Man, I keep getting this incredibly Mandela-effect like feeling that this entire Vegas tunnel project was something I made up.
Glad to see news that it wasn’t. The idea is just so colossally and obviously stupid compared to actual transit investment that it really FEELS like something a lefty type would’ve made up as a hypothetical to illuminate the kind of idiotic shit happens in American urban planning.
Highly recommend Volts to everyone interested.
David Roberts is EXTREMELY practical, politically. He’s very no-nonsense, but gives clear and simple reasons for why he categorizes stuff as nonsense when he does. He’s not some techno-wizard optimist, but he’s also clear about how much tech we DO have and how much is achievable on realistic timelines if we just commit. He’s also clear about what the obstacles are, and even sometimes gives useful calls to action.
His most recent episode on nuclear is an almost perfect example of this. A lot of people are VERY enthusiastic about nuclear. He had Jigar Shah from the DOE on to talk about the field extensively – the upsides and downsides, what technologies work and make sense, what technologies are just mis-advertised, what technologies are total vaporware, why it’s so hard to build nuclear in the US (hint: it’s not the anti-nuke environmental lobby), and all that. Fabulous interview.
I definitely trend towards doomerism on all this stuff, but it’s good to be reminder the tech really is there decarbonize a LOT and VERY FAST, and probably even achieve planetary net zero or even net negative within my lifetime. Just have to convince people the juice is worth the squeeze – which it undeniably is when the entire ecosystem is at stake.
Sounds to me like there is a total glut of software engineers.
Which makes it really difficult to fathom why they are paid so goddamn much.
The most charitable read is that it’s an attempt to build hype among powerusers by letting them own a piece of it.
In a vacuum, that’s actually kind of nice.
A less charitable reading is that they’re targeting the users who have flukes and blowholes to try and get even more money from them as part of a media campaign to make it seem like they truly value those users.
There’s just zero merit to these “people on the internet are saying X” stories.
Nothing of value to sourcing a few retweets, ticktock duets, instagram stories, or whatever the fuck TMTMTM version of it you get.
Actual street interviews with random schlubs are far, far more informative than this crap. The internet is huge and you can find literally any opinions on it. Sourcing these anecdotes is absolutely the trashiest tier of journalism and anyone writing one of these stories should think hard about an immediate career change.
Run a fucking poll if you want to write a story about public opinion.
The world will be a better place the day after every serious news media organization leaves twitter and tells all their journalists they cannot use it as anything other than an original source to what a specific public figure has to say.
You have fundamentally misunderstood the interoperability that is being discussed re: podcasts and drawn a totally spurious conclusion.
You can connect to nearly any podcast using as little as an RSS reader. You can build your own podcast app TOMORROW and that app will be able to access pretty much any podcast from any network (with very narrow exceptions for the worst actors, e.g. Spotify exclusives, NPR One, etc).
The only purpose of the various platforms is boosting discovery. There’s nothing oligarchic happening there; for pretty much all of them listing your podcast is free. There’s also absolutely no necessity to use any particular platform’s discovery tools or to list your podcast on any platform. It’s totally fine to distribute it yourself, via a link, using whatever means pleases you. Your “podcast discovery platform” could well be your local bookclub’s email list – and while the quality of that discovery may be worse, it in no way inherently limits what you can access. Even if you use that platform’s app, it should still generally be possible to add any podcast via RSS URL (if any major apps don’t support this, they’re behaving in a deviant way).
There is absolutely nothing oligarchic in general. At least for now, so long as the fucking fuck fucks at Spotify don’t get their way.
Spotify is actively and aggressively trying to be the ones to break podcasts by having their spotify exclusives.
Even things like Patreon bonus episodes aren’t a problem – they still are sent out via RSS. Still use the interoperable standard. You can even share the URL with people you know, if you feel like it.
The bad actors creating true app-exclusive content need to be called out, shamed, and stopped. Even if it is NPR.
Analog cameras also do not catch an image exactly as-is. Just look at the history of film technology and the racial biases it helped perserve.
But there’s undeniably a huge difference between how you interpret and commit the photons going through the lens versus entirely inventing photons going through the lens.
I had some French cousins we would talk to a little bit at the time, and I remember their descriptions of the early internet were just absolutely bizarre in comparison with the minitels.
In those days, I’m sure every major region and country had vastly different experiences.
But yeah, at least my experience in the US was that AIM was huge. My entire peer group was connected through AIM. That and memorized land line phone numbers.
God, I remember in the early-ish days explaining what browsers were to AOL users.
