I must, the same way the immune system must assume that anything an IgE antibody can attach to is a potential threat, assume that anyone who unironically uses the word "gaslight" as a verb is wrong.
908 karma · joined March 30, 2025
It's like the game Civilization.
Every new version is worse than the last. Every new version is more bloated. Every new version has changes that ruin it.
Every new version is "less snappy". Every new version ruins everything.
Not even with OS X, we're talking back to the System 6 days, almost 40 years ago, it has always been the same.
System 6 uses too much RAM I'm staying with System 5.
System 7 is bloated I'm staying with System 6.
System 8 is a disaster I'm staying with System 9.
System 9 is a buggy mess I'm staying with System 8.
System, err, OS X v10.0 has no apps I'm staying with System 9.
And then oh boy the OS X/macOS versions!
Every generation gets so much worse, buggier, and "less snappy" than the last that surely our computers must be traveling backwards through time by now!
Every Civ game past III, the one I spent the most time playing during college and am most used to and like the most for totally not arbitrary reasons, has just been the worst, amirite?
But to answer your question, after a year I use those 30 extra minutes to play Sonic the Hedgehog six or seven times, nibbling on an ice cream sandwich between acts and zones, a sandwich that eventually melts and makes a great mess of things including all over my Genesis controller, which I clean in the kitchen while looking out the window over the sink.
Investors have a deep understanding of their desire to make money.
AI, thus far, has proved itself to be very bad at making them money.
Here's a phone with "a completely square display": https://www.walmart.com/ip/Rotatable-Phone-i19-Pro-Mini-Fold...
It even rotates but only the one screen.
I even found a phone with integrated barcode scanner, the UNIWA V9S.
Not only do I have the muscle memory, still after 30 years, I also have the added incentive of knowing the value of my own time, not being fatigued from hours of work, the ability pre-position items in the cart at an optimal orientation for handling and scanning, and foreknowledge of what items I have and a plan for how best to bag them that was made prior to my arrival at self-checkout.
So, yeah, I scan faster.
Much faster.
edit: oh man this has brought up a bunch of frustrations. Why do customers just pile shit on the counter? When I interact with a cashier, like at a gas station on a long road trip, every item I place on the counter has the barcodes oriented towards the person, so they can just "zap zap zap zap" the items rapid-fire without handling them. My bag (I live in a civilized state that has banned plastic bags) is ready and waiting, items are organized and presented in an order that make sense for ease of bagging. My payment method is ready. The experience is efficient and quick.
It takes no mental effort to do any of this and yet I am constantly stuck behind people who act as though they are purchasing things for the first time in their entire lives and the process is as foreign to them as communicating in the language of an extraterrestrial intelligence is to me.
I look at myself and go "damn that's one sexy dude I'm gonna jut out my chin and stand up straight so if anyone looks at this, they fall in love with me".
Also, the staff doesn't identify as anything except someone trying to make it through their day.
I know this because I used to try to help. I used to think that, for whatever reason, people just didn't know about all of the options out there.
I was wrong.
"I want a smaller phone" here's a smaller phone "yeah but I don't like that one".
"I want a thicker phone with a huge battery" here's a thicker phone with a huge battery "yeah but I don't like that one".
"I want a dumber phone" here's a dumber phone "yeah but I don't like that one".
"I want a privacy-focused phone" here's a privacy-focused phone "yeah but I don't like that one".
People will make up an infinite variety of excuses why a product that meets their chief stated requirement isn't for them.
"Oh the camera is only 24.9999 megapixels instead of 25. Oh that's 9mm thick I really can only do 8.9mm at maximum. Oh that's only IP68 rated I want IP69. Oh that screen is 5.4 inches-- TOO BIG-- I want a 5.25 inch screen."
The best was when someone wanted a rugged phone with long battery life and they rejected an option because its ARM cores ran at like 525MHz less than the latest shiny Samsung joint so they bought the skinny non-rugged non-gigundo-battery Samsung instead. They didn't understand that the only distance between the two would be in benchmarks, and only by small margins, and that to human perception there would be no difference.
What I think they want, instead of a phone that meets their requirements, is a POPULAR phone that they consider to be an aspiration goal or status symbol to be specifically designed to meet their personal requirements and that everyone else should have those same requirements too.
reclaimthenet.org appears, at first, to be a pro-free speech site.
But they only publish stories that support the current US administration's stance that conservatives are being oppressed and persecuted.
And there are absolutely no stories critical of the steps the current administration has taken to curb free speech and expression.
And on several articles (I read a lot of that trash, unfortunately, trying to analyze it) they refer to efforts to install solar panels as "trying to block out the sun". Two different (apparently) authors used this very specific phrase as a stand-in for "solar panels".
