25 years ago Dave Barry wrote about “smart appliences” and said everything there is to say. His foresight was impressive - and extremely funny, like all his columns.
https://www.deseret.com/2005/9/18/19912434/smart-appliances-are-a-bad-buy-for-half-wits/
It also has the coolest abreviation/name out of most image formats.
.jxl sounds a lot nicer than web-pee or avif.
Also Junkie XL made that famous remix of Elvis’ “A Little Less Conversation” which is a banger.
Thank you! Nice to know I’m not crazy :-)
Regarding windows. Does NTFS support this? Like COW and other advanced stuff? Or am I doomed if the underlying FS is NTFS?
At work I have to use windows (11) and i always have the feeling file-related stuff (copying, moving, doing stuff in large git repos) takes a loong time compared to my own devices thst run linux with btrfs.
That matchstick look. Classic.
The big difference that I see is that they investes in people for a long while now. They did what they can so people can get a decent education. That’s also the reason why they don’t allow kids to use tiktok and so on - it’s hindering the next generation’s ability to think. They know that you need many intelligent people to drive whatever other innovation you want to have later. That’s why they’re pulling ahead so fast while we are collapsing. I am not even living in the US, but even here the education system is crumbling.
The west has trapped itself in the thought of technology without people. The idea that few clever people can design perfect systems that drive everything for us. That we just need to support those few individuals to get maximum return. China is supporting the broad masses. It’s like creating a fertile soil.
Who knows what all the asterisks are causing in the future. But at the moment it’s just no comparison. We’ve gone backwards, while they’re so far ahead we barely see them.
I get the meme (though why was this single unstable point - imagemagick in the original xkcd - removed? To make the left side seem more stable clmpared to the original idea?), it might be trueish atm. But with rust I feel that a lot of projects that are rewritten in rust are quicker arriving at a “finished” (or almost finished) state where they are more or less just tools being used without much discussion anymore. I guess a lot of commonly used tools already use Rust in some way, but i rarely is an issue which makes this discussion-worthy or generates enough conflict in order to raise awareness outside.
I have a hunch that open-source rust-devopment is less of a hassle as a lot of discussion about code or the quality therof is simply avoided by a stricter compiler. If the code committed compiles with rustc there’s less possibility of it breaking other things in the codebase or containing hidden dangers that need to be discussed. Overall less friction, less overhead and distruction from the actual coding.
It’s used like sweating. We lose heat by havibg water evaporate off our skin. Right now get warm water and put it on your arm, then blow on it. It gets cold until it is fully evaporated. For water to change from the liquid to the gaseeous phase it needs energy. Think like water molecules are holding hands in a liquid. If one of them wants to come free and fly through the air it needs to somehow get the energy to break free from the grip of the others first. When water evaporates from your arm it tales this energy in the form of heat. It turns heat and uses it to get to the gaseous phase. As long as there is water on your arm it can be cooled that way.
That’s what data centers do as well. They take water to cool their processors and the let part of it evaporate into the air. That way the parts of the water that remain are like your arm - the get cool quickly.
It’s very effective. But if you live in a small town and next door there’s a massive datacenter that takes out all the groundwater and basically just boils it until it disappears, you might get angry after a while.
Moneyball - very good choice. I’d like to add “The Big Short” as well.
Dammit, we all think alike nowadays… XD
What is the problem with a BSD-license? I’m not familiar with the different open source licensing models and their problems.
Thank you! Nicely put. The problem isn’t people like your aunt, its massive shareholder-controlled investemet machines that own thousands or even millions of homes. Your aunt probably knows eafh renter by name - there can exist a personal relationship. There’s two things limiting your aunt becoming a money-hungry antisocial ghoul:
So increasing rent is a lot of hassle and her renters might like her less after that - which might be a factor.
