Posts by Pirate Dave 1872 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Oct 2008
The simple answer is to start training AI in how to design better robots - ways to make them more energy efficient, more powerful, more graceful, and more intelligent Then hook that AI to machinery that can actually build those better robots. Then Musk will get the robots he's dreaming of.
Which will promptly kill him and begin a war against humanity.
"banning gerrymandering,"
So how is that done? Somebody has to draw the lines that define the districts, and there's always going to be someone else who complains that putting the lines "there" instead of "over here" hurts their party's chances of ever winning again. I've seen it go both ways in the past, and both times I think it was finally resolved by the courts.
"Careful now, you're implying that he thought before."
This is The Register. Why would I be "thinking" in a political thread on an IT site? It's pure, caffeine-fuelled emotion, baby. Besides, this is the Arguments Department, innit?
"You also have to remember that to a right winger, only other right wingers are people with rights."
That's a bit of a grandiose statement. Sounds a bit like political bullshit, honestly. Did you read that on Facebook or something? Facebook will rot your fucking mind right out of your fucking skull. It's full of Russian instigators, you know...
The ones I've seen were put up in the 1890's, AFAIK. Which would have been proper for memorializing those in the war.
"Just to point out, YOU didn't erect anything, "
Thanks for clearing that up. I wasn't sure. But I can now rest easy knowing I didn't erect any statues.
"The same with putting up all these statues of people defending slavery and oppression during a time of increased oppression.... people in present day are made deeply uncomfortable by these statues, so they were removed."
So a statue of an officer on a horse, or a soldier holding a musket is "oppressive"? Wow, some people are perhaps too sensitive.
"So... slavers and those in favour of slavery to such an extent that they would go to war over it, they are worthy of hono(u)r. "
Here in the South, yes, they are. Those were our forefathers and ancestors. Were they right in holding slaves? No. Were the right in fighting for what they believed in? Yes.
" If I see a lot of buildings, bridges, monuments, roads, whatever, named after pro-slavers I guess the people who put them up think the same way."
Perhaps or perhaps not. Honoring someone for some honorable service they provided is not the same as promoting their beliefs. Those are two separate issues that are commonly tied together nowadays to justify tearing shit up for political reasons.
"Southern statues were erected as oppressive measures against Black people, to celebrate traitors who fought for slavery"
No. I get that you may think that, but that's not why. At least not for the white people who actually put up the statues. I realize that in your narrow world view, you think you are completely correct, but as a white southern male myself, I can tell you, you are not. Had we wanted to erect statues to "oppress" Blacks, we would have erected statues of Blacks being oppressed, which we did not do. We erected statues for the same reason we always erect statues - to honor people we felt were worthy of honor. You may not agree with it, and that's fine, but please don't go on with your out-of-touch liberal bleating about this subject.
"it's about how the right want to make other people behave, how they want to cancel anything that doesn't agree with their viewpoint..."
And how is that different than what the left is currently doing? Didn't "cancel culture" start among young, liberal groups who realized if they banded together and used the Internet as an ultra-megaphone, they could "shame" the people that don't agree with them into compliance with their viewpoint? That was my understanding of the situation, at least.
In my own little case, I dislike systemd because the times I've tried to figure it out, I found it disjointed and confusing with things scattered all over in unexpected places. It's a whole new realm of knowledge that we have to master, and some of us just don't see the point in expending the effort to gain mastery. Reluctance, not kool-aid. For most of us sysadmins, it doesn't really make anything any better, but it makes a whole lot of things newer. The knowledge we worked so hard learning, the locations of various configuration files we etched into our brains, the general "how to do things on Linux" that we gained, we're supposed to just throw all that out the window and start over. THAT is why we are resisting. Because systemd shows that nothing is sacred, nothing is reliable, and change is king. RedHat will bend each and every one of us over on a whim and roger us into submission, and there's jack-shit we can do about it but change careers or keep running increasingly ancient distros, while vainly hoping that one day, regular init will come back into vogue and we'll know what we're doing again.
I'm sure that a systemd apologist can pick apart my vague and emotionally driven diatribe, and show me for the old fool that I am. So be it.
Only speaking for myself here, but "learning" is not the issue. I still love to learn new stuff. But now in my mid-50's, I'm tired of the vendor treadmill that's tied to my paycheck. Forced learning because Microsoft or Red Hat or whomever decided to go in a completely different direction for whatever reason and the whole industry has to pivot and follow. I didn't mind in my 30's when I was still eager and mellow and full of energy. But now I'm crusty and often wonder "what the hell good did changing that really do?".
I spent three years in management, and was horrible at it. Not my cup of tea, but the $$$ was good, so I took the promotion. And regretted it. It's not just a different skillset, it's a different mindset. The IT Director really needs to be somewhat of an extroverted "people" person, not a hardcore techie introvert. Now I'm back to adminning, and couldn't be happier (although systemd does make me sad).