And every single author I looked at appears to be fake with just "Cam Wakefield" having any other editorial presence on the entire internet, at a Christian anti-lgbt ragebait AI-slop website.
And the authors are very prolific, thousands of words a day, every day, non-stop.
All of the articles are the same approximate length, read very similarly, and very, very, very few of them (that I've seen and I've seen a shit-ton) have any links whatsoever to any website except other pages on reclaimthenet.org leading to loops of ragebaiting.
And there are absolutely no traces of who is behind the site, how it is funded, and the only common threads I can find, sprinkled judiciously just enough to be noticed but not enough to turn off normal people who don't look deeper, to try to explain what this site is is an obsessive (and secretive) focus on Great Britain and the United States and attempts to tackle hate speech and bigotry from the far Christian right.
My final analysis, especially based on the authors' off-site posts, is that they really, really, REALLY hate from the bottom of their hate-filled hearts, any trans or gay person and they hate even more when companies, governments, or other individuals say: "hey you're not allowed to write 'trans people should kill themselves' that is against our rules". And that this entire effort is fake, designed to stir up outrage to build pressure or support for legislative moves designed at first glance to "free da speech" but are really designed to limit peoples' right to say "gtfo bigot".
Or, cynically, it's just a rage-fueled fundraising exercise for persons unknown.
Very interesting.
From milquetoast write-by-committee text generation engines that allow shitty writers to pump out terrible business boilerplate in an email client to customer service representatives tacked onto storefronts that don't do anything except waste your time, using anything AI feels like wading through a waist-deep swamp that ten thousand cows have shit in.
In a way, Apple having terrible AI is a plus to me. It recognizes that there's a cute puppy in a photo in my photo library and that's what I need, and want, it to do.
True or false: PSEG's annual profit every year for the last five years at a rate that greatly exceeds inflation while expenses are practically flat.
Their stock symbol is PEG, bee-tee-dubs.
There are very few theories of business and/or economics where profits increase while costs are steady where prices don't increase.
Are they (hold on a sec while I compose myself so I don't type a long string of obscenities) using that money to improve their service and keep rates steady or are they funneling everyone's money into the pockets of their investors and begging the state for free cash to maintain their infrastructure like they're some broke-ass bitches?
That's exactly what's happening. Like, it's happening before our very eyes. Right now.
Hubris, arrogance, and entitlement led us here and the world is taking your suggestion to heart.
I want to live like I'm in Star Trek. The good Trek, not the new stuff.
So when I wake up to pee in the middle of the night because I'm an old man my bathroom light turns on, dimmed to its lowest level, upon detecting my presence in the bathroom. I do my business and stumble back to bed and the light turns itself off.
When I leave home my front door locks, and when I pull into the driveway it unlocks. Also if the sun has set, the driveway, front porch, and foyer lights turn on.
When I say "hey Siri, it's movie time" my projector turns on, the lights dim, and if music is playing elsewhere it stops.
One day I was on the road for work and a package was unexpectedly delivered. I texted my neighbor to put it in my garage and opened my garage door from 2,700 miles away. When they replied that it was safe from the rain, I closed it.
Triviality. Beautiful, glorious, triviality.
I love it.
Every description of it is ludicrous.
>here, researchers under Dr. Nathan Gordon, a CIA chemist, mixed shellfish toxin with water and froze the mixture into a small pellet or dart. The finished projectile would be fired from a modified Colt M1911 pistol equipped with an electrical firing mechanism. It had an effective range of 100 meters and was virtually noiseless when fired.
The device held up by Senator Frank Church was not a modified Colt M1911. It was an air pistol with absurd rifle sight attached.
That device has no mechanism for cooling the pellets. The second a frozen pellet is inserted into that device it will begin melting.
Very few handguns, to the point that "none" is accurate ENOUGH, have an effective range of more than ~50 meters. There are some calibers, not nearly-silent ice pellets, that can travel further but their ballistics out of short barrels are so poor that demos at 100 yards and beyond are exercises in exhibition and bragging rights.
No known combinations of mechanisms needed to propel a projectile 100 meters are virtually noiseless. Even air rifles that can fling a metal pellet several hundred yards as their "maximum range" but operate in 50-60 yards as their "effective range" make a shit ton of noise.
Any small dart-like ice pellet would immediately disintegrate into dust at the forces needed to travel even a fraction of 100 meters with enough energy to pierce human skinned clothing.
Any large .45 caliber ice pellet would shatter and if it struck a target with enough force to penetrate skin it would leave way more than "a tiny red dot"'s worth of signature.
Saxitoxin is not, and has never been since its isolation, undetectable. It doesn't "disappear" from the body after death (indeed the mechanisms that would cause its distruction cease upon death) and can be detected with simple tests.
