Ah, the wonders of Thunderbolt over USB-C. One connector, two sides, three generations, ten protocols, a hundred dollars and still one just one monitor. If you're lucky.
939 karma · joined November 12, 2021
Why would I use something that most of the web doesn't support, is full of crapvertising, doesn't work seamlessly with my other Google services and Android, and on top of that, gets worse every year?
I opened it just now, just for kicks, and it's begging me to pin itself to my taskbar (even though I'm on a Mac). And the tab right behind the modal popup is a bigass advertising for some Mozilla VPN product. The New Tab below that is a grid of six more ads from something called Pocket.
How the hell did it get so bad? At this point I'd rather just see Firefox die entirely, or be made into another Chromium reskin. It's just malware these days.
Google has become the web standards body, and Webkit/Blink are the only renderers that matter anymore. Mozilla doesn't have enough influence to change anything anymore, it just dies a little more every year as browser support for it decreases even further. It's already down to <5% marketshare, what's left for it but to die?
I'm no audiophile, granted. Just a satisfied average Joe. The Airpods are way more convenient.
They can't have it both ways... Fastly was the one that complained that their JS engine still wasn't up to par (being in beta), so clearly the language of choice (or interpreter/compiler/whatever) DOES matter.
Either the language doesn't matter (in which case, replicate the JS test) or it does, in which case this isn't even a useful comparison.
* Rust compiled to WASM is faster than Javascript (ok, but I'm not going to switch my entire stack just to use your CDN)
* Fastly performance throttles their free accounts (ok, but not Cloudflare's fault, and I definitely don't want to get into your pricing game if you're going to start offering different tiers of serverless workers... part of Cloudflare's allure is its simplicity in pricing).
They do have two good points:
* Benchmarks between CDNs should be done from the same client locations (fine, but why did you then use your own set)
* Cloudflare should not prohibit benchmarking of their products (fair)
But this whole post read like a feeble attempt at misdirection, and made me distrust Fastly as a company. The complaints about their methodology aren't solved by using your own, even more flawed, methodology that doesn't even use the same language. You could've just emailed them and asked to work together on an apple-to-apples test instead of creating an even more flawed benchmark.
The Airpod Pro sound quality is maybe 90% as good as the Sonys, but the form factor is INCREDIBLY convenient. No more sweating and constantly adjusting the earcups and headbands... just plop them in and they fit my ears perfectly and never fall out. The noise canceling works VERY well, as good as any other I've tried, whether at home, at work, or on a plane.
I also love that they work so seamlessly with some Apple devices, like being able to wirelessly watch the same movie from my iPad to two sets of Airpods. Apple has their own proprietary wireless chipset and protocol, so the interconnect between Apple stuff and Airpods works a LOT better than using them with Android or Windows hardware (sadly). Bluetooth works but is far less reliable.
That was the first Apple product I've ever purchased, and it has since become my favorite-ever piece of technology. I honestly adore them so much it makes me gush (and blush) when I talk about them... egads. The Sonys were always a love-hate relationship, with great sound quality but terrible comfort. The Airpods have both in equal measure.
Whelps, that's one CVE script kiddie away from becoming an indestructible paperweight
If we had pulled out twenty, thirty years ago, they would've been much smaller conflicts. They only get to these proportions because they have strategic value to US hegemony and so we keep arming them and escalating tensions.
> After a hypothetical Taiwan annexation, Okinawa is next. The PRC have made their claims clear. This is the bloodshed the US is preventing.
Taiwan would've surrendered without much of a fight, long ago, if not for US involvement. Taiwanese presidents would not have gotten so bold if not for their big US brother waving carrier groups around. I spent two decades there witnessed firsthand how the culture and anti-Chinese sentiment grew louder as US-China relations continued to deteriorate and Taiwan felt increasingly safe hiding behind the US.
I get your point, that sometimes MAD can be a deterrent, but in this case, we created those flashpoints ourselves, it's only a matter of time before they destabilize. The longer we wait, the worse it's going to get, as the weapons on both sides continue to get more lethal and resource conflicts escalate. Conversely, Hong Kong and Tibet fell without much of a fight because the Chinese army saw no real resistance.
The US can't prevent bloodshed indefinitely, merely postpone it until some future boiling point. The same thing we did in Iraq and Afghanistan. We suck at nation building and "peace"keeping. We defend places only until they are no longer strategically important to us, and then we let them implode, former allies be damned.
> You may be fine with the idea of millions dying because you hate America or whatever. I'm not.
