I know everyone points out the problems with Nest, Ring, and various talking/listening/spying agents. For me, one of the worst offenders was a garage door motor that came with WiFi capability. Damn thing has the ability to just open up a door on my house on command. There’s no way am I putting that online.

Workers risk a few things, depending on the job:

• Health
• Time
• Opportunity (could be working someplace else that’s better)

These have a lot of dimension to them, including how one quantifies what “pay” actually is/for, what legal restrictions there are around taking the job (e.g. non-compete, non-arbitration), work/life balance, and so on.

Risk comes into play where the employee takes a bet that the job won’t destroy their health, work only as much as is absolutely necessary, and have taken a position at the optimal balance of responsibility, personal growth, retirement prospects, and income. It’s a risk since there are substantial barriers to changing to a new job, so you can wind up “stuck” in a bad position, but can’t know until after you start.

The collective man-hours this would have saved people, if we had it back in 1999, would be staggering.

people love over engineering the fuck out of technology

Exhibit A: 2.85 Million packages, as of mid-2023

Rust is still in the locker room having an argument with their coach (borrow checker).

War boys from Fury Road?

This describes how most people have it deployed, yes.

It gets real fun when you have custom Java plugins, Groovy script, BASH script, Windows runners, and Linux runners, all in play at the same time. Much of which is held together with hopes, dreams, and unicorn farts, willed into existence by wizards that haven’t worked there in over seven years. If upper management could even comprehend the level of deferred maintenance and haphazard software hackery that birthed this electronic Gordian knot, this unholy union of decrepit software and company policy, they wouldn’t sleep. Ever.

It really should be “parlay.txt”.

Or more subtly, when the command uses BSD (nowadays Go) style single-dash args, so it wants -help and not --help.

That’s $400k worth of house and $500k worth of windows. Lotta big custom glass in there.

FROM Software: Fuck that, we’re doing fog-walls.

I don’t trust anyone when I’m on the road.

And you shouldn’t. Everyone is equipped with a lethal weapon masquerading as personal transportation, where safety is predicated on mutually-assured-destruction and the presumption that everyone is a sane actor. Keep your head on a swivel and stay safe out there!

You’re right about turn signals.

A lot of people have “target fixation” and telegraph their moves somewhat. I look at where the car is tracking in the lane and what their head is doing (if I can see it). Most people drift left or right on the highway before they change lanes, exit, or turn. It’s no excuse for bad manners, but it helps.

IMO, the big problem is just a matter of standards and practicality. The bar for a DL is “can operate a vehicle” and not “can safely drive a vehicle in public for extended periods of time.” I agree with periodic re-licensing though; everything else called a “license” seems to need that for a host of reasons.

It’s outstanding at bridging the gap between “I need to mash these two concepts/technologies together” and “the answer is spread across six different StackOverflow threads.” Hunting that stuff down using Google has been a delicate operation even at the best of times in the last 25 years, but it always took a lot of time. With an LLM and each such query, I’ve saved hours, maybe even whole workdays. Fact-checking an AI takes far less effort.

The Trade Federation greatly appreciates useful imports.

On my aging laptop, the Discord app consumed RAM like Goku at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Moving back to a browser tab eliminated the overhead from Electron and was dramatically more performant as a result. This completely side-steps any upgrade and/or snap issues.

it’s like an engine being allowed to slow down after over-revving it incessantly.

That’s exactly what it feels like. I installed Social Fixer on my browser(s) to make FB at least usable for the few times I have to touch it for event coordination. People ask me what that’s like and I simply say: “Oh, it’s boring now. I only look at status updates for a few minutes and go do something else.” The pull to go back is just… gone. It’s as dull as LiveJournal ever was, and frankly, it’s better this way.

What did I strip out of the feed? Everything that wasn’t generated directly by someone on my friends list. That’s all it took. All the “engagement” is either artificially injected into your feed, or clickbait people pass along because their feed isn’t filtered.

It’s already kind of happening. The Curl project is having a really bad time. No idea if the “bug” submissions are themselves automated, but the content of the filings are pure AI nonsense.

This is the way. The key is to ignore the clickbait, politics, low-effort content, and sensational bullshit, and just go after stuff you really like.

There’s even videos for every schedule. We seem to be back to 30-50 minute videos these days, but there are still some micro channels around. Like “Sandwiches of History”, where every video is at most two minutes.