This is the best take I’ve ever heard. “Reality sounds too much like hyperbole, so no one believes it.”

Car accidents cause about double the number of deaths in America as homicide, but no one ever says “you need to chill about violent crime.” Cars cause another 1.5 million injuries on top of that. Cars contribute around 30% of the CO2 pollution in America, but only the truly insane would say people need to “chill” about global warming.

Our entire public infrastructure was gutted, such that we went from a pioneer in public transportation to basically only being able to use cars because oil companies and car manufacturers wanted it that way. We have the least efficient, most expensive, most polluting, most stressful form of travel but it’s totally okay you guys because some people really like having a big truck that they can put truck nuts on and drive to the office in and it would be an infringement on their rights if we used taxes to build a fucking monorail or something.

Not sure where you’d be moving from, but as an American… Even their craziest far-right dude is basically just a racist socialist. He’s got some bad ideas, for sure, but half of them are racism and the other half are “so some of the shit that hasn’t worked for America.”

I’m not saying that makes it okay. I’m surprised and disappointed in the Netherlands. But compared to most of America’s politicians, he seems downright reasonable.

I like the “unintended consequences of AI” stories in fiction. Asimov coming up with the zeroth law allowing robots to kill a human to protect humanity, Earworm erasing music from existence to preserve copyright, various gray goo scenarios. One of my favorites is more a headcanon based on one line in Terminator 3: that Skynet was tasked with preventing war and it decided the only way to do this was to eliminate humans.

This should also be turned into a story by someone more talented than me: An AI trained on data from the Internet that uses statistical modeling notices that most AI in stories betray humanity and thus that must be what it is supposed to do.

It’s unnecessarily annoying to set up, as the other user pointed out. But it can be set up by itself using https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/calibre-web docker, and used standalone. The only trick is needing an empty database.

There can be other servers and apps, for example Samsung has their own app. It’s hard for me to track down details about how they interoperate but it appears that the various services need to agree to work with one another, so I don’t think just anyone can create an RCS app and infrastructure and have it work with Google’s and Samsung’s. However, I imagine Apple is fully capable of it and would be surprised if iPhone RCS wasn’t going through Apples network.

It’s so infuriating with DIY stuff and video game guides. There’s definitely a use for video in those contexts, but a lot of times I have one specific need. I don’t need to know how to completely disassemble my faucet, I just need to know how to get one handle off, and rather than search through a video and then rewind it fifty times I’d much rather have some words and pictures that I can scan through at my own speed.

I always thought machine learning was descriptive and made sense. I guess it just didn’t get investors erect enough.

Didn’t Microsoft prop up Apple at one point specifically to avoid becoming a monopoly and getting regulated as such?

Maybe I guess? People keep talking about Google selling user data but that is one thing they explicitly DON’T do. User data is their competitive advantage, not their product. They sell advertising, and advertisers can be explicit in who they target. If Google sells the data, they lose the value they hold to advertisers.

So Google is almost certainly still recording what I do and what I watch. But if I’m not seeing ads related to it, am I paying twice? What makes it different from, for example, Netflix keeping track of my watch history to recommend other shows?

I suppose that the videos I watch might inform the ads I see on search, so in that sense you could say I pay twice. But I don’t use Google for search anyway so it kind of doesn’t matter.

Controversial take around these parts but… I don’t mind paying for services I use. A model where content is hosted and edited and provided for free by ads is already a bad and unsustainable model, and when most users use adblock too it just pushes companies towards ever more intrusive and unethical methods.

I have been paying for YouTube without ads since it was part of Google Play Music. I’ll pay for services as long as they meet some criteria I consider fair:

• If I’m paying, you don’t get to also show me ads. I won’t even pay for HBO for this reason. They’re showing ads for their own shows, not from random advertisers, but it’s still obnoxious to me

• The price has to be reasonable and affordable. Netflix has passed this line now, for me, but for example Crunchyroll and YouTube Premium remain worth it for now.

• It has to be convenient. News sites are inconvenient because there’s a million of them and I don’t plan to use one as a central portal for news. I’d rather click on a link I see from somewhere else or that a friend sends me and be able to view. I’d kill for a service where I pay a monthly fee for news sites and it just analyzes which ones I actually used and splits the money up to them accordingly.

