I do software stuff in the computer security space. Former (2009-2022) Wine hacker at CodeWeavers. You can email me on fastmail.com with username coldpie. Personal websites: <https://smokingonabike.com> (video games, gardening, tech); <https://aechairs.com> (woodworking).
I thought about writing a Firefox extension that would just auto-click the Hide button for any story containing a keyword from a configurable list. Haven't gotten around to it.
I wonder too. About a year ago I dropped a ~1970s Citizen mechanical watch[1] of mine and it shattered into a few pieces. I took it to a small-device repair place that advertised they can fix watches. The guy there said it was out of his abilities, but his business could send it out to some guy in California to repair. I took him up on that and a few weeks later it came back in one piece. So I guess someone out there is making a business of it. Cost me like $200 which is more than I paid for the watch, hahah.
I'm a security people. I can say with confidence that a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of these security issues are deliberate. Almost all of them are just dumb mistakes because making good software is really hard and really, really expensive and there is no market incentive to make good software. You don't need to get hired at the safe factory to build an elaborate back door into the production line if safes are actually just cardboard boxes, you know?
It's possible the backdoor is deliberate, I have no idea in this particular case, but the more likely situation, absent more information, is that someone who is earning a middling wage just added the "feature" and didn't think about the security implications because no one cares about computer security.
Yeah I suspect ebooks are even more dire as they have neither the curation of a publisher putting money into physical production; or the curation of a librarian with limited shelf space.
Interesting! I'm surprised to hear you've had that experience. I pick out books at the library largely by the cover & back blurb, not by whether they're popular or well reviewed or whatever. And to be honest, I've picked out a lot of crap this way, where I turn it back in after just a chapter or two. I suspect that frequency of being checked out & popularity/well-reviewed-ness are correlated. So I also suspect (admittedly without evidence) that my algorithm of picking somewhat randomly means I pick out books that are not popular with some frequency, and I've definitely regretted many of my choices. So it's surprising to me that you haven't had any that were terrible.
You get VC to give your company $X00 M to build out AI capabilities, take a $X M salary for yourself, and retire. Doesn't matter what happens past that.
I guess the WWW itself is what you are asking for. You simply can't scale a single community to include all of humanity. You need some way to filter out abusers, and people will vary widely in where they want to place the line of what counts as acceptable behavior. Given that, you need some way to exclude people from spaces they aren't welcome in, and different discussion mediums in order to encourage or discourage types of behavior. This leads to different communities with different expectations of behavior, and that's exactly what we have on the WWW.
Usenet worked because it was small, a very small percentage of the planet used Usenet.
It is the website owner's decision to allow people on drugs screaming obscenities on their platform. They are allowed to kick those people out, and you're allowed to leave if you don't like the people in that community. Good moderation is a requirement for healthy communities.
They have much in common with slot machines, yes. It's no accident, many of the lessons from exploitative mobile games are being reused in LLM UIs. Rename "tokens" to "gems" and the situation looks very familiar.
I don't think it's that hard to reconcile. The tools are being massively oversold and we are in a bubble. I think things will settle down to a reasonable middle ground in ~2 years as the checks being written right now start coming due and we are forced to figure out what they actually are and aren't good at. Infinite money distorts markets, it's currently not a good time to be judging these things for the long term perspective.
You know, someone should invent an infinite sequence of ordinal symbols which we could use to place things in a sequence. It could start with a simple vertical line, something like "1". Maybe someone more clever than me can come up with the next symbol.
FWIW I just rent a truck from the home center when I need to do that two or three times a year. Small hassle but a lot easier than owning a whole vehicle.
Well I mean yeah. That's exactly my point, you don't have to do that with the 300mi range. I think 300mi is the "sweet spot" where you're probably going to stop anyway to take a break or whatever, or your trip will be done already, so charging isn't really an issue. 200mi feels on the short side to me, and I think my Brainerd trips are a good example of the difference that 100mi difference makes.
I have often felt that software should have a "Credits screen", like movies and video games do. For developers, QA staff, support staff, etc. I opened a bug to create one for our end-user facing software at my last job, but we never actually did it.
> But you're going to stop somewhere along that path already, right?
Honestly, no, I didn't. It's only 2 hours. Having to stop for a 30+ minute charge in each direction would add a significant amount of time to the trip.
I don't really understand why you're being so aggressive about this. We are almost entirely agreeing. 300mi is a selling point for buyers because it means an easier time doing 100+ mile road trips, which are not uncommon in the US. More range is a tick in the "pro" column when comparison shopping, and it could convince someone to buy a car other than this one. That's all I'm saying.