime... until it fell in 2024.

I wouldn't put any weight on how much the population of a autocratic country pretend to support its regime.

CityMapper, a local transport app, tried to do this in London a few years ago.

It was a failure because they couldn't compete in price with the government-subsidised buses, so the vans they used were almost always completely empty. It was also a bad service: the few times I took it it was extremely late compared to the app time estimation.

I can see Uber succeeding if they have routes that are not covered by existing public transit, and are actually good at estimating pick-up and drop-off time to make a reliable service. This is a much harder problem that it looks.

Francis was the most important supporter of liberation theology in Argentina, which was very ideologically aligned with the Kirchners. He was also strongly opposed to almost every politician who opposed the government.

Bergoglio had several conflicts with the Kirchner government when he was an Archbishop. Cristina didn't tell the position the government would take when he got elected Pope, but the government-aligned (but not government-controlled) mass media associations preemptively filled Buenos Aires with anti-Bergoglio propaganda.

A week later Cristina met the Pope and announced that they were politically aligned, and the same mass media associations filled Buenos Aires with pro-Bergoglio propaganda.

Francis was seen as being too close to the Kirchnerists in ideology and too conflicted with the Kirchnerists in actions when he was Archbishop. Visiting Argentina would have forced him to take a side and trigger a political crisis he probably wanted to avoid.

As far as I know there's no similar conflict with the new Pope, and he wasn't even in America for the most important part of his church career.

The tragedy is not that some students are going to college to get a diploma while learning as little as possible. It is that the boards of many private universities see their students' cash as more important than their education, and force the professors to pass everybody who went to higher education to buy a diploma.

This has a negative feedback loop where universities have to lower standards to bring dumber and lazier students to compete with other diploma mills.

I'm still using Facebook for this, which works for the very few of my friends who are on it. It's actually nice if you aggressively report and unfollow everything you don't want to see.

Does anybody here know of an alternative that works like 2010 Facebook?

This sounds like the kind of things painters said after good photography because widespread.

Instead we got aesthetically original avant-garde art to replace the thousands of low-quality slop portraits that were common in the mid-19th century.

Always remember that internet conversations are carried by a small group of antisocial losers, and a most of media articles complaining about society are specifically targeting that small but loud group.

An average person has a lot more in common with you than with the imaginary protagonist of this blogpost, who is really smart and wants to show that everyone else is really dumb.

Like other normal people, I discuss politics with friends; both with the ones I mostly agree with and the ones I mostly disagree with. We need to understand game theory and military strategy to have a useful conversation.

The microphones and speakers are what I care about. Alexa is the perfect hands-off universal remote + podcast speaker.

Is there a way to flash the Echo hardware to make it work with Home Assistant without pinging Amazon HQ?

I bought a Thinkpad P16s because I wanted to use Linux but got used to the beautiful Macbook screen. So far I'm very happy with it.

Back when I was forced to use a Mac I used BetterTouchTool for this. It's a fantastic tool in general, and the window management is sensible.

Why Librewolf and not Waterfox or any other open source fork?

Thanks!

If anybody has any suggestion in preparing for a PhD in a major university, I'd appreciate it: I expect these four years to be fun but also very challenging.