This doesn't make sense except as a distraction from things the CIA really didn't want investigators to see.
Yes, on March 12, 2025 the EPA published that press release.
But a non-fool would search the CFR to see if any proposed rules had been published.
Almost exactly one month after that press release the EPA started releasing draft rules revoking the previous administration's rejections of regional haze reduction programs and approving them instead.
Here's a draft rule revoking the disapproval West Virginia's plan and approving it: https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-06608.pdf
Then you have to actually READ what West Virginia's haze reduction plan does: it removes the previous requirements to install additional post-combustion controls on various coal-fired power plants in the state in order to reduce emissions.
The rule was approved last month.
And the same thing is happening in other states.
"We're reconsidering an implementation" is bureaucratese for "that shit's done, yo".
Jesus fucking Christ this country is doomed because it's full of idiots who won't expend any energy whatsoever to figure out what's going on.
Project 2025 is almost halfway implemented and several of its authors hold positions in government, charged with its implementation.
Everyone who thinks it is some side project or wish list that isn't "real" and actually, literally, happening right now is a fool.
What else are they saying?
Entitlement is a crazy master. Same kind of person thinks they can tell advertisers to fuck off and then sue when they do.
Gaming is irrelevant.
For AMD, gaming (both console and PC combined) is less revenue than embedded-- things like those routers you can get off of aliexpress and Synology NASes.
Enterprise, cloud, and AI are the only things that matter, and even enterprise is falling off.
Back in 2020 with the second wave of AMD EPYC Rome, after I had gotten a couple of R7525s in hand and put them through their paces I started saying that you are professionally negligent if you, as a technology professional, recommend an Intel solution unless you have some very specific use cases (AVX512/Optane-optimized options). In 2022 everyone started agreeing with me.
Now you are professionally negligent if you recommend Intel at all.
Enterprise cares about speed, cloud cares about clients per socket, and AI cares about bandwidth. Intel is not competitive in any of those.
Even in the consumer space, for running bullshit workloads like Copilot on a laptop the difference is negligible. Intel is ahead, by about 10%-- at ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY WATTS (if the OEM even allows it) while you trade that 10% for 75W on AMD.
No human being on earth cares that the scan to identify if there's a cute dog in the photo they just saved to disk takes .255 or .277 seconds. They do care about battery life.
And gaming isn't just irrelevant due to revenue, once you look at margins you start realizing that AMD could never again spend a single cent on marketing X3D chips to gamers and instead redirect that money to target other sectors and they would probably be better off for it.
Look at Nvidia. Gaming went from their cash crop to burdensome baggage in just a couple of years. Gaming went to less than 9% of revenue from like, 80%. They don't care about people buying an RTX card and having to deal with OEMs and distributors and retailers and marketing and RMAs and driver patches at whatever piss-poor margin it is due to everyone taking their cut when enterprise clients are putting in POs directly to them for tens of thousands of Data Center cards at a time at high margins-- and they didn't have to spend barely anything on marketing.
The very last thing, after figuring out absolutely everything else, that Intel should care about is what their chips are benchmarking at in the latest video game.
Here in the real world, the number of professional journalists who would stick their necks out and risk losing access or a paycheck to "fight the powahhh" is exactly and precisely zero.
It is, however, a supremely self-righteous profession full of people who THINK they would...
As far as a liberal rebellion goes, they're too busy dividing themselves over foreign matters they have absolutely no chance of changing or even slightly influencing to even the tiniest degree to see that they are letting themselves be fucked. Russia and Iran spending a tiny amount of money and other peoples' lives was the best investment they ever made and the only smart one of the last decade.
It helps that I haven't had a claim in 30 years.
They say they want one thing, but buy another.
They claim they want a manual transmission and then buy a RAV4.
They claim they want a sports sedan and then buy a RAV4.
They claim they want a station wagon and then buy a RAV4.
They claim they want a base, cheap, simple, vehicle and then they drop $55k on a fully-equipped RAV4 Hybrid.
Be weird. It's ok. Do the dumb thing and follow your desire.
And you can hedge your bets. I bought, used, a manual transmission convertible sports car, a sports sedan (red, even!), and capacious station wagon for all of my Home Depot needs all for less than the price of RAV4 Hybrid and between the three I always have at least one functional vehicle!
They did amount to something.
Those announcements were part of Apple's initiative to build/assemble certain Mac Pros in Texas.
The idea is to do it on a high-margin, low-volume product so that any hiccups can be absorbed in the accounting and aren't as impactful to millions of customers. Hiccups like a dearth of US suppliers of subcomponents.
If a North American customer purchases a Mac Pro its final assembly occurs in Austin, Texas.
