Yeah if AI was actually good you wouldn’t need to mandate it. No one was like “everyone here must use Google search”.

On the one hand, omnipresent surveillance is bad and ripe for abuse.

On the other, I feel like the haphazard and selective enforcement of traffic laws by police officers is also really bad. Cops can selectively enforce laws so poor people or black people or whatever out-group suffers more. A machine should be impartial.

On the last hand, no traffic enforcement is probably going to get people killed. So that’s not desirable.

Also, fines are problematic. Fines should probably scale with wealth, but also it shouldn’t be a revenue source because that’s a perverse incentive.

Companies fill up with idiots and parasites. People who are adept at thriving in the role without actually producing value. Google is no exception.

Assuming what you’re saying about the harms of consuming pornography, is it the state’s responsibility? Is it a top priority? Do we trust conservatives to implement a solution in good faith?

The answer to all of those I think is no.

There’s no analogous ID check for violent media, so far as I know.

There could be a raging wildfire and I would hesitate if a Republican said “let me deal with it”. They are fundamentally untrustworthy.

That’s on top of the deep irony of the same party that goes on about “small government” and “parents rights” is typically the same one pushing draconian anti-porn laws. It’s a joke. “A government small enough to fit in your bedroom”. Their motivations are so corrupt I am extremely skeptical of anything they propose.

Adding websearch to the start bar’s search was solving a problem that didn’t exist.

Maybe the average user is so ignorant and bad at computers they don’t understand this. They don’t know what a browser is. They don’t know what a website is. They don’t know what a program is. It’s all just stuff.

Personally, I’d rather spend billions on education than AI slop and other patches on “people are kind of dull”

It’s do-gooder derogation. People get upset when they see someone else being more moral than them. Instead of trying to either grow themselves or accept their own imperfections, they lash out.

And some people just like being part of the in-group, and see vegans as an easy out-group to mock.

I’ve been pushing to add some basic checks on PR, and people are reluctant. There’s one repo that I’m code owner on so I spent the like 15 minutes to apply a code formatter and add a GitHub action to check. But on the main repo people are dragging their heels. I’m like just pick ruff or black and do it. It’s going to take like 10 minutes. I’m not asking for us to go crazy and add automated tests right now, but can we at least get something to verify the python code is syntactically correct?

The other day something went through code review until I looked at it and saw there was an extra (, and that shit wouldn’t even run. I’m like please please add an automated check. I’ll do it. Please.

I think a lot of people just aren’t familiar with how other places do software. This is the same place that was ssh’ing into prod and making changes right on the machine until like this month.

Mint is fine. I went with pop!_os because at the time mint didn’t play well with my hardware.

Make sure you test things from the install live disk before you commit. Internet access, displays, audio should all work.

I’m kind of bummed no one at my job really does code reviews seriously. I don’t really get any feedback, so it’s hard to improve.

That’s also probably why the older code is an idiosyncratic mess of mutations and "oh yeah you need this config file that’s not in source control " and “oh sorry I guess I hard coded that file path, huh?”

Saint Luigi preserve us.

Despite enshittification being widely talked about, I expect maybe wide eyed idiots will be completely surprised by this.

Yeah I just… Don’t need that much stuff. Most of my money goes to food and shelter.

I’m sure there are companies that are at least more good than bad. Teachers pay teachers. Meetup. Bandcamp before they sold. That’s all I have off the top of my head. But even so capitalism invites cruelty, and the best intentions can easily wither under the pressure to make more money.

I work for a very large company involved in medicine. They make machines to do like blood work. That’s fine. People need that. But they treat many of their workers like trash. I don’t get paid for holidays and get the legal minimum sick leave per year. Their mission isn’t especially evil , but their behavior sucks.

I think a good step would be if people could admit the companies they work for are making the world worse. I’ve met some people who work for Google who do some backflips about how no the company is good and definitely they’re good people and it’s not the $300k salary talking.

My therapist tells me everyone is doing their best, even the housemate that leaves dirty dishes all over the house and never flushes the toilet. I grapple with this on the regular.

It’s debt in the sense of obligation, not literal finance. If we get more volume, we’re going to be obligated to change this so it does something smarter than dumping output to a csv on disk. For now it’s fine, even if it’s annoying to scp and parse the files every time you want to see something.

After a particularly potent evening of farts, someone whose identity I will protect had their ass dubbed “the gates of hell”. I can imagine this hanging in their bathroom.

There was a website where users could request something or other, like a PDF report. Users had a limited number of tokens per month.

The client would make a call to the backend and say how many tokens it was spending. The backend would then update their total, make the PDF, and send it.

Except this is stupid. First of all, if you told it you were spending -1 tokens, it would happily accept this and give you a free token along with your report.

Second of all, why is the client sending that at all? The client should just ask and the backend should figure out if they have enough credit or not.

The other day I accidentally looked at YouTube without adblock, without history off, and it was a nightmare. Just AI slop and rage bait. Absolute trash.

I pretty much only use YouTube for music and very specific clips. It’s a bad place.

[mode="snob] read more books. [/mode]

ls never asks you to create an account or to update.

Don’t give anyone ideas.

“Pay $2.99/mo to see hidden files!”