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315 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Mar 2016
Paperless is and always has been an instrumental goal, not a terminal one. As another story reminded us not so long ago: Bad software destroyed doctors memory. If they cannot do paperless right, keeping dead trees is the lesser evil.
R is nice. It is even more readable then Perl!
But seriously, if you learn Python for pandas, with some luck you might end up learning Python, a generally useful programming language. With R you end up with a lanague which is very efficient at specific things and frustrating when you need also to do some ‘normal’ programming.
> Do you seriously think that ANY company would ignore a market segment where they could make money?
Could they? Companies ignore market segments all the time – precisely because [they think] it is not worth it. Sometimes they are right, sometimes not.
Accessibility is hard and tends to or force you to change the design, i.e. get in the way. And Apple are not in the ‘everyone uses this’ business. They are ‘overpriced tat to show your superiority’ business. If everyone used Apple, Apple users would no longer be special. So to keep the air of exclusivity they actually need the unwashed masses to use something else.
> Your existing is wrong!
Did anyone say that? Please calm down.
So, what to do instead? Generate vast quantities of such images. For everyone. For non-existent AI-generated lookalikes. For whoever and whatever you can in all possible variations. Make them easily available. Let everyone know.
Then they become banal and useless for extortion. Of course such pictures exist. Of course they are fake. Who cares?
Sure currently there would be legal problems, and with minors this is not likely to be an option, etc. But generally, the ease with which they are generated is not the problem; it is the solution.
That is basically the right approach to all ‘smart’ devices. In some cases there can be benefits if the thing is programmable or remote controlled or something. But… The piece with the complicated software has to be disentangled from the hardware. You have hardware which actually does something – and with that you may or may not have a computer (whatever the form factor) which provides the smarts. And they can be replaced independently. Because they have very different upgrade cycles. Then it perhaps can work.
If we stopped chasing the upgrade, I haven't noticed. Sure, the reason for upgrade used to be ‘it brings these nice things I need/want’, whereas now it is more ‘my old stuff is no longer working – again’.
But perhaps we are reaching some kind of equilibrium. I would not call it a good thing. It means about half of ‘improvements’ will make things worse. Probably more than half, knowing humanity and the second law of thermodynamics…
Sure they will be shafted. Also there is also the third party, not always mentioned, the lawyers. And this party always wins.
Anyway, Apple are wrong on the principles and EPIC are wrong in the specifics. This is one of the cases when one wishes “can't the two just somehow annihilate”? That would leave the world a better place…
Taking snapshots of a filesystem is a good mental model for Subversion – it is probably the mental model almost everyone uses when working with it. So I do not know where you got the ‘thinking error’ idea.
CVS versions single files. SVN versions entire directories (trees). Git… makes simple things look complicated.
> we don't need to worry about the AI uprising any time soon
AI uprising has never been the problem. We will destroy ourselves using dumb machine learning long before getting close to developing a general AI.
The way it is going someone soon nukes a country while trying to erase an old Johnny Cash collection…
Sure, X11 carries lots of baggage – show me Wayland after 35+ years and then we can compare.
Also, one reason why it is smaller (beside X11 containig lots of stuff quite irrelevant nowadays) is that pretty much everything X11 does is against the Wayland philosophy – forwarding, making screenshots, programs positioning their own windows, … Yes, I am aware that many of these things can actualy work in Wayland. The developers are not completely Poettering-level insane. Fortunately. But anyway…
X11/Xorg has shown its strength by integrating lots of things no one even dreamed of in the 80s. Sometimes seamlessly, sometimes less. I am looking forward to its 40 year anniversary.
One more reason to avoid smart speakers as hell.
If a person is confined to the space covered by ultrasound emitted by smart speakers, they can monitor the heartbeat. What is the utility? Don't know, probably none. What happens when someone takes it seriously and tries to ‘make it work’ in practice? Disaster. All kinds of. The best possible outcome is that it will not work. Of course, the Googles and Amazons will see another data stream to record and keep, so they will grab it anyway. They always do.
> Requiring people to idenitify themselves would go a long way to restoring civility on the 'net.
That is the old theory, and it could even be true some time ago when people still could be ashamed or afraid of consequences or something. Not any more. Now you double down – the more outrageous things you say, the more important it is to do so. And it works.
I have watched the real-name policy applied by some news sites here (or “news” sites – though not consipracy theory pedlars, just news somewhere on the tabloid spectrum). The result is that all the insane crap in discussions continues happily, now just labelled with real names and towns.
500 ml is a medium size tea mug. I need about 5-7 per day. Beside other things I drink (see icon). And that is in winter. In summer the intake goes up and becomes mostly water. Drinking a 1.2 litre jug in one go means I am just momentarily thirsty. I must be a different species…