Same here on the SysAdmin side. I don't want to learn the latest and greatest, whether that's "yet another wonderful way to do things" on Windows or how to deal with the new stuff around the systemd cancer. I'm mostly tired of sacrificing brain cells and spare time for things that may or may not be useful in 5+ years. Just let me soldier on, keeping stuff running for another few years, then give me my gold watch and cake and let me go off into the sunset.
Great ideas by the NTSB. Although maybe it would be easier and more efficient if the government would just lock us all in padded rooms immediately after birth, and keep us there for our entire lives. Kind of like the Matrix. Can't get much safer than that. Driving is dangerous, freedom of movement is grossly overrated, and the government's #1 job is to keep any of us from dying.
" using the “43 trillion security signals” Microsoft states it gathers every day."
Ahh, that's where all the Internet bandwidth went. And we thought it was down to 4K pr0n streaming. Nope, it was alllllll those Cortanas out there sending their thousand points of light back to Redmond several times a day. Gosh, those must be chatty little services.
Thanks for watching out for us, Microsoft, and not wasting our time or resources on needless bullshit.
The problem with that is Microsoft would add a raft of "new ideas" to Excel that would do little to make it "better", but would slow it to a bloody crawl. Like that damned yellow word-suggestion thing that showed up n Outlook in the past year that absolutely slows things to a crawl while it's trying to figure out which three-letter words to suggest. Even though I've supposedly turned it off, it still rumbles back to life at random moments, like a drunk at a frat party. Imagine something like that running constantly in Excel. Yeah, no thanks. I'd rather go back to Excel 2003.
The root of the problem is that there aren't many Good Ideas left at Microsoft these days, but there is an apparently never-ending supply of stupid, pointless, and/or wasteful ideas.
Yeah, but that may be hard to do. I would think MS, Amazon, and many of the major multi-sited hosting/cloud providers have datacenters in California, so would have to kowtow to this crap law in some way. Hopefully some Very Bright People will speak up soon and show California, via the Federal courts, how they've overstepped their authority in a major way.
"/me operated nuclear reactors for the U.S. Navy, pushing a sub around the world for close to 4 years."
You took that job? Man, I was getting all kinds of postcards from the Navy my last two years of high-school ('86 and '87) wanting me to do that, but...eh, being in a metal tube under hundreds of meters of seawater with a nuclear reactor that I have intimate access to? Nah, thanks - the Marines say they'll keep me out in the sun and fun all the time.
Doesn't he work for Microsoft now? That, somehow, seems like pouring salt on an open wound...
So are we now on the "Extend" portion of the tour, having successfully completed "Embrace"? Perhaps Poettering is the matchstick man put in place to burn the whole thing down once it comes time to Extinguish.
Better to keep schtum about the good stuff, and not go plastering it all over the Internets as if it's pictures of what you ate for lunch. Things get passed-on, and before you know it, your "secret" find has blazed its way across Facebook. The wife and I agreed we would not post anything related to our favorite vacation spots on social media - no restaurant shout-outs, no "oh, look at our lovely hotel", and most certainly no "this twisty, curvy country road has no traffic on it and will save you 20 minutes going from (point A) to (point B)". Those are all just glory-seeking types of posts anyway, trying to impress some small circle of "friends" and make the poster look important. Which, yeah, that's exactly the never-spoken-aloud entire point of Facebook, innit?
Judging from her social media (I'm no longer "social"), we're the most boring, stay-at-home people alive. Which is just how we like it.
Just one tiny anecdotal point - last week, our 4 year old Compellent/Dell SCv3020 finally blew its first drive. One of the SSDs. There are 10 SSDs and 20 spinning rustbuckets, all 30 of which were installed at the same time, and if memory serves, were relatively close in manufacturing date.
Not a datacenter full of disks, and no where near a significant sample size, but enough to make me chuckle at the irony of Backblaze's statement. As always, YMMV.
"Congrats Google, you won. The internet sucks, you broke it, and nobody can fix it while you exist."
If I could, I'd give you my entire week's allotment of upvotes for that. It all started with the heavy-handed "only https" requirement and has gone downhill from there.
I just remembered there is already another monopolist waiting in Chrome's wings should Google falter, so perhaps my suggestion was already doomed to failure from the start.
Although it's hard to tell which monopolist's version would be the more heavy-handed on the community. Would definitely be a litmus test of Microsoft's true commitment to the FOSS community.
"Outliers like Brave and Mozilla have said they plan to continue support for MV2, though some resources will be required to do so."
