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marssaxman

10,184 karmajoined 17 वर्ष पहले
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marssaxman
·8 घंटे पहले·discuss
> Caturday -> Saturday enjoyed with or similar to a cat

There's a well-known underground nightclub in Seattle which has a monthly event called "Caturday" - I had no idea there was another meaning for the portmanteau! Makes sense, though.
marssaxman
·कल·discuss
I'd prefer that my software isn't connected to servers in a datacenter that require me to pay monthly bills, either!
marssaxman
·कल·discuss
Your concern is reasonable but misdirected. This article is a publication of the "Modern War Institute", a research organization at West Point, the US Army military academy; it is literally their job to anticipate and plan for the next war, whatever it may happen to be. Deciding whether those plans ought to be used is a completely different responsibility.
marssaxman
·3 दिन पहले·discuss
> I remember when folks had to have a degree to enter the "profession" of software developer.

I am not old enough to remember that era; by the 1980s, when I was learning to code, it was already quite normal to get a programming job on the basis of skill you had acquired independently. The past era of quality code you refer to must already have ended, because most of the code I encountered back then would be considered garbage now.

I spent many years of my early career trying to lower the entry level to a point where anyone who could read and write English could be a programmer: this was a popular idea, part of the whole "democratization of computing" theme that came along with the development of the personal computer. BASIC was popular, GUI interface builders were popular, HyperCard was popular, there were many efforts to make software construction as easy as anything else you might do with a computer. This all continued into the web era.

In the end, though, it seems that the great majority of people don't want to make their own software.

> More of the same probably.

Yes, I imagine so. Technology keeps changing, but history goes around in circles!
marssaxman
·3 दिन पहले·discuss
Thank you for the reminder! I got out of the habit of checking StreetComplete since my previous neighborhood was well populated in OSM, but having just moved, I should check it out again.
marssaxman
·4 दिन पहले·discuss
That's funny - to me, Jodhpur is most immediately appealing of the three. It reminds me of the medinas I visited in Fez and Marrakesh: overwhelming at first, as a visitor, but compelling, and full of life. I'd rather live in a thriving urban place like that, all human-scale and pedestrian, than some sprawling, soulless, car-dependent suburb like the ones a majority of North Americans inhabit.
marssaxman
·5 दिन पहले·discuss
King County (where Seattle is located) repealed its mandatory helmet law in 2022, not because anybody has changed their mind about bike helmets being a good idea, but because the law primarily served as a discretionary-enforcement tool for harassment of homeless people and racial minorities. The law had no measurable impact on helmet-wearing rates or rates of brain injury, because people who can afford helmets generally choose to wear them. The city of Tacoma had repealed its mandatory helmet law two years prior, for similar reasons.
marssaxman
·5 दिन पहले·discuss
> one of the most rewarding blueprints for making money online was to “start a blog.“

I would date the Great Blogging Collapse to the arrival of this idea, not whatever happened a decade later.
marssaxman
·8 दिन पहले·discuss
Who would do the requiring, how would they enforce it, and what would motivate them to bear the expense?
marssaxman
·15 दिन पहले·discuss
That's a different complaint. I was responding to the previous commenter, who said, "No one getting rich off data centers wants to live next to one, which kind of tells you everything you need to know": but people getting rich off anything choose to live in exclusive residential areas rather than industrial zones, so I don't think this is a meaningful argument against datacenters particularly.
marssaxman
·15 दिन पहले·discuss
The same is true of factories, mills, distribution centers, stockyards, and industrial facilities in general. As these things go, datacenters are relatively benign.
marssaxman
·16 दिन पहले·discuss
Perhaps there will come a day that I give up my gas range, after all.
marssaxman
·16 दिन पहले·discuss
The fear began in 1998, when a fraudulent research paper was published in the Lancet which claimed that the MMR vaccine caused autism. The fraud was exposed in 2010, prompting retraction of the paper and revokation of the author's medical license, but twelve years was plenty of time for a folk suspicion of the MMR vaccine to put down roots independent of the original cause.
marssaxman
·17 दिन पहले·discuss
Someone is finally building an electric vehicle for people like me!
marssaxman
·17 दिन पहले·discuss
This seemed obvious to me at the time. It was hard to understand why people in the cultural mainstream let themselves get swept up in it. I felt like I lost my country, back then, as they pretty much all went off into crazyland together.
marssaxman
·18 दिन पहले·discuss
If AR glasses could run an adblocker for the real world, that might convince me to buy a pair.
marssaxman
·23 दिन पहले·discuss
That's kinda neat, actually.

The summary appears to have a pronounced recency bias. Is that intentional?
marssaxman
·24 दिन पहले·discuss
It was a rhetorical question; I am aware that people do stupid things with their employers' hardware. More directly, my point was that the supposed privacy questions raised by the AI-training keyboard tracking system do not matter much, because it has never been safe to do anything which requires personal privacy on work devices in the first place.

There are other reasons one might reasonably object to keystroke tracking, of course.
marssaxman
·24 दिन पहले·discuss
"If you log into your personal bank account, does the tool track you? What about when you’re writing a personal email, or responding to a personal call?"

Why would you ever do such a thing on a device controlled by your employer?

I guess there's a whole generation of devs who don't remember the Microsoft antitrust trial, and haven't learned the "anything you do at work may come out in discovery" lesson.
marssaxman
·25 दिन पहले·discuss
> just is an overlay for pirate streaming sites

Now you're making it sound even more interesting. What is the name of this device?