At the end of the day these are commodity items. It’s reasonable for consumers to buy whatever’s cheapest from a reputable physical store and expect at least decent reliability.

The solution can’t come from a manufacturer making a better product, because of the information asymmetry; the average consumer just can’t be expected to spend hours researching every commodity item.

The solution has to be targeted legislative action with a clear goal of measurably improving the overall reliability of those commodities. Unfortunately lobbyists hate that because more reliability = less margin and fewer sales, and consumers don’t often love it either because this kind of legislation directly translates to inflated prices (at least in the short term). There are still people bitching that you can’t buy incandescent lightbulbs anymore… So regulators would rather play dead and hope nobody notices they are doing fuck-all.

I guess Greek house building was several decades ahead of Belgian house building then, because I’ve yet to see a pre-war house with cavity walls. I guess the cheap coal heating and lack of a need for cooling must have something to do with it.

The 100 years old brick buildings don’t have any voids. That only started post-WWII when ventilation became a real concern.

But even then those houses are likely to have wooden floors and more modern drywall remodeling in some areas. My house is hurricane-proof but not rat-proof.

Yeah it’s Ctrl+D. I do use bookmarks on occasion (especially for stupid websites with non-intuitive URLs and page titles I can’t easily find by typing in the omnibar), but not as a way to organize my work.

The reason I mention ADHD for this in particular is I saw a home organization tip for ADHD that I related strongly to: ADHD brains really benefit from having everything spread out on a table, visible and immediately available. Trying to force an ADHD person to constantly put things away is super counter-productive even if it’s apparently good advice for neurotypical folk. Though of course ADHD is not an excuse not to clear the messy table once the project is finished.

My computer desktop follows the same principle. I’ll have as many workspaces as I do ongoing projects, and every workspace has all the tools I need open. And the good news is it’s much harder to run out of virtual space than it is to run out of space on a real table.

I feel like it’s often bad game design from developers who think they need to put in consumables without understanding their gameplay value.

In too many games using up all your consumables is just A Thing That Happens. So the game is balanced to allow you to survive anyway. But then the corollary is that if it works for a bit then you can finish the game without using any of the consumables. The consumables are just a way to make already achievable portions of the game easier, which is just sloppy game design IMO. Bethesda games for instance are very guilty of that.

People not understanding that we understand bookmarks exist is weird to me.

For me it’s a suspected ADHD thing. If I make a bookmark:

• I have to context-switch into “cleaning up” mode. Leaving a tab open is not distracting, having to name it and categorize it is.
• Bookmarks are virtual drawers. Anything I put in a drawer might as well be in a cave in Alaska guarded by a troll as far as my brain is concerned. If I intend to look at this in the next 2-3 weeks, I keep the tab open because it’s a virtual reminder I’ve not yet done the thing.
• Yes, I’ve got tabs open from over a year ago. Those ones don’t serve a purpose, I’ll get around to cleaning up… eventually.

Honestly if I was forced to close my browser sessions at the end of the work day, not joke, not an exaggeration, I’d switch jobs. I’m working on too many different complex things to have to rebuild my mental model of where everything was at from scratch every morning. I would not get anything done.

Given the prevalence of forced mutilation of intersex babies as well as medically unnecessary circumcisions, I humbly disagree that these procedures are “weighted on total outcomes”. Unnecessarily cutting off (part of) a baby’s penis is not comparable to being unaware of a new drug’s side effects. Every doctor who has performed that procedure was fully aware that it was medically unnecessary and did not have reason to believe the baby would not come to regret not being given a choice years down the road. I’d argue these procedures are institutionalized medical malpractice.

No shade on you personally because you seem to be approaching the topic rstionally, but I think it’s critical to acknowledge that the field of medicine still has very strong biases in these matters and is not nearly as Cartesian as it is sometimes made out to be. Especially on sensitive topics such as gender identity or reproductive rights doctors have a lot of latitude to be bigoted and to unilaterally deny necessary care.

Doesn’t HP end up a literal magic cop at the end of the series? The whole caste system is also upheld throughout, at no point is revealing the wizarding world to muggles even considered an option despite the fact that little kids are dying from cancer all over Britain/the world that could be magically healed in an afternoon. The whole SPEW thing is just profoundly racist and always has been. “Cho Chang” – nuff said. The whole point of Hogwarts is that it’s a boarding school, which proudly inherits all its real-world British characteristics which are intrinsically linked to the more problematic parts of the British class system.

Rowling has always been a bigot and I will die on this hill. Any progressive messaging that people read into harry potter is at best performative (for instance yes she explicitly denounces “blood purity” pretty early on, but that’s super performative considering her entire worldbuilding is built on the premise that some people are just inherently magical and others are inherently not invited to the party. “Blood purity contests” are only bad when wizards to it to other wizards.).

I don’t think she’s a good enough writer to have done most of the racist/classist/misogynist messaging intentionally, but nonetheless her reactionary poorly thought-out world view transpires through every bit of her writing.

EDIT: Trying to expand on my own thoughts here. I’ve always despised HP as a franchise so to try to be fair to HP let’s contrast and compare with the piece of shit author who did make a book I like, Ender’s Game. I pirated it a couple years back, and I won’t pretend it’s not obvious at times that he’s a homophobe and a religious nutcase with some obvious cognitive dissonance with some of his (at least at the time) progressive views. I guess the good thing about that particular IP is that there’s no new stuff coming out besides one awful movie, so everyone can agree Orson Scott Card can get fucked and move on with their lives. But it’s important to acknowledge that his religious zealousness did impact his writing and to take a step back even if we decide to still appreciate his work.
The problem is that HP fans are in a much tougher situation because the writing just isn’t good so if you drop the flimsy pretense that 2000s Rowling was a champion of liberal ideals, then you really don’t have much left besides a profoundly flawed worldbuilding with shitty characters who only work to uphold the wizarding status quo. Yeah I’d get pretty mad too if I had spend my teenage years obsessing over that heap of trash.