"Millions dying" is probably an inevitability of the new world order, at this point. What I'm not OK with is the US pretending like we can still control the world the same we did in the post-WW2 years, forevermore, with no repercussion. We can't even govern our own country anymore, and we expect to safeguard the world? Who are we kidding?
> Also the fact you think I was alluding to the US allies nuking each other following an American withdrawal shows you really don't understand the situation there at all.
Well, I did ask. I'm still asking. I really don't know what you're referring to. I think regional spheres of influence, vs a failed US global hegemony, would still be the long-term, big-picture, less-lethal route with fewer overall casualties.
Equality is a human cultural construct, a social contract that attempts to minimize in-group violence. It is itself a cultural evolution, a relatively recent one in the West, longer-lived than that in other cultures, but altogether very limited and mostly only applied to some convenient in-group du jour, not humans around the world and certainly not to hominids at large.
Equality has no real evolutionary basis. Evolution depends on inequality in the face of selection pressures. May fit individuals breed, may adaptable populations persist, and may the sexiest genome win.
Scientific racism failed both because of changing social norms and because taxonomy-by-appearance was doomed to fail upon closer inspection, not because humans are inherently equal... we're anything but, and those "self-evident truths" are believed by no one in particular, not even grade school kids. It's ironic that the nation who says that on one hand has, on the other hand, produced one of the most unequal societies in human history.
If society is ever to actually become egalitarian, it must be because we -- by social contract or force of mythology -- place equal value on each individual, not because our genetics are the same. We're not clones and we're all better and worse at some things, and most of us are completely mediocre at everything except, maybe, being an adaptable hairless ape between ice ages in the temperate zones of a wet rock floating around a star.
In other words, we can't morphologically evolve our way out of racism, but perhaps -- someday, if we survive these next few decades -- we can culturally evolve more egalitarianism. Genomes aren't the only unit of information reproduction anymore. We can only hope culture will succeed where nature failed.
The brain is just another blob of flesh, and what we understand of its capacities suggest it's at least partially inheritable. You'd have to ignore a lot of evidence to believe that all humans are intellectually equal. If there is variation and there is mutation and there are different pockets of populations, there are going to be evolutionary differences between them. Then in terms of sexual selection, we'd have to believe that intelligence as a criterion for mate selection is equally important across cultures, and also impacts offspring fitness the same across all cultures and environments -- vs, say, disease or sun resistance in the tropics. Otherwise, differences would naturally arise over time.
The tricky part is coming up a way to define, much less measure, "intellectual capacity" across different cultures and ways of knowing. IQ tests are pretty biased and arguably a useless measure of evolutionary fitness in many human cultures. Even if you could create the perfect cross-cultural IQ definition and test, administering and collecting such a thing would be nearly impossible in a world where many countries don't even have proper birth records or thorough population censuses (even a basic count, without in-depth testing).
We already know that, within the upper and lower bounds, there can be great variations of "intelligence" WITHIN populations group, as well as smaller differences between them. But we lack the methodology and cultural transparency to be able to accurately measure whether the cross-cultural error bars fall within the intracultural ones. That's not for lack of trying, mind you... many careers have either risen to infamy or else have been destroyed for daring to suggest such things.
In other words, it's not that all humans are equal, it's that we're SO diverse it's hard to group us into neat little groups, whether by race, ancestry, skin color, intelligence, or any other genetic factor. Because the underlying genes themselves don't work that way. They're always changing and competing.
The principles of egalitarianism are a cultural ideal (not shared by much of the world, mind you), not necessarily scientific observations. The scientific input to the ideal, if anything, is not that "the are no differences between groups" but "there are so many differences that these groupings don't really make sense; there are a million other equally valid groupings".
IMO it's that "species" is a term coined by older, less-informed biologists who didn't yet understand all the nuances of genetics, and created a taxonomic system based, erroneously, on superficial differences in appearance. It's like how old scientists believed in "ether" to describe the mysteries of space and "humor" to describe the mysteries of the body. Species is what old scientists used to describe the mysteries of genetics.
Should we tell smeej about Google's fifty OTHER failed IM marketing attempts?
> So yes, by offering Taiwan a better deal than they get from the US, they could remove a lot of influence from the region. But it never happens.
I doubt this is actually as much a cultural issue for the CCP as it was for past emperors. They've long since abandoned that model and instead observed/emulated the successes and failures of the West, including our love of creating enslaved vassal states under the guise of nation-building. Long game, they probably want Taiwan to become another Hong Kong or Tibet. Short term, Taiwan is a useful bargaining chip for them to focus American attention towards, and the mere threat of war there can back the US into our corner while China focuses on domestic infrastructure and continues to leapfrog us across the sectors and years. Never interrupt your enemy while they're making a mistake, etc. China knows they'll win by default while we blindly obsess over our colonies, and if they really need to (unlikely), it's a lot cheaper to sink a carrier group than to build and maintain one.
