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> if you required any enterprise features

For me it was the multiple regions. It's like.. with that disabled why are we even here? Data residency is the whole point...

Probably a good move. I'd looked at Cockroach before for a project - they basically disqualified themselves from the start by nerfing the "core" version so bad it was useless, while Enterprise was some absolutely insane figure for a cash-strapped startup. While it was possible to hotfix the code to get around their restrictions - we eventually just used something else.

This at least gets the full-fledged product in the door at startups. Say what you want about the timing or the BSL but I think this makes sense business-wise.

I like and use fastmail but I'm yet to hear any sort of convincing argument why passkeys are better for me in any way, shape or form than passwords (with a password manager)?

Oh man, I tried to use WARP for a project and it was the most confused, hard to understand product I've seen for a while. After a couple of hours of reading unhelpful support pages and trying increasingly random settings I simply gave up and used tailscale instead, which worked instantly.

I'm sure it wasn't the part of the product you worked on but the onboarding experience, wow, just terrible.

It's actually only americans who unaccountably make do with these horribly underpowered kettles. The rest of the world wants their tea and they want it now...

The "scientific management" was just one example out of many, and I disagree its lessons form the thesis of the book. The thesis as I understood it was that states seek legibility of domains under their jurisdiction, and the example of the forests was demonstrating the bad outcomes arising from seeking that legibility through misguided means. While unfortunate, that was an implementation error that could - and indeed was - corrected.

I'd say a much better illustrative example from the book was the introduction of last names. In that case, faced with the illegible identity of the people under its rule, a whole new construct was invented, imposed and pertains to this day. This one really opened my eyes. The whole reason we have last names at all is because our society just sort of invented them, hundreds of years ago, for its own convenience, and it was so successful we all just accept it as the way things are. Now that is seeing - and acting - like a state!

Yeah, they have to fix that. ChatGPT used to have the same issue.

Well, I don’t think of it as true AI, of course. But even LLMs can be extremely useful in their own way. I happily pay for them; there have been times (like today) I feel they paid for themselves in a single response!

They’re not culture level Minds, sure, but they can still help massively in the right situation.

I paid to upgrade my Anthropic account to pro today, ending a long monogamy with OpenAI, and one thing that struck me was how hard to describe the advantages of one over the other were. I like claude.ai's "style" more, and prefer the "interface" - basically the "way" they talk over the strict correctness of what they said.

Hate on LLM-AIs but if you told me 5 years ago I'd be switching my AI provider because I liked another one's style better, I'd have thought you were bonkers. Shit's come a long way.

Huh, I hadn't even considered Andy Weir to be science fiction. Good stuff, but not thought-provoking in the way "real" scifi should be... in my mind, at least.

I hear you about the Revelation Space series. The first (titular) book is one of the best I've ever read.. but it is painfully obvious there was no plan.

That's what SC is for..

I think that's unfair and definitely being too cynical. I'm pretty skeptical about LLM-AI in general too, and yet can readily admit it's highly effective at certain limited tasks such as.. summarizing things. And I'm sure the author did at least some cursory quality control to make sure it was doing what he expected. Hell, this is LLM-AI being used exactly as it should - to automate away the skutwork it can do well to free up the human for synthesizing something good out of it.

Frankly, my "input" related criticisms are more around IMDB rankings and whatever criteria ended up with "Despicable Me" being considered a science fiction film.

> I highly disagree about Russia being a modern nuclear power

Look, I'm as pissed at Russia as anyone but it doesn't change the facts. They are indisputably a modern nuclear power, and they have ramped up their spending in recent years. It's practically the only thing in their defense they haven't starved of funds.

> They have some nuclear capability

They don't have "some" nuclear capability. They are equal first or near enough.

> China and Israel are really the only countries that have the modern infrastructure

Israel!?? Now I'm really questioning your source of information. Whoever told you tiny Israel was anything other than dead last was leading you quite astray, I'm afraid. In fact some would say that Israel's nuclear capability is behind some other countries who don't even possess the weapons.

> I'm generally pragmatic about things

Not nearly pragmatic enough. Of course the war is terrible and of course Russia is to blame. But the world doesn't stop moving and high level co-operation still needs to continue. Russia is still a big, powerful, important country and we can't just cancel everything in a fit of spite.

I mean, even Ukraine, even while it's being brutalized by its neighbor, still maintains high level connections to organize prisoner transfers. There's regular communication between the RUAF and NATO to deconflict and identify each other's assets to avoid misunderstandings and accidents. All of this continues, war or not, because everyone knows the alternative is just that much worse.

It's no different for the scientific cooperation. War or not, everyone knows it is in everyone's best interest for cooperation to continue. The scientific ties long predate the war, and will continue long after everyone has forgotten it, too.

And I'm surprised you then completely contradict your moral point - which I disagree with, but it is a point - by suggesting the West engage with China, a prospect against which almost the exact same argument can be made. Of course, taking the "we only co-operate with partners with sparkling moral rectitude" line even further, you could argue that no-one should be co-operating with the USA, with its two disastrous recent wars, either. See where this goes?

"Well a wave hit it!"

Yeah. I'm still not sure how to parse the GP's comment, "it created an attack vector of one". On its face, that sounds like a good thing, less attack vectors!

