funimpoded

Chicago School jerks got their way in the '70s and we effectively decided to stop doing that. This was the first notable fruit yielded by the postwar pro-rich/business "think tank" and intellectualism-washing push which was quickly followed by that set dominating almost everything.

Good luck reversing that and bringing back the "giant enterprises may be assumed harmful" standard (the one under which it was possible to win these cases more than once in a blue moon, without unreasonable costs) now that rich right-wingers just openly steer most news media.

Do I think supernatural things like thoughts not being represented in physical reality exist? I defer to Russell's Teapot on this one and lean toward "no". If they do, then attempting to reason about anything gets pretty iffy anyway. Who knows what might exist or be true, in that case!

Possibly metaphysical naturalism is wrong and supernatural things exist! And maybe thoughts (and/or the experience of consciousness) are among those supernatural things. That could be it. In which case sure, maybe solving math problems can create consciousness (why not?).

\s?

Yes, brains apparently can do consciousness.

Can descriptions of brains do consciousness? I don't know why we'd expect that they could. You can describe a fire in all the detail you like, and burn nothing.

Can electronic brains be conscious? I dunno. If I had to guess? Sky's-the-limit ignore-all-physical-and-temporal-constraints? Probably. Within the bounds of what humans will ever achieve? Maybe. I doubt they'd look as little-removed from tabulation machines as ours are, though. Like I definitely don't think you get there solving math problems. That would be surprisingly metaphysical.

Would you say that displaying image of something on a screen qualifies as actually happening?

Yeah, of course.

What I'm addressing is "if we turn 100% of everything about neurons into numbers we can do calculations on those numbers and it's the same as that stuff actually happening with real neurons". Which is entirely wrong. A trajectory calculation isn't different from actually firing a projectile because it's not precise enough but because it's something else entirely.

"Resolution" has nothing whatsoever to do with it.

No amount of scribbling graphite onto paper will produce a butterfly.

Computing something isn’t the same thing as it actually happening.

You can add everything and commit all at once in git, so you’re technically using staging but it doesn’t feel like it.

I stopped using it the first time I committed something I didn’t want to, over a decade ago, haven’t used it again since so I forget the exact invocation, but I think it was just “-a” or something.

Before it bit me though yeah, that did seem like a default I’d have preferred. Not any more.

“Yo, this violates your rules” and then twitter sometimes going “yep, true, we’ll do something” and sometimes “nah” is pretty low on my list of concerns, yeah.

Then again I also don’t think any company should have the reach any of the major media companies do these days. But antitrust and media-diversity regulations and laws have been out of fashion since the ‘70s.

I once spent an hour or so tracking down and reading parts of the twitter files specifically highlighted by people loudly complaining about them (as I figured those would be the worst bits) and it was mostly pretty yawn-worthy in context.

That might be why they didn't get more attention.

It shouldn't. But under this Supreme Court it might.

Corporations are creations of the state and treating them as strictly private, especially when they're trampling rights, is illiberal horse-shit, and is straight up insulting when done under the guise of defending liberalism. And there's plenty of room for nuance, we don't have to (and already do not) regulate family businesses or 50-employee enterprises like we do transnational mega corporations with more capital than many entire countries.

Same, I can't pass any test that relies on getting syntax correct. If you want me to fizzbuzz on a whiteboard in a language I've been writing dozens or more of lines of per day for a year up to and including the day before, and require that I don't mess up the syntax, I reckon I've got a coin-flip chance of passing at best (meanwhile, sure, of course the actual logic of fizzbuzz isn't tricky for me)

I once got the method invocation syntax wrong for PHP in an interview. I'd written thousands of lines of PHP and had most-recently written some the week before.

This, despite starting off my programming journey in editors with no hinting or automatic correction. If anything, I've gotten even worse about remembering syntax as I've gotten better at the rest of the job, but I was never great at it.

I rely on surrounding code to remind me of syntax and the exact names of basic things constantly. On a blank screen without syntax hints and autocompletion, or a blank whiteboard, I'm guaranteed to look like a moron if you don't let me just write pseudocode.

Been paid to write code for about 25 years. This has never been any amount of a problem on the job but is sometimes a source of stress in interviews and has likely lost me an offer or two (most of the sources of stress in an interview have little to do with the job, really)

this still wasn't perfect and a lot of new users did think their documents were in programs, which might be why we gave that up

To this day there exist office workers—ones old enough that no, it's not because the were introduced to computers via smartphones—who use a computer for hours every single weekday day but get totally turned around in a file manager, and don't know even the extreme basics like how to copy and move files.

There are offices full of such folks, in non-tech offices, where the person who knows how to sort-of use a GUI file manager is the "computer whiz" they go to with questions.

Not even joking that the main benefit I've seen from "AI" for editing code is that it lets me quickly do all the things I could already have been doing just as quickly if I'd ever bothered to learn to use my tools.

Of course I lose about as much time as I save to its fuck-ups, so I'd still have been better off learning to actually use a text editor properly. Though (as I mentioned in a another post) part of why I've never done that in 25ish years of writing code for pay is that my code-writing speed has never been too slow for any of the businesses I've worked in, i.e. other things move slowly enough it never mattered.

Just title it "draft". Odds are nobody will look at it anyway.