IMO we're their ultimate target, not Taiwan in and of itself. It's like an abusive, manipulative spouse using a kid as collateral against the other parent (us). Once the other parent is taken care of, they're free to do with the kid as they please.
> The US withdrawing from East Asia would be a global disaster. This wouldn't be a small land skirmish, it would be a massive amphibious invasion in Japans backyard - which knows it's southern territories would be next on the menu.
Sorry, by who? Are you saying South Korea will invade Japan if we pull out...? How?
And why is that our problem to solve?
> It would also take place in one of the busiest shipping routes in the world, causing a massive disruption of global trade. Not to mention the semi conductor angle, now abandoned US allies pursuing their own nuclear weapons agendas.. etc etc.
So, kinda like Covid? Eh, fewer Xboxes and new cars for a few years, global GDP repressed for a bit. The world will survive and move on and adapt.
As for nuclear weapons agendas, the US is still the only one to have used them, and still one of the most imperialist countries in the modern era, and the one who tends to create the biggest enemies out of our misadventures. South Korea and Japan and Taiwan aren't going to nuke each other, even if there's historical animosity there. Maybe the Koreas themselves will break out into war, but that was probably an inevitability anyway, unless the removal of US attention and sanctions allows NK to grow and transform.
> You could argue the US should not have been interfering there in the first place. Which is very principled and all, but the USSR was going to be there either way.
So let China take over that role for that region of the globe. Let a resurgent Russia have its piece of the pie. Maybe it's time for US power to wane.
> And now the US is very much the force in that region keeping war from breaking out. Arming South Korea, Taiwan and Japan does not make these places more volatile. It makes them much, much less.
This makes no sense. With US involvement, Taiwan and South Korea become proxy wars with China. Without us, they become regional conflicts affecting a few million people, not WW3.
Yeah. I'd vote for naked MMA mud matches between heads of state.
> One wonders how long it will be until they move on to taking care of their neighbors.
If the Six-Day War was any indication, they have that option any time they choose to exercise it. But it's doubtful they'd ever be able to hold the peace even if they could win the wars that way. Israel didn't survive by being brash and careless... they're not the United States. One mistake and they'd be wiped from the planet, at least until World War 3.
Yep. It's great, if hackish. A good overview (https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2021/04/incremental-static-...) or Vercel's own docs (https://vercel.com/docs/concepts/next.js/incremental-static-...)
Vercel aside, I think Cloudflare by itself works similarly if you configure it to "cache everything", including HTML pages, on a revalidation period. I find this a great balance between serverside rendering and static builds. Specifically it allows you to rebuild certain pages as things are created/updated (new or edit blog posts, products, etc.) without having to trigger a full rebuild every single time.
In the modern era, arguably few have suffered as much as the Jews, in large part due to their historic lack of a homeland and safe haven. That's not to excuse modern Israeli policy, and I find it atrocious that they treat Palestine this way especially because they know what it's like on the other side.
But at the end of the day, most countries that "fall" would just be assimilated into their conquering cultures. The fall of Israel would be another Holocaust. I doubt many of their people would survive at all, given the severe hatred much of the world has for them, especially in that region.
I don't think we should be arming Israel, but that's only because they can take care of themselves. Their military is so far and away above their enemies' that they could easily destroy every single country around them if they so chose. We don't need to stay involved there any longer.
I don't quite follow. Are you saying China purposely gives Taiwan a raw deal just to deliberately spite the US? Why would they do that? I think I'm misunderstanding you.
> Also Israel gets a much better deal than Taiwan. The US gives military aid to Israel, where as Taiwan has to petition the US government - their only significant supplier - for the right to even buy weapons. Better hardware too, despite Israels poor track record in passing US military tech to China.
Yeah, for sure. But our support of both countries (and others like them) pisses other countries off. IMO we have no business being either world police or world arms market, especially in some of the most volatile quagmires in the world. We make our own enemies because of our supposed friends. These places only have strategic value to us so long as we desire to remain the global hegemon, with tentacles everywhere. Let go of that weird military-industrial-hentai complex, and there's no reason for us to artificially prop up these countries. Especially Israel. The IDF can more than take care of themselves. Taiwan is going to fall sooner or later anyway, but why is that our business? We force our enemies to go on eternal arms races against us because we've shown them we're incapable of minding our own business after WW2. It should not be our responsibility to provide world security using our people, our equipment, our money.