nhtsamera's comments

Yeah, it's actually one of the last sentences in the New Testament - Revelations 22:18.

Jesus did his best to tone down the fire and brimstone, but the Abrahamic god is not a particularly forgiving one.

When it comes to producing things, there's a whole world out there. You aren't competing with your neighbor, and materials/labor are vastly cheaper in other parts of the globe.

Before you suggest boycotting the rest of the world, protectionism rarely works over the long term because it tends to stifle innovation and provoke trade wars. The US is already courting this with its recent green energy legislation which aims to promote domestic industries in a way that inconveniences Western Europe, for example.

Another big challenge is the punishment for getting it wrong, which the article doesn't even mention.

>For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.

Personally, I wish more people would include curse clauses in important documents. Legal contracts, government constitutions...why not tack on a few lines threatening a dire curse for any party who reneges on their responsibilities?

Rail travel is one of the last places that you still see this in the US.

I took a cross-country Amtrak trip right before the pandemic, and most of the conductor's announcements were just to tell us when the next smoke break would be.

When the train got stuck waiting for cross traffic at a freight yard in rural North Dakota, an incipient passenger mutiny forced them to break the rules and let everyone pop out for some light trespassing and nicotine consumption.

It felt strange in a similar, but opposite way to what you're describing.

It seems pretty popular in big software-centric companies like the FAANGs. IME the turnover is usually every couple of months, as the sacrificial lamb gets tired of it and other team members start to feel like it might be time to take a turn in the bilges.

I can understand why the idea of hiring someone to handle that role would be appealing, but it really isn't a full-time job.

Plus, the last thing that BigCo engineering teams need is more politics; they have more than enough of that between the overlapping layers of engineering, project, and product managers.

And to think, Office Space came out 24 years ago. Funny how things come full-circle.

>And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now.

>I beg your pardon?

>Eight bosses.

>Eight?

>Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation, is not to be hassled. That, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.

Cue some discussion about kids these days and "quiet quitting".

Not really social media, but Netflix lost (settled) an ADA suit because they weren't providing subtitles consistently:

https://dredf.org/legal-advocacy/nad-v-netflix/

That would be unusual, so you could probably report them for being a bot.

After all, Meta's TOS stipulates that you must provide accurate information about yourself, and that you cannot share anything that is misleading.

It also prohibits making groundless reports or appeals, so maybe you could take an eye for an eye it you get unfairly targeted.

Ex post facto, as usual.

What are the odds that this whole imbroglio happened because their third-party APIs broke and they can't figure out how to fix them?

It's static, until a contractor ignores the post-it note on their monitor that says, "IMPORTANT: ALWAYS add an extra newline BEFORE saving the file".

Once that happens, you have to hope that your backups work - why bother having disaster recovery drills for a static system?

Once you realize that your backups are hosed, you may experience a creeping suspicion that software is never truly static when human operators are involved.

Not particularly surprising to hear that HoloLens may have moved into the "oh well, dump it on Uncle Sam" phase of product development.

It's good to hear that the government is demanding fixes to the eyestrain/nausea/headache issues before they commit to deploying them at scale.

This is quite easy to do, but the results can be off in funny ways. For example, try putting this into SD with Euler a sampling and a cfg scale of 10:

"The Night Watch, a painting made by Rembrandt in 1642"

It generates a convincing low-res imitation about half the time, but it also has a tendency to make the triband flag into an American flag, or put an old ship in the background, or replace the dark city arch with a sunset...

If you keep refining the prompt, you can get closer, but at that point you're just describing what the painting should look like, rather than asking the model to recall an original work.

Well, their API has been broken for days, and they haven't acknowledged it yet.

So I would say their current staffing levels are probably not sufficient.

The recurring cost is a real problem.

Not just financially. We all desperately want to feel some sense of agency over our future, and subscriptions force us to frequently reckon with our existential lack of control.

"Subscribe vs buy" feels like deciding between "rent vs own".

Sure, if I can snag a rent-controlled apartment for well under market price, that would be a good deal. And yes, if I buy a poorly-designed money pit to live in, that could be a bad deal.

But in almost all cases, I would prefer to own the place where I live. The biggest reason to rent is, "I cannot afford to buy", which seems like a reasonable way to restate your framing of subscriptions as a pricing-vs-value proposition.

So, would it be reasonable to conclude that allowing people to buy software like Photoshop or MS Word (or removing add-on subscriptions from paid products) would result in most people being priced out of the market? Could the recent rise in subscription models be seen as a form of software shrinkflation?

You can't access expensive hardware on YouTube.

If you want to learn about chemistry or biology for learning's sake, good luck. Most autodidacts won't have space in their apartment for a -80C freezer or flammables cabinet, and their landlords might not approve the installation of a proper fume hood.

We have things very easy in software. The cost of iteration is low, you can fit a respectable laboratory in the space underneath your desk, and you're unlikely to accidentally poison or maim somebody if you screw up an unwise experiment. Not many fields have that luxury.

You shouldn't even need to run an "app".

A phone is no different from a laptop, except that it is smaller and the mouse/keyboard are part of the screen. On my phone, I should be able to:

* Open an IDE and write some code.

* Compile my code (depending on the language).

* Run my code.

The whole concept of "app stores" is absurd. In 10 years, will we be denied sudo rights on our laptops? Will we need to pay a 30% cut to Apple for every program that we install, plus $99/yr if we want the privilege of building code for our own device?

Me neither, but I have heard plenty of complaints about backup cameras being required in all new cars.

The idea is that the cameras require a large display on the dashboard. If you could sell a car without them, we might have a cheaper class of small street-legal vehicles with simpler controls.

Sadly, with electric vehicles being thousands of kg heavier than ICE vehicles, kei-style cars would probably get a lot of people killed if they were introduced to the US today.