dachris

If you've accidentally become a persona non grata, then obviously because you've not exercised sufficient self-censorship.

This is real already. Recently saw a petition for EU to rein in big tech (there are several initiatives advocating this). Had this nagging voice at the back of my head ... what if signing that gets your Google Account terminated.

I'll leave it open to you whether I signed it.

For developers relying on any type of Google services, you'd be in for lots of pain.

Pretty much the same here. A happy Ubuntu user for 4 years now. Here and there, there's still minor issues, but nothing a quick search or AI can't help you with. And we're hackers here after all.

For me that was already with the original DALL-e. It was utterly mindblowing, I was like "oh shit, AI is here".

"Draw a picture of a unicorn on the moon". And it did that. The model really "understood" what you told it.

After that, it was "oh, AI improved, again".

The farewell to Stack Overflow is not welcome. So many kind people shared their knowledge there. I answered a few questions as well, so not just a lurker.

It's a prelude of what's has already begun - the collapse of human-to-human communication.

Veracrypt e.g. has had this for a long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability

I'm considering using a second phone for increased security. As you say, only put banking apps on them, leave it at home.

The larger population is getting pushed towards banking on the phone, and on top of that, many people don't own a PC/Laptop anymore.

In Western Europe this is also quite pronounced.

In Białystok, Poland, solar noon is at 11:39. In Vigo, Spain, it's at 13:46, .

Being in favor of all-year DST (more sun in the evening is just nice), nice to see that those lucky Spaniards already have it and then some.

Whatever the preference for the permanent time, abandoning the switching should be advocated by the software industry. I've yet to work at a company where there are no bugs related to switching the clock. Those bugs have ranged from harmless to pretty severe.

Started the Visual Basic dev env, added a button to the form, MsgBox "Hello World", and it worked.

So simple, so easy. Those were the days.

It looks like the difference between the Boston Dynamics robots 2016 vs 2021

The Spot dog (which inspired the Black Mirror "Metalhead" episode) in 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf7IEVTDjng

Atlas doing backflips in 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FByY3tSx2Ak

So 5 years of progress within a year.

The good thing is, with AI scraping everything today, it will be incorporated into the AI - so your content will continue to exist in the weights.

In that way, your thoughts will live on ...

My favorite: near the Bering strait you can see the distortion of the map - obviously ships go in straight lines on a sphere but in a curve on the map.

As you say, in moderation. That also applies to red meat, considering the adverse effects listed on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_meat

The compression is nice, you can fit very long (low-entropy ;-) messages in there - this one is 9k characters:

https://textarea.my/#7cGBAAAAAMMgzfmTHORVAQAAAAAAAADAuwE=

Very nice, the introduction to recursion in university (which was around that time of the year) was drawing a fractal Christmas tree

Writing this on a first-gen 13 DIY, so it's already a bit dated. I've already added additional RAM and swapped in a much bigger SSD (really underestimated how much space you need if you heavily use docker and VMs).

The 1st year was a bit bumpy with 4k monitors over a USB-C hub being somewhat flaky. Ever since a clean Ubuntu reinstall, I'm very happy, no complaints whatsoever.

Sure, it costs more, but the combo of perfectly running Linux, giving me the piece of mind of repairability and easy upgrades for me justifies a higher price.

On the other hand, I'm not willing to pay the kind of premium you have with Apple products, where for incremental steps in more RAM or SSD you pay a multiple of the off-the-shelf price of the added space.

Lots of normal people don't think it's fine.

Lots of parents limited their kids' TV (television, you know) time back in the day (mine sure did, thanks mum and dad, even though I didn't particularly approve of the restriction back then).

Now you have to limit smartphone (and tablet and PC and TV) time. Lots of parents do this already, CEOs are not alone.

Its sister tunnel - the Semmering Base Tunnel [0] - is scheduled to be completed in 2030. These two combined greatly reduce the travel time from Vienna to Graz and Klagenfurt (combined 1h 15m time saving).

You don't hear that much about great engineering projects today, yet it's still an incredible feat to build those.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmering_Base_Tunnel

Good to see that there's new episodes and they've still got their mojo - putting it on my list.

For the other non-native speakers wondering, "fly" means your trouser zipper.

He surely has his fly closed when cutting through the hype with reflection and pragmatism (without the extreme positions on both sides often seen).

You'd be surprised how many people run 'npm i' in their CI. I've seen this on multiple occasions.

'npm ci' is some mitigation, but doesn't protect against getting hit when running 'npm i(nstall)' during development.

Would an airtight container and liberal addition of dessicants help?

Really funny on a farm when you see young calves "kissing" i.e. stick their noses/mouths together and lick each other's noses.

The manual for a human body says several hours of exercise per day.

Children try to follow it, but it's being made hard for them, and by the time you're an adult most have learned to forget the natural instincts for movement and how much fun you can have doing physical exercise.

Not to give any ideas, but a likely outcome is a US-based fork that has the offending bias removed, with a "ministry of truth"-y name.

That's certainly not the only (and I'd also not put it as primary) reason for extending the lifespan.

Still, breaking one's hip in advanced age is often a death sentence as many people never get out of bed again.

When an old person breaks their hip around here, people say something along the lines of "we'd better hurry up for visiting them one last time".

This is fun - and really powerful.

In some way, multicellular lifeforms (like a cherry tree or a human) also have to contain a kind of formulation like this so that they result in the fractals of branches and blood vessels as well as the overall structure.

Really ironic that Britain left the EU, but is even further ahead down this road. British humour I guess.

Hopefully it doesn't get implemented, but obviously they could force OS providers to implement this in Android and iOS.

Power wants to stay in power.

In a healthy society, citizens should always be wary of those in power and keep them on their toes, because power corrupts (and attracts already problematic characters).

Not driveling when they get thrown some crumbs or empty phrases ("child safety", "terrorism").

It is, but cui bono. I know that local software companies in my city had meetings coordinating the local software dev wage level. There's no reason to assume something like this isn't going on at a larger scale too.

Yes, perfect AI content has multiple issues, that need to be addressed differently

- treating certain content in the same way that drugs are treated. Lots of countries are already moving towards age restrictions for social media.

- some kind of hardware-provided signatures for images and video, anything else must be assumed to be generated

Will be interesting for kids growing up - the peer pressure is now already very high to have smartphones, to be on Whatsapp, Instagram, TikTok, this will only get worse.

Maybe if I have kids I will found some Amish-like community with only 90's tech (only half joking).