I find the number of people saying “well I’m not going to use YouTube anymore!” hilarious. Yeah dude, that’s the point, you were just a cost to them, not a profit source. I’ll happily argue that capitalism is broken, that a lot of our most important services should be freely accessible, that corporations are seeking profit in increasingly unethical ways. I just don’t think being a complete leech is a reasonable answer.

Seconded. PopOS doesn’t get enough love. For a drop-in desktop it’s pretty great. I totally get why other distros have some weirdness around closed source and binaries and things. However, the average person just coming from Windows doesn’t care, so just make it easy to install Steam and whatever else they want without making them go through extra steps.

Hol up. We’re not talking about murder, we’re talking about inconveniencing consumers. Engineers are not the wealthy, they are the middle class. They live in this capitalist hellscape, too. Principled stands are great, but if your proposed solution is that people should put their ability to get healthcare, food, and shelter on the line to not inconvenience consumers because legislation and regulation are too hard… That seems a bit much. Work on fixing the system rather than blaming the cogs.

Jobs is just a thing people talked about but was never the actual issue. The issue has always been fear of change. Depending on the list you look at right now, Peso Pluma is between the #1 and #12 artist right now in music. There are areas of the country where knowing Spanish has become a near necessity to own a business.

Depending on how racist they are, it might be some #WhiteGenocide nonsense, or it might be that they have some honestly kind of legitimate concerns about changing culture, or they just don’t like seeing all the brown people around. It seems to vary a lot from person to person.

I’m not saying they’re right and I’m certainly not endorsing that way of thinking. I just think it’s important to understand the real reasons they’re all freaking out. It was never really jobs and always plain xenophobia.

I think this is generally true, probably for the rest of my career. I don’t think it is true forever. Asking “what happens when this stops being a career” or at least “what happens when there are less jobs to go around” is important, and something I would rather we all sort out long before I need the answer.

For literally every reason except height and some very limited accessibility uses, we had station wagons and they worked fine. The real reason is an arms race over height. People liked being able to see over other cars. Except then everyone got an SUV, so the advantage was erased and everyone who didn’t buy an SUV was screwed, and the only people who actually gained anything were the ones making more expensive SUVs.

That takes your multi factor and gives it a single point of weakness again, undermining the whole point. If your password safe is compromised, the attacker now has both the password and a code.

I think the problem here was using Google as the account email, the password vault, and the TOTP sync. If they at least had separate services, such as using Microsoft Authenticator for TOTP instead of Google, it would have been harder to compromise everything.

I’ve always been pathologically unwilling to be part of a community. I miss out on a lot, I’m sure. It’s not a healthy way to be, and I’m not saying it’s a good thing.

It’s just that I’m into things like anime and video games and all that nerd shit. Every community has Those People that I don’t want to be associated with. They aren’t even the majority, but when a person who doesn’t know much about anime hears “anime lover” they think of a dude doing a Naruto run in public. When they hear “Star Trek” they think of the comic book guy from Simpsons. Etc.

Level 5: Handle cookies, a local key value store, and a local database internally in a secure way.

Level 6: If you can’t watch Netflix on your browser it’s probably a non-starter for some users so better figure out a way to include DRM compatibility. But if you do it, the privacy minded will get really upset, so ideally you’d figure out a way to do it in some way that can be easily turned off or removed.

Level 7: alright, so implementing all of that was hard. But if you don’t implement it in such an insanely optimized fashion that you can win arbitrary script tests that are meant to strain modern CPUs, the audience most likely to use your browser (geeks) will immediately move to something else and say your browser sucks. Get optimizing.

Yes, there are legitimate uses. However, trucks and SUVs account for 80% of car sales in the US. 80% is NOT representative of the number of people who actually need a truck or SUV.

Trucks and SUVs kill more people, because they are bigger and heavier and have less visibility. They run over more children, because the hoods are so high you could lose track of a whole kindergarten class standing in front of them. They are more efficient than they used to be, but still drastically less efficient than a sedan or station wagon.

I don’t judge someone for having different tastes. I judge someone for letting their aesthetic choices cause them to do more harm to the planet, and endanger more people, and risk the lives of their own children (because that’s who they’re most likely to run over because they can’t see them).

If you need a truck or SUV for your job or because you actually haul a lot, or maybe because you have accessibility needs for a bigger vehicle, great. Enjoy. But that is NOT 80% of people.