atoav

LG is on my blacklist. That means I won't buy LG products and in my job actively fight against buying products from them. And they put themselves onto that lost with their behavior.

Well you know you will likely have an outlier. The question is when.

I am all for it, where do I sign? The whole ad world has brought nothing but problems to our world.

4. Voice capture can include other people. Voice-enabled products may record and analyse family members, children, guests, and bystanders. LG places responsibility on you to inform them and obtain any legally required consent. (Section 4.d)

Cool. Meaning you either inform every guest before they enter your home or they can sue you. Great LG! This is a good way to ensure to land on my personal forever-blacklist. I won't even come back to check whether you changed.

Good to know. LG is now on my blacklist.

There has been a history of problems with that exact airframe where people died. People dying is usually considered bad.

Now root cause of the issue that airframe had before was that Boeing was given the leeway to certify it themselves with too little oversight by the FAA. In short: the airframe of the Boeing 737 MAX is so far away from the originally certified 737 airframe it is ridiculous to consider them the same airplane. The adjustments Boeing made via softeare to deal with the physical changes (like putting the much bigger engines forward so they have enough clearance under the wings without having to certifying this as a new airframe) was the cause of the incidents. A truly independent FAA would have never even remotely accepted that.

I would say, you install a lightweight Linux, boot directly into your favorite distraction free editor at full screen and sync the files back to phone and big computer via something like syncthing/Nextcloud/etc.

As for which editor that is, it depends a little bit on your needs, but there are ones specifically geared towards being distraction free like https://ghostwriter.kde.org/

Although markdown may not be what you're after. I personally consider formatting another form of distraction, ao this would be a plus for me. But if you write math-heavy papers, going with something else like Typst or LATeX may be a better choice.

Are they? I can easily dangle my Phone of my USB-C cable. Maybe this is a regional problem. Within the EU I rarely ever had any mechanical problem with USB-C, where applied reasonably.

You don't necessarily need to argue a lot of times. Often the much better way is to deploy the rhetoric equivalent of a Judo throw, by using the momentum of the other side and ever so gently redirect it to have them lose their footing a few steps later. Do this well enough and it isn't even immediately clear who caused it.

Directly arguing has the downside that people with big egos will harden their positions even (or rather: especially) if they suspect they they might be wrong. If your goal is to let of steam while causing destruction, that is a valid strategy, if your goal is to reframe a topic, refute a point and/or win over the room, it often is not.

That all being said, we are talking about a public argument, not about private discussions. If you can make good points, bring the receipts arguing for those points is a good idea. However if given the chance it is a good idea to make these point in a smaller circle, in writing or in a one-in-one with your boss first, to give them the chance to agree with you when it is easy, instead of feeling put on the spot in front of everybody.

Not to be that guy, but the USB-C specification requires an extraction force of 8–20 N for a new connector, measured on the sixth unplugging cycle after five conditioning cycles. After 10,000 insertion/removal cycles, the permitted range is 6–20 N.

Equivalent hanging mass:

  8 N is 0.82 kg  
  20 N is 2.04 kg  
  

As an aside, the specified extraction force for USB A is:

  10 N minimum when new  
  8 N minimum after durability cycling  
  

I don't have problems with USB-C connectors per se. I think HDMI is worse in terms of durability.

It is easier to get an LLM to tell an unusual story using the most popular phrases than have it tell a common story using off-kilter uncommon phrases.

The big arc is easy to get using an LLM, getting it to do the details correctly, that is the actual hard part. So in my cases I (by other people's account a legendarily patient person) lost my cool trying to get a LLM to write CSS in a way that makes any sense if you have a design background. I ended up rewriting the whole CSS by hand, because it is inconsistent, piecemeal and just doesn't make sense. Yeah let's make everything bold and important. Yeah let's write internal implementation details into a label in the UI.

I decided to use LLMs as an aid to my own thinking, not as a replacement.

Huh? That is a really common term. There have been even memes about it. I remember roughly 5 years ago I first heard the ironic; "Real men use after free" in a discussion about Rust's benefits as its borrowing checker would have also prevented this one.

"Use after free" is also described in most standard books about C as a thing you should never do, have you read one?

Consider reading the post I commented on.

Until drones deploy counter-blinkenlights. As someone who has built a realtime people tracker art installation in a disco: Stroboscopes are highly effective at confusing these models.

Current metric time can be seen here: https://metric-time.com/

I mostly agree with the points made, however I would not call this "invisible" as it was chosen to be called in the title.

Good tools should be obvious, with the main ways to use it being very low friction and low cognitive overhead. That is not the same as them being invisible. It is just a different type of visibility (one that doesn't require users to get a driving license before they can use the tool properly).

When I design such tools, I tend to think about the problem from the users perspective. What is the information they really need to know? In which environment does the rest of the context reside? Which error cases exist, who will have to deal with them and what will they need to know?

I'd did not claim that things do not have downsides. I said tech embargos are the wrong way to deal with that specific downside and even proposed another way to deal with it (targeted, stochastic checks). If the people making those checks are good, the paperwork you described won't be necessary. E.g. in the EU the police may put your car onto a test stand and measure the exhaust during operation. Who cares what you did to the thing if the result is that it is within the emission thresholds.