It honestly felt pretty early in AOL days that people were mostly just using it for email, chatrooms, and otherwise as a web browser on the regular, non-AOL internet. Then AIM becoming more popular as time went on, but eventually third-party clients totally obviated that in a lesson Google would learn from well (and their takeaway was to destroy Jabber/XMPP with great prejudice before they lose control over their users).
Explaining parents that all they needed to do was open another browser – literally any other browser – while AOL was running and they could go to the websites with it was rough. “AOL has you connected to the internet already, you don’t need to use it to go to infoseek.com” or whatever.
Whenever they finally did it it seemed like magic. WOW, how does this connect to AOL! Then they’d close AOL and disconnect the modem and tell me the other browser was broken.
I remember all my friends convincing me to switch to Opera because it had tabs and that was revolutionary.
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Places your bets, which is it:
He isn’t a credible ‘threat’ to Putin, and the state media is letting him get away with some visibility so that he can be crushed in the definitely-not-completely-fake polls in order to preserve the democracy kayfabe. Possibly to achieve a domestic policy goal like getting out of the Ukraine war without losing as much face for Putin.
He is a credible threat and will be dealt with brutally and violently.
He is a sockpuppet. Either of Putin or the next generation of Russian leaders who, in proud Soviet tradition, are going to honor and glorify Putin in his retirement then quietly delete and replace his history and influence with their own.
We shouldn’t even need to “remove” qualified immunity. We do, but you we shouldn’t. Qualified immunity already excludes violations of statutory/constitutional rights. It already shouldn’t be protecting pretty much any incompetent cops. Showing it was a violation of training – that is, that the officer was incompetent – should be enough to re move the protection.
The original standard as applied to police required they be able to show they were acting in good faith in a situation where the law is not clear. For Christ’s sake it was established by an Earl Warren decision – from probably the ONLY time in US history the SCOTUS has mostly been a force that strengthened civil rights instead of deleting them – and it somehow has become this bulwark of the police state over time.
Even now it is supposed to be a 2 part test: first, can the official show they believed in good faith they were behaving lawfully and second was the conduct objectively reasonable. Most police abuse shouldn’t pass either pillar of that test.
It isn’t even originally statutory. It came from the SCOTUS legislating from the bench.
The idea that qualified immunity should protect police is utterly absurd to begin with. Qualified immunity is what stops a bureaucrat for being sued for stamping approval on a zoning change according to the policies of his job. It’s just a category mistake to apply it to 95% of police activities.
The insurance solution sounds good until you remember it’s the taxpayer that foots the bill and a private industry that reaps the profit. The cost is basically external to the department so it is unlikely to seriously change their behaviors absent a separate and more complete cultural shift to one where the police are viewed as public servants instead of… well, police.
My memory idles on around 3341MiB with a browser and just a few basic daemons like Syncthing used in mint cinnamaon. 4GB is pretty tight unless you are willing to make some behavioural changes or use a less friendly distro. But 8GB is more than enough.
Different story trying to run VMs on my server, though.
Well, I certainly don’t get 10 hours, more like 5-6, but have also never in my life and hopefully never will need to sit in the same public place for 10 continuous hours using my notebook. God help me, my life is so off the rails if that ever happens that I don’t even want to consider it.
The rest of those things my budget notebook does just fine. Maybe if I used these touchpad shortcuts that the Mac offers it would change my life, but I’ve always massively preferred navigating the OS with the keyboard and have always found the way Mac application windows and taskbars work totally unitiutive and fighty.
On the whole though, even if I accept everything you said at face value, it’s still just… not an argument for “there is no alternative”. Seems to me my ancient ASUS is a perfectly reasonable alternative, especially considering it was a less than a third the price of the Macbook even when it was new. Plus it’s repairable. I can open it up and change out components myself, with just a screwdriver.
I hear this all time to time and I just don’t understand it.
My 9-year-old Windows laptop does literally everything I need a mobile notebook to do (which unfortunately includes a bunch of software like AutoCAD which just gives a double middle finger to Linux). It’s reliable, boots quickly, doesn’t frequently bug out, has more than enough battery to never make me stressed and scrambling for outlets, and all these things. It’s windows 10 and not signed into an MS account. It can run powershell, python scripts, all those little sugar things that make computers less horrible to use. I’m not forced into any weird proprietary rabbit holes by the OS and have all MS telemetry shut down on it.
If not for bad actors like AASHTO or AutoDesk, I’m quite confident the notebook would be working just as well with something like Mint Linux on it.
What the hell is it that Macbooks are doing that my notebook can’t? I just don’t get it.
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Anonymized Bing is the back end for DDG. It’s already happening.
They are very useful for outlining and similar “where do I start” writing projects. They help break the dam and just get some damn words on the screen, at which point it’s often easy to continue and flesh things out to a complete thought.