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AI is absolutely imperfect, just like teams of human developers.

The old "nothing's perfect therefore everything is equally imperfect" fallacy. It's not a binary. While everything is flawed, somethings are more flawed than others. Welcome to the world, it's complex.

when we talk about AI code, it's always compared against some idealized

Have you ever seen a development mailing list? Seems like when human code is scrutinized it's held to a high idealized standard. "Technical debt" is a concept that originated from looking at human code. How then can it be true that applying it to AI code is setting a higher standard? It's setting the same standard. These things existed and were applied to human code before AI exploded.

The whole "many eyes" thing can be quite brutal. We don't always get the many eyes but when we do... wars are waged. It's brutal out there for anything getting scrutiny. Currently, AI code getting a lot of eyeballs. That's a good thing. Don't wish it away just because you're butthurt about your new pet tech being held to a standard. That's how it gets better.

The "problem" of AI being held to a supposed higher standard isn't a problem. It's a free pony.

if the organization were seen as less leftist

I don't understand what you think should happen here. I honestly don't think that the EFF has shifted nearly as much as people have in this hyper partizan environment. The trouble with being "center" is that you get pulled around by the most extreme. The flag is tied to the center of the rope right? If the right pulls away should the EFF compromise their values just to be seen as less leftist?

When being the center is the principle value, you stop being defined by your own values. If you're the flag, you don't get to have a say. One side could hook a tractor up to their end of the rope. The flag has no agency.

Do I think the EFF should have more outreach to the right? Sure. But that outreach can't be: we compromised our principles to chase the moving target loosely defined as "the center" of the moment.

Of course the EFF had more allies on the right during the Obama years. They were suing the Obama administration! There is always going to be a nontrivial amount of tribalism going on. How do you think suing the Trump administration has affected the left? They are eating it up!

No, the EFF should stick to their principles and try to pull people out of their tribalism rather than cater to it. Suing the "your team" administration should not automatically be seen as "look how other team they are!"

Given the context of what I personally think about the content, the AI is much more accurate than that.

(Is it any wonder why people fall in love with bots that always agree with them?)

We should use lead pipes because they are made from naturally occurring lead. Synthetic PEX pipes have to go because: synthetic.

I'd be happier if they stopped using percentages. When percentage points don't consume close to an equal amount of time, don't use them. It's just complete nonsense at that point. It doesn't give the user any useful information just false hope that it might finish soon.

Of course if Windows update wasn't so horrible maybe it wouldn't matter as much.

companies need to attract customers - i.e. make their lives better.

Companies need to sell the *idea* of making lives better. They don't actually have to make a customer's life better and many don't despite selling lots of product. Profitability is not a strict function of quality. If it were, we'd not give the slightest fuck about monopolies. It takes a great amount of effort to get companies to compete on "making lives better." If bettering lives is not the most profitable it is very often eclipsed by what is.

It's much more complicated than the simple lie that "you get what you pay for."

FBI: See the problem we face is finding a needle in a haystack.

Morons in congress: Oh, we're really sorry to hear that, what should we do?

FBI: Give us more hay for the stack.

Hostility, it turns out is "engagement" which is profitable. We went from people organically paring themselves to algorithms steering people towards "engaging" encounters. Where we used to say "don't feed the trolls" we should now be saying "don't feed the algorithm."

I suppose we shouldn't feed either one but right now "the algorithm" is the bigger threat. I mean, I can usually get a troll to work for me with a bit of patience and perseverance... algorithms? They'll only work for me if it's profitable for someone else. It's so soulless.

Altering the deal is SOP where law permits it. Read any privacy policy or user "agreement" and note that they all have "Darth Vader" clauses where they get to alter the deal when ever it suits them. It's even your job to spam refresh on the page and use a diff tool to figure out what changed.

The difference is that these customers potentially can defend themselves with lawsuits and switching to a competitor.

Despite the gutting of desktop usability for the sake of being mobile compatible, many environments still have zero presence on mobile. Can I PLEASE have my fucking scrollbar back now?

I once spent a lot of my time and the time and the time of a developer trying to find a setting because there was no indication that a window had more content (a checkbox) to scroll down to. Something that would have been obvious before the onslaught of hidden scrollbars. The trouble is that having my pointer over the navigation pane--practically a guaranteed position--causes the scrollbar on the other pane to be hidden. Without the visual cue of a scrollbar there was no reason to move my pointer over to the other pane to discover there's more. Hell you might not even know it's a separate pane now that we've gotten rid of every defining border. I shared a screenshot with the developer, assured them that I was using the current version, only to have him say "scroll down." No doubt, I'm the fucking idiot (/s).

Just like on mobile, you're supposed randomly interact with every UI element in hopes of discovering how it works only to have that learned skill be unique to one fucking app. Tap it, slow tap it, slow tap it for a different amount of time, tap it faster, spam it... "google it"... oh, this time you're supposed to drag it to something that doesn't even look like a UI element. Stupid grandpas!