In the case of guns this documentation makes sense, because of what guns are used for typically.

To play the devils advocate: It is efficient — for them.

It is a bit of a myth that everybody in Germany talks English. Sure in an academic or business environment, or in certain social circles that can be taken for granted, but there are people who can only talk German or whose English is so bad they will avoid talking it.

If you want people not to have out of spec tractors that is a regulation and oversight issue, not an issue of locking down tech.

Right to repair argues the tech should not be locked down, it doesn't argue you should be free to break the law.

You are also free to remove the handrails on a set of stairs using a simple wrench, but if a building inspector shows up or someone falls because of it there will likely be consequences. The argument here is that the simple wrench isn't the problem nor is your potential ability to remove handrails. In fact removing them may be necessary in some situations. The argument here is, you should be able to decide when it is necessary, while also facing consequences if tou do so in a way that is potentially harmful to others and the environment.

If you worry about the environmental impact of people turning a screw in a tractor you need heftier fines and more random unannounced controls. This is btw. how gun law works in countries where they make sense. Own a gun? No you don't unless you store it correctly and have documentation of ammunition spent etc.

Yes? But if you want to solve that issue locking down the tech is not the solution. The solution is to have an inspector show up unannounced and give you a hefty fine if that screw is set incorrect.

So if that is really an issue, apply the correct fix and don't push the blame on environmentalists.

"I did not plan to relocate, but the opening at $your company made me reconsider. I then delved into $location history and culture, and found it really fascinating. Since I am [young|experienced in $oldcareer], I decided it would be worth trying out something new."

I don't think it's a matter of "resisting or not", they literally have no choice and can typically also not tell anyone because of gag orders.

I would not rule out there are organizations/companies in the US who would rather give up their business than fold to the pressure, which is why I let this open. I know there are some US entities who have public carnary style notices ("We have not been visited by a government agency, ..."), with the idea being that while they can compell you to not say a thing, they can't force you to say a thing. How well that would work in practise, I dunno, but it shows that some in the US anticipate the issue and at least signal to care about it.

But in the end I agree with you, the safer route for people in the EU is to not deal with this risk to begin with.

I get the difference between business and academic note taking, but I still think it is benefitial to do it yourself in a business meeting, because as you write down the notes you may realize a point hasn't been made as clearly as you wish it was made, which allows you to intervene.

Actually I think one of the main values of note taking isn't that you get notes, it is that engaging your brain to summarize points makes you understand and remember the points better, even if you throw your notes away right after.

It is like writing: One of the main purposes of writing (for me and many others) is that it forces you to structure your thoughts. You could give that task to AI, get the resulting text, but your loss is the lack of clarity you could have gained from doing it yourself.

Well in this case it is a documented trail of defering needed maintenance with the argument of needing to safe money.

I did not argue that this is a outcome that can only happen to conservative governments. In fact I am convinced it is a fundamental problem of how politics work: you elect politicians to government for a limited period, so they often try to push off costs for which the ultimate prize will be paid to the next period, in which they may not be in government anymore.

But of course conservative governments tend to be more often part of that dynamic since austerity politics and conservatism often (although, not always) go hand in hand. Often the austerity has a smidgen of corruption as well, where government contracts that then need to be made (urgently! since maintenance was deferred!) often go to the politicians private friends. Free market for thee and not for me.

Another classic is to starve some working government/public institutions budget, only to then point at the mess and explain why this needs to privatized (coincidentally you know exactly the right guy to step in, what a surprise).

I am not saying that it is only conservative polticians that do that, but it tends to be a bit harder to do while e.g. demanding democratic socialist policy and strong public institutions.

The issues you see now in Germany are the direct consequence of the Merkel era conservative government and its austerity policy. They really wanted to get the deficit down at all cost. And all cost included any sort of needed maintenance on public infrastructure.

I always bring the receipts, so if I say it is them, then the chances are it is them. Pointing fingers before investigation the cause is a waste of precious time.

Yes, but if any US three-letter agency knocks at a US companies door and says: "Nice business you have there", will they resist just to not sell out their EU customers? I don't think so.

And the patriot act exists, so this is not just a theoretical worry. Meaning as an EU citizen I would like to ban US vendors completely till you guys get your house in order again. Not that we don't have our own wanna be autocrats and surveillance-lovers, but I think having authocratic laws should have consequences for the businesses in any country.

I know that capacitance multipliers are commonly used in audio circuits like specific Equalizer circuits, mainly to allow to use smaller capacitors.

XML is ok, the problem IMO is that the way some people use(d) it is utterly unhinged.

So a return value that could have easily been two lined of text is now a nested demon of XML. The complexity isn't what that application does, the complexity is in how it returns the values.

Another good one is to use XML when something else would have made things simpler, e.g. for a config file where you could easily have used a .ini or a .toml file.

Or you have an application that tries to so generic that the definition for a simple use case is a whopping 5MB XML file. Cool. When I feel writing a config for your application is harder than programming the whole thing yourself you have really made it. /s