It's almost like the part of the FOSS community that isn't Google needs to create a "primary" fork of Chrome that everybody but Google can use going forward, instead of relying on Google's good graces (which, eh, ain't always that "good").
Are they in Gartner's Magic Quadrant? Because we only listen to firms that are squarely in the Magic Quadrant...doesn't matter which Magic Quadrant, just has to be a Magic Quadrant.
“Enterprises must turn once again to outsourcing as a means to increase efficiency and lower costs,”
Great advice - hand off parts of your IT to people who have no skin in the game. Haven't we already been down this rabbit hole a couple of times in the past 20 years? It never turns out as well as it does in the slide deck.
Good crisp start, but going around the far bend, your saddle started slipping, and by the end you were barely miming AManFromMars.
Besides which, anyone in the US government threatening anything beyond a rolling two-year timeframe is talking out their ass. There is no stability in our governance anymore that extends beyond "the next election", whichever election that happens to be at the time.
Yes, agreed. I don't mind the ban on select-fire, even as a demented gun-fetishist I can see some logic behind that.
I mortally HATE 922R though. Total piece of crap regulation. There are better ways that are less intrusive to achieve the same result.
I'm personally opposed to the "ghost gun" ban, but I understand the logic behind it. I think Biden, et al, pushed the wrong narrative for it, since they wanted to score points with the anti-gun crowd.
IMHO, had Biden come out and plainly said the ban was primarily aimed at organized crime building up arsenals using 80% lowers, then I think maybe it might have gone down a little smoother in the gun community. We still wouldn't have liked it, and we'd have certainly still bucked and said "it's not about organized crime, it's about aiming at AR/AK rifles", but at least we could have consoled ourselfs to some small degree that there was some modicum of truth to the fact that it would impact organized crime.
Instead, Biden chose to aim it more squarely at the firearms community itself, as if to shame us for wanting to build our own weapons without government oversight. We aren't the bad guys, here, we're just nerds and bubbas who like to build stuff, and the 80% crowd was an even smaller subset of us. IMHO, it's way too much trouble for a wanna-be mass-shooter (with a clean record, at least) to turn an 80% lower into a "ghost gun", when he could just buy a completed Palmetto State or Anderson lower for $50 and be done with it.
Printed guns are just a Bad Idea. As another guy on here said, they are "self punishing".
"So following your logic, we should ban everything remotely dangerous,"
I apologize, my sarcasm must have been too thick. My original point, about amending the First Amendment, was a counter-point to DJO's implication of amending the Second Amendment since "amendments can be amended". Some groups lately are all about "amending" things, without putting a lot of thought into what happens when that can or worms gets opened. So my idea was how would those same groups like it if other Amendments were changed in ways that negatively affect their activities? I don't personally give a damn about banning nudity or violence any more than I want scary black rifles to be banned. Which is to say, not at all.
Yeah, brass will be hard to make. I remember seeing a guy on Youtube years ago that made a set of dies where he could use a hydraulic press to slowly form brass sheet into cartridges. So yeah, not easy, but not impossible.
Primers are more difficult since the primer compound is, by nature, a bit unstable. The cups are probably easily made, the anvils, not so much. The assembling with the priming compound would be the tricky bit.
Neither process would scale well, but over several months, a bit of a stockpile could possibly be built up.
"Tom and Jerry cartoons, they are far more violent than almost any live action."
Have you seen "The Boys" on Amazon? Or any of the other "recent" shows from the past 5-7 years?
My (oblique) point wasn't prudism, but was that perhaps we shouldn't start fiddling with the foundational restrictions placed on our government by The Bill of Rights. That becomes the slipperiest of all slopes, especially as fragmented and divided as our society is currently. There have only been a small handful of politicians in my lifetime that I would trust to touch those words, and none of them are still in politics.
I'd never seen any "antifa" in real life until about a month ago in the bathroom of a Chili's restaurant. I'd gone in to do my business, and noticed there were a few sheets of paper scattered across the floor. As I didn't have much else to do, I took a look at one, and discovered it was serious anti-Semitic hate propaganda. That was something I'd never seen in real life here in North Georgia for the 53 years I've been alive - Southern Baptists and Methodists generally have a good deal of respect for Jewish culture and religion since that's where Jesus came from, and we're simple people...
Anyway, as I'm washing my hands, in comes this guy, and starts picking up those papers. I assumed he was a Chili's employee sent to get that garbage off of the bathroom floor. So I casually mention it was highly unusual to see that kind of stuff in our small town. To which he said "I see it all the time, I'm in Antifa", and I then noticed he was dressed in black with a black ball cap that had "Antifa" iron-on letters.
It was all very strange, one way or the other, that I've never seen EITHER of those two things anywhere in town before, but then I see BOTH of them at the same time at the same place. It definitely felt like political theater, just not sure who the puppet-master was.
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