I mean, not like sourcing materials locally alleviates things. Apparently the US embassy in Moscow was discovered to have listening devices mixed in the concrete used to construct it...

OK, I checked it out too and I'm a little less impressed. I don't mean to knock the OP too hard, but I feel like I've been seeing the exact same "glitchy morphs in time to the music" for ever, like literally for decades.

Maybe that's just what people want and props to the creator for nailing the genre but I'd be way more interested in something actually unique and generated real time with the music. I feel like visualizers from the 2000s were more impressive - surely with all the progress in CPU/GPU we could be doing some truly epic visualizations these days...

Coming back to this, having read some of the (great!) replies, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that in theory, this sounds possible, and fun, but highly impractical. I'll assume that by "scan" you mean a high end "flatbed scanner" optical scan which would return a 2D bitmap.

It's impractical because the resolution required to retrieve the data "flatbed scanner style" is comically high, perhaps 50k dpi, far beyond the capability of any commercial unit and well into scanning microscope territory. Sure, from my understanding, it looks technically possible. But it would be a very significant and costly project just to assemble the image in the first place. Even if you had that, the resulting file would be hilariously huge (something like 122GB), extremely difficult to work with, and you would be starting from scratch implementing some kind of visual pathfinding helical decoder to painstakingly unravel the linear coil of data the scan just sort of blatted into two dimensions.

It's a cool idea. But it's comically, exponentially harder than just using the equipment as intended to just read the laser returns off the disk directly, into a far, far more easily dealt with format.

I'm adding that CD scan to my list of things I'd like to do if I ever get really rich.

I'm not sure what you mean about the NK situation making the diplomatic pouch an attack vector? Can you elaborate?

Fun fact, those "pouches" don't have to be a pouch or even a bag. They can be boxes or even crates and have been used for smuggling in the past, including drugs, weapons, gold and even - allegedly - people.

this seems responsive: https://superuser.com/questions/140874/is-it-technically-pos...

I ran into so many obscure, incomprehensible issues with OBS I just gave up. I'm sure the other two can also be coerced into doing what you need but Quicktime just works. Maybe things are different on PC.

I've been trying to level up my pop sci medical reading the last few months, and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that our understanding of the human body, how it works and how to fix it, is really still very basic. On the one hand, it's somewhat depressing how little we know and how blunt our tools remain. On the other, it's very exciting just how much of the field remains, frankly, wide open.

There's several medical revolutions just waiting to happen. The next few decades will, hopefully, be very interesting. If I was a young man, I would definitely be getting into biotechnology.

Yeah, the cheapest good-ish solution is the ~$100 elgato camlink 4K, which will give you 4K 30fps in. It works well enough. Skip the really cheap crap, as you say.

Yeah, I got back into video recently and it's pretty surprising that the "multiple video in" isn't a solved problem in 2024! Even recording "clean" video by itself is unexpectedly tricky. The only choice, on a mac at least, appears to be to record directly from the USB device using quicktime.

Seems like a definitely opportunity for someone, although it also looks like Apple are thinking of moving into the space so maybe not.

I like IA and I'm checking out their new presenter, thanks for the tip. But geeze I wish they'd have a better example in their showreel video. Who, exactly, makes, presents and is presented with these "What is design?" fluff shows with giant "inspirational" pictures accompanied a single line of text? Even Apple has to occasionally show, you know, a slide that isn't just a giant well-chosen picture.

> They don't work anywhere else you'd want to use an SVG (e.g. embedded in a PDF)

My workflow is exporting to PDF and then just embedding that inside the larger PDF. Works fine?

Well, I'm sorry to hear this, even though I never tried it. I don't care about threads, I don't need multiple chats, I don't have any big groups, everything is E2EE, and I actively do not want an AI gimmick bot hanging around. But it was someone's dream, and it's always sad to see it end. Been there and got the scars.

Hope you try again guys. The scars fade.

Actually, "man" in this sense ("all humans") is descended from mann, an old english word that didn't specifically indicate male. It evolved to refer to males specifically later, although retaining its old inclusive meaning.

Also interestingly, the "man" in human is not related etymologically to man by itself.

So the author is actually correct, although the usage is a little archaic.

Has it occurred to you that the sense of throw-your-hands-in-the-air, nothing-will-ever-change hopelessness you're evincing here is exactly what they want?

I know I'm putting on the very old, tired and threadbare "software developer tries to solve real-weird problems as if they were software" hat but these kind of stories are both legion and seemingly conceptually simple. Stepping back from the messy injustice of it all and treating the problem as essentially a customer support scaling problem, my off-the-cuff analysis is that we have a process which is too high-touch (the appeals process) which is being subjected to unexpected and unservable scale demands (the bored prisoners) leading to pathological results (prisoner appeals are ignored or subject to desultory binning).

My annoying, uneducated and probably arrogant response is that we need to introduce a lower-touch triage process in between the prisoners and the high-touch, overloaded CS department (the courts) to reduce spurious or unmeritworthy tickets (appeals) taking up too much time and increase the time departments have available to look at the meritworthy ones.

I know it's "not as simple as that" and doubtless I'm missing a million devils hiding in the details but I wonder if there's anyone in government actually tasked with finding these suboptimal aspects of the system and if not, why not? It would surely be a huge bang for the buck.