I love Dune but that game is so powerfully unappealing to me… I didn’t play it so maybe I got the wrong impression from a few minutes of gameplay but it read to me like every generic crafting-survival-base-building live service game from the last 15 years since MC and DayZ. Does it do something subversive or is it really just Rust on Arrakis?

I will argue there is something very different between Rowling and Bezos.

Both are rich beyond measure and can fund lobbying efforts indefinitely. But Rowling has something that Bezos doesn’t have, cultural capital. When she says something, people listen, from journalists to citizens to lawmakers, and not just because she’s rich.

Truth is social capital matters. A lot. Which is good because it’s the only thing we, the people, can hope to have that most billionaires don’t. But a corollary of this statement is that giving social capital to Rowling is, in fact, worse than giving actual capital to Bezos, all else being equal.

Now I can’t tell you how to live your life and we all have our vices. Just giving food for thought.

That song is very hard to coordinate with a crowd of untrained singers. It was written to be sung on stage in a theater, not by a rowdy crowd. It can be (and has been) used as a dub over videos of protests though.

The reason why La Marseillaise and its offshoot L’Internationale were so successful is that they’re slower songs, meant to be absolutely belted by a crowd of belligerant drunks. La Marseillaise is originally a literal revolutionary marching song.

Plus La Marseillaise just goes harder lyrically. It would actually have been pretty scandalous if it was written in 1980 for a play.
“To arms, citizens! Form your Battalions! Let’s March! Let’s March! So an impure blood can water our furrows!”

Maybe one of them Angelino theatre kids should do a partial English and/or Spanish translation focusing on rhythmic accuracy.

Opposite statements. Either they follow orders or they are loyal to the constitution. Can’t do both right now.

I can’t fathom the industrial amounts of pure propagandium that Americans must have been huffing to think the military will ever be on their side. Blind and unconditional obedience is literally the only way militaries can function properly and everything about them is organized to promote that.

US military apologists (even before Trump) will say “but soldiers are legally obligated to follow the constitution first and must refuse unlawful orders” like Abu Ghraib didn’t happen in my lifetime. We all know that 90 % of soldiers will wipe themselves with the original copy of the declaration of independence if Trump orders them to. And those that refuse will be dishonorably discharged, or worse.

Mathematics articles are the most obtuse I come across. I think the Venn diagram of good mathematicians and good science communicators is very close to non-intersecting.

Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from

The entire mistake right there. Look no further. They saw a solution (LLMs) and started hunting for a problem.

Had they done it the right way round there might have been some useful, though less flashy, outcome. I agree many article summaries are badly written. So why not experiment with an AI that flags those articles for review? Or even just organize a community drive to clean up article summaries?

The questions are rhetorical of course. Like every GenAI peddler they don’t have an interest in the problem they purport to solve, they just want to play with or sell you this shiny toy that pretends really convincingly that it is clever.

This is separate from A-GPS. Google seems to be using WiFi rather than Bluetooth, but the broader point remains the same. No one is stopping any vendor from crowdsourcing the location of every BT device… which is what Apple has done, for Airtags which don’t have the battery capacity to run a GPS chip.

Sure without GPS it wouldn’t be very effective to rely on only nearby devices to guess the current location. But an attacker only has to get lucky once to get your home address. So the only safe approach is to hide nearby devices/networks from unauthorized apps.

Every Bluetooth device has a unique identifier. Any phone that has seen that Bluetooth device in the past could have told google/apple/whoever “hey BTW this device is at those coordinates”.

Google already uses this with WiFi to help “bootstrap” GPS localization. It is much faster to get a GPS fix if you already know roughly where you are (a few seconds vs a couple minutes), so they use nearby WiFi/Bluetooth devices to determine that. Remember 10-15 years ago when getting a GPS fix took forever? GPS didn’t change, this did.
Apple went further and does this with Airtags now. Every Bluetooth device that ever went near an iPhone is in Apple’s database with GPS coordinates.

So unless you live alone in a mountain cabin that has never been visited by someone with a smartphone before and you didn’t disable the “enhanced localization” feature on your phone, yes your Bluetooth is at risk of giving up your location.

Plenty of cars flash their brake lights when ABS(/ESP?) engages, which is reasonable and should be a legal requirement IMO.

There’s lots of room to give additional info in between that and “brake light is on because the driver doesn’t understand that they can do mild adjustments by letting off the gas / stupid bitch-ass VW PHEV computer thinks using cruise control downhill with electric regen requires the motherfucking brake lights”. It’s like no-one realizes or cares that brake lights lose all purpose if they’re on when the car isn’t meaningfully decelerating. ARGH.

There are ways to own very high quality movies. Those ways just happen to not be legal. Still less of a hassle than maintaining a physical media collection.

I do own a record player so I see the point of added physicality though.

Sure, but I don’t think Waterfall is going to save you from the soul-crushingness in such an environment.

Or way worse, what you said but senior techs.

Microsoft has been at this long enough that there is an army of old guys whose only - but extremely specialized - skillset is navigating arcane GUIs for group policies and AD administration. But drop them in a bash terminal and they’re like a fish dropped on a tennis court.