According to local media and government reports Apple has spent over a billion dollars in Austin and directly employed about 10,000 new permanent workers so far.
If you count local suppliers, the total is higher.
You can see some of the billion dollars here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/dHy52bEoWizDC5qz5
You can click on "See more dates" and select 2020 to see that in two years that site went from "empty lot" to "hundreds of thousands of square feet and thousands of workers".
The Flextronics facility about a mile-and-a-half to the south is another chunk of cash.
Additionally, many, MANY, components from audio codecs to SoC cores to sheets of glass used in Apple products are made in the US and exported for integration into products that are assembled overseas.
If you think 5 years from announcement to construction is a long time, I've been working about that long on a committee to build a tiny 4-bay fire station. It isn't about money, we have the money and infinite money wouldn't really change anything. It's about permits, contractor availability, and subsystem/subcomponent lead times. The diesel fume extraction system installers had a year-long backlog of work alone.
If you're waiting for the iPhone to be built in the US, you're going to be waiting for a long time, perhaps an infinitely long time. Other, higher-margin lower-volume, products? That's more likely.
I'm more familiar than most with how difficult it is to build things in the US, because I build satellites for a living and fire stations as a civic duty.
It's hard.
A week in Bali is not the same thing as interstellar travel…
“The indefatigable spirit of exploration” isn’t the answer. People, as a mass, only explore to find new resources due to scarcity.
There are exceptions, but they tend to be thrill seekers or publicity hounds seeking to capitalize on a measure of fame upon their return and dying on a spacecraft 1/5th of the way through its journey isn’t thrilling and no ticker tape parades await your return.
If you can build a spacecraft capable of sustaining 1,000 human lives for multiple centuries, you’ve solved all local resource scarcity problems. You could just mine the solar system and build billions of habitats that lazily circle the sun.
Hell, you wouldn’t even care about habitable planets anymore and a likely endpoint for any interstellar efforts would likely be a long-lived star with large orbiting gas giants you could turn into solid materials in order to build trillions of habitats orbiting that star, not an insignificant earth-like boulder.
Imagine turning all of the methane in a gas giant into carbon strands, using its hydrogen to do it and building a near-infinite number of habitats, each perfectly suited to human existence.
An earth-like planet with its quakes and tsunamis and seasonal cycles would seem pathetic.
I am convinced that is a skill that can be learned or taught.
When I go to reddit, I see posts about astrophotography, vintage computers, ham radio, classic cars, typewriters, film photography, sculpture, gardening, woodworking, firefighting, archery, fencing, outer space, watches, cutaway drawings, the Sega Saturn, and more topics I'm interested in.
When they go to reddit they see stuff they don't like, and people arguing about it.
I just want to shout "yes, you do, because your brain is damaged and you asked it to show those things to you".
It's the same with all social media. When I go to instagram I see people I know personally and have been in the same room with doing things I am interested in. I don't see any rage, titillation, celebrities, or gossip. Just my friends and acquaintances being friendly. (It IS annoying that I keep having to turn off suggested posts)
Even when I click on the magnifying glass, which is where people say Instagram shows them titillating things in order to get them hooked, I see scuba diving, aviation, vintage Macs, watches, and astronomy.
What is going on? Do I have a "only show this guy nice stuff he's interested in" cookie following me around the internet?
And YouTube. People will complain about YouTube showing them shit. When I go to YouTube.com, right now, I just opened it in another tab, the top six videos are: Dutch firefighters battling a stable fire, a homelabber messing around with vintage linksys equipment, a history of the development of nuclear weapons, a review of a handheld video game emulator, a guy with a VAX setup in his basement working on restoring those machines, and a video on new theories about how the moon was formed.
The next six are also laser-focused on my interests including a two hour video about various motifs found in Indo-European mythology and their origins which I am totally going to listen to in the background while at work.
I did nothing, NOTHING, except subscribe to/follow things I like and people I know, and it's great.
When people log into reddit and see people arguing about bullshit, instagram and see models bouncing their tits, and YouTube and see garbage, the only logical conclusion I can reach is that their brains are damaged and they set up the systems to show them these things then decided to complain about it as some kind of hobby or something.
If anything, HN is the worst of them all because I can't tell it "show me more 'floppy disk raid array' and less 'crypto and AI bullshit'".
No. Stop. Fuck off. Get fucked.
I didn't say, mean, imply, or insinuate that.
Someone said/meant/implied that banks were a monopoly, probably because they're a piece of shit libertarian or they heard the phrase "ReGuLaToRy CaPtUrE" on a shitty podcast somewhere, and that it is impossible to start one.
And I replied that it isn't, well, it is, but no more than any other capital-intensive project.
And credit unions are easier than banks.
Goooooooooooooooooo fuckyerself.