Add a pre-commit hook to re-create the diagrams on every commit (in case anything changed, of course), that way you can really burn tokens and look good to management.

To save folks the search, these both sell ~$300 sunglasses.

They show action shots of people wearing them kayaking or at the beach but I'd be so worried about dropping them in the river or scratching the lenses with sand that I'd never take them those places. $300 is more than I paid for my kayak, LOL. Probably more expensive than entire sets of clothes I might wear while doing those activities, or at least right around the same price.

There's really no end to dot-language diagrams you can have it make. Call graphs, package dependency maps, let it try to figure out an architecture diagram, whatever.

I notice a lot of Cursor's suggestions are just stuff a linter should auto-fix.

But if you hit "tab" it'll claim that as an AI-edited line, LOL.

(A lot of the rest of it is stuff I could already have been doing just as fast if I'd ever bothered to learn to use multiple cursors, learned vim navigation, or set up some macros—I never did because my getting-code-on-the-screen speed without those has never been slow enough to hold anything up, in practice)

It’s a business decision, but one of the options won’t move enough units to keep Wal-Mart and Target and Costco and Best Buy using shelf space for your product, and the other might.

I haven't had any insight into the industry lately, but did work for a company in that space several years ago.

Most (all?) ordinary TVs, plus things like Roku streaming devices, are sold essentially at-cost. The profit comes from ads and information-brokering stuff. This makes it basically impossible to break into the market without doing the same thing.

I had a subscription for a couple years, and grabbed a bunch more between sale-priced single issues on their site and eBay.

We've got a couple stacks of them, maybe 20ish issues total, and I grab one a lot of the time when I'm taking the kids somewhere that my main role will be to sit around. Beats reading a phone (plus works if there's no service), most pieces are short so getting interrupted isn't a big deal, and they're very friendly to open-to-any-page-and-go sorts of approaches.

Really, the only reason they're not absolutely perfect for that is that they won't fit easily in a jacket or coat pocket like some mass-market paperbacks or older Modern Library hardcover volumes will. Otherwise, though, just about ideal for that use case.

Can confirm, that kind of thing (murder that the jury decide was OK because they had it coming, or a town collectively deciding and sticking to “we didn’t see nothin’” so a prosecution can’t proceed) happens, but it’s so rare most rural-dwellers never see it anywhere near them in a lifetime. Unless it’s cops covering up for other cops or their pals, but I mean, even that’s not exactly an everyday occurrence (at least at the level of things like murder). Approximately nowhere in the US is this normal among ordinary folks.

Beware that there exist people who will cut you out of their lives—professional, personal, whatever—completely, likely with no warning, and possibly loudly, publicly, and with-receipts (if they’ve seen this kind of thing before or have thought through what your next steps will be after they cut you out) if they find out you do this.

All it takes is for a few of them to start comparing notes behind your back. Shit goes sideways extremely fast for people pulling this whose victims start talking to each other without them as the intermediary.

You buy a share of stock and participate in their gains

That is "literally not how it works", as you missed "... and losses".

Since dividends aren't really a thing any more and gains are ~100% from stock prices increasing, existing holders of securities would really like a bunch more money to come shopping and drive that price up. Very helpful if you want to make sure a period where "... and losses" seems like a silly thing to be worried about keeps going for a while longer.

Bunch of folks out there would love to be taking management fees on funds that're required by law to receive 10ish% of every middle-class-and-under working American's paycheck (some at the higher end of the pay scale pay less than that, because of the cutoff, and of course anyone rich enough not to have wage income pays no FICA at all).

Others would like to game the system to make Social Security a huge, deep-pocketed buyer for their scams. This is for when "... and losses" starts really biting people.

Watching the entire economy of a superpower and ~all of online culture go absolutely ga-ga over Furbys has been one of the weirdest things I've ever witnessed.

yet agreeing to only get paid when he does go to Mars.

He already owns hundreds of billions of dollars worth of SpaceX. He "gets paid" whether or not these goals are achieved (a million people on mars definitely won't be achieved this century, as the place is fucking awful; one thousand is vanishingly unlikely, one million is flat-out not happening). In fact, hyping the company up ahead of IPO gets him paid, to the tune of thousands of working people's lifetime earnings.

Absolutely, that's the main reason there's been a push for that for decades. It's a giant pile of poor people's money that rich people can't easily skim from, and they'd really, really like to. Once it's "in the market" they gain all kinds of options for turning some of that money into their money, some immediately, some with tweaks to laws or policy.

That’s… the game console market. Even the NES in the ‘80s tried to lock out unauthorized (by Nintendo) software. When the screen flashes over and over on boot, that’s the lockout chip not seeing what it expects (due to a poor connection, usually, if it’s a cartridge that should work). Though I hear the latest Xbox is notably more open than the norm, and of course a living-room PC from Valve would buck that trend entirely.

The cable length limitations are also a pain in the ass for not-uncommon A/V system configurations. 6' recommended max, and the best you might get working stably if the device and cable gods smile on you is 15'. 6' is the lower edge of acceptable for just about any A/V system setup (in practice it means your devices need to be within about a meter of the screen's port[s], which is pretty close) and even 15' is still too short to be useful for, say, a projector, or a "the A/V receiver or HDMI switch is over in that cabinet, the TV is on this wall across the room" situation.

HDMI goes 25'+, no problem.