Now lets think of the hugr real estate company. They have thousands of renters and maybe hundreds of employees. They have lawyers employed. If they raise rent by 2% they have to send thousands of letters. But these letters are sent by people whose job it is to do so. Tyey can calculate in advance that from their renters X% will just accept the nrew rent, Y% will require some manouvering, Z% might move out and so on. They can estimate the cost of raising rent pretty well based on experience and compare to the profits they make. And with thousands of apartmants 2% is a lot of profit. The employees have no relationship to the thousands of renters. Renters are just numbers anyway. Everything is much more efficient. Also: Shareholders. They demand profits and dont’t care how. They care even less aboht the renters. They demand more profit and will just say “make it happen”. If thr ceo doesn’t raise profits - with whatever means necessary - the shareholders will replace the ceo.
The soltion IMHO would be some progressive tax That makes it basically unprofitable to have more than 10 apartments. And to prevent legal entities owning other legal entities owning apartments in order to circumvent this. If there exists (and can reasonable exist) a personal relationship between landlord and renter everything is alright in my opinion. People usually are not animals to eaxh other if they know eaxh other personal.
We need Paris-Pickup-Parking-Prices everywhere. They’re 18€/h. If you want your stupid tank within city limits pay for it.
Well in a way all Art is being done indirectly by some sort of instrument. Only the degree of sophistication or degree of separation of this instrument is different. A pencil drawing is in principle also done by the pencil, but I provided a lot of guidance through my hand. A pencil - almost no sophistication - is on one side of the spectrum and Midjourney/Stable Diffusion etc is on the other side of the spectrum.
I don’t want to judge AI “art” in general - there’s so many awful traditional artworks that AI art doesn’t really stand out.
What rubs me the wrong way is that it is a tool that no human can understand reasonably well. Everybody can understand a pencil. It’s possible to understand a computer renderer that renders digital art. But no one can understand the totality of an LLM which was trained on terabytes of images. It’s a lot of trial and error, because what the tool does generate random images even with precise directions. It’s throwing dice until one likes the result.
The one thing I give this “artist” credit for: he was very early (maye even the first?) that entered AI art into a contest and fooled the jury. Being the first is often enough historically to make “great art”. Where art is more measured n the impact it has on a societal discussion. So I give him that.
But a court already decided you can’t copyright AI art, because it’s trained on other art without permission. So he can get fucked.
There are still phones that have it. Sometimes even pretty good ones. It’s just that they are not advertised so heavily. I recently learned about HTC U23 or 24 or something. Now I feel dumb because I never bothered to check because I always thought all good phones don’t offer headphone jacks anymore.
Ahh the event in 1054… Yeah that event was a banger!
me too! I shattered the screen of my pixel 4a and without much thinking I bought a used Pixel 6a off ebay. (I needed a phone quick that worked and the shattered screen was somehow disrupting the touch -accuracy. Now I have a phone without a headphone jack and its seriously an issue. Bluetooth is still not usable. There’s so many situations where it suddenly doesn’t work. Then I have to restart my headphones or fiddle around with bluetooth. It’s seriously annoying. A fucking cable is the superior technology - still!
I hate that every known company has to suddenly exploit their “brand recognition” and expand into unrelated areas. It’s completely logical from a short-term-profits-from-uninterested-in-anything-besides-profits shareholders but destroys the value people ascribe to a certain brand in the long run. My favourite example: Marshall. They’ve been known for loud and DISTORTED guitar amplifiers for decades. They shaped the sound of so many famous bands. Their amps would last a lifetime and sound great! So someone thought "Hey let’s make shitty headphones and Bluetooth speakers that will - by nature - not be durable, will have to excell in an area that Marshall never was interested in: amplifiers that do not distort the source material and that sound neutral. They had to rely on completely new technology like Bluetooth (which changes it’s standard over time) or be dependent on shitty Internet companies like Spotify (who decide suddenly to brick devices by not supporting them anymore). It’s almost the complete opposite of everything Marshall stood for IMHO. The only thing they have in common is that they make sound. The effect is that people buy products that break, decay or deteriorate on timescales much much shorter than the original brand would be expected. The thing that Marshal will be known for in the future is these speakers or breaking headphones with OK-sound quality. But a few management people will have made a lot of money of course.