"Is the checkbox checked?" was never as ambiguous as "is the slider switch on?" Also, the checkbox uses less screen space! I'd argue that they optimized for neither screen space or user friendliness. It's optimized for a look and you can even make it worse by making it flatter. Go ahead make it look like two squares! Is the darker area the switch part? Who cares! It looks so clean and distraction free! I was so distracted by knowing what state the switch was in.

Sorry, time for my meds. I usually make it half way through the day.

Depends on what you mean by "stability." The number of crashes is down but UI churn seems like it's at an all time high.

Settings reversion is a constant peeve. Seriously, how many times to I have to set the height of the task manager. I have one screen that runs at the same native resolution it's always ran at. Tell me how hard it is to preserve the fucking setting? That's just the most recent annoyance but it's constant things like that where an update reverts a setting or two. No, it's not a distro thing. No, my package manager is not walking all the /home/*/.config trees--I checked.

Less annoying is the constant "how to turn off new intrusive feature" quests that occasionally you have to do. Setting something once and forgetting about it is tolerable. It's having to do it more than once that sets me off.

File indexing, a feature that I never asked for, seems finally under control. It's finally not sending me looking for the off button. Although, the number of times I've had to turn it off again after a new release? I really wish there was more respect for my preferences. Why is it on again??????? Good job fixing it but, jesus christ, why is it on again?

I'd like to not have to constantly set my audio output back to "Analog Surround 5.1 Output", turn the Mic off, and then turn the subwoofer back down. But this is Linux. If the last 20+ years have taught me anything it's that audio will always suck on Linux. Always. Forever. When someone replaces pipewire, in a few years, it will still suck. (BTW, bluetooth touches audio... connect the dots.)

But crashes? For me, they seem rare now. Fantastic job there.

without having to take on a whole bunch of the footguns that would come from working directly in a language like c++ or Rust.

Don't forget the footguns of working with developers who do those things. Ask them to do something simple and you get something complex and expensive after months of back and forth about what is wanted. You're likely to a framework for a one off SQL query.

I hear it being said already, "You're using software developers wrong!" Well, maybe software developers shouldn't be so hard to use?

That's not been my experience with the original Pis. We ended up mounting cards as read only because they wouldn't last otherwise. Syslog and various other processes, even with light IO would render the cards useless after a month or two.

I'm not surprised Experian's security is shit. Equafax proved that there are basically no consequences. Here's some basic free credit monitoring that you probably already had for free.

Clicking a button from the tool bar that shows a popup of some type (e.g. color chooser) doesn't display the popup. I'm not asking for an exotic behavior. No it's not NVIDIA's fault because I have no such hardware.

Can the mouse scroll speed be configured in KDE, nowadays?

Unfortunately KDE has gone full stupid in this regard. From the numerous bug reports, I think they decided that you can't please everyone so they should please nobody. Scroll speed is not deterministic to humans, who are not calculators. The intuitive thing is to scroll a consistent a amount per wheel tick. They used to do this but now it's a percentage of the content so sometimes it scrolls 14 lines and sometimes it scrolls 8.

I guess the behavior is different in Wayland because "x11 is dead" therefore only breaking changes make it into the x11 version. Some day they'll make the x11 version suck as bad as Wayland and then people will make the right choice. /s I'd be a bit less salty if I wasn't being asked to chose between two different sets of broken. I need LibreOffice to work so I'm using x11.

It won't run on perfectly fine hardware which manufactures EOL practically as it leaves the conveyor belt. They'd like the solution to everything be to buy a new one. So when Microsoft left it to manufactures to decide if a machine could run Windows 11, it was a lot of "nope". Yes even the ones with new enough TPM.

When everyone wants 10 bucks from you, 10 bucks isn't cheap. That model scales poorly at the PC price point.

They need to break Windows 10 and remove choice.

I went with an Intel 7260HMW BN for $20. Dual band with Bluetooth 4.0.

USB 3 can trash your WiFi/BT spectrum as many device manufactures provide inadequate shielding. I got some foil tape and carefully lined the inside of an external drive enclosure and fixed some intermittent WiFi issues. FCC should scrutinize USB devices more, I thinks. Probably wack-a-mole though.

So few buy used hardware. I got a used Dell laptop and the WiFi card was shit. Dell doesn't always make the right call but because WiFi card was a replaceable PCIe card, I was able to get more life out of the machine. On the one hand it was good for me. On the other hand it was bad for Dell because I didn't replace the whole machine. Dell is learning, however. Their new machines have every thing soldered in place with no pesky upgrade/repair options, not even a stray NVME or RAM slot. It's amazing they left a USB port.

I've used PCIe a lot for storage and networking applications in laptops, servers, and desktop form factors. It has allowed for much cheapskating--which is why it's got to go. Repair and expansion options are bad for business.

At some point when 50% of the world uses your service the rules must change.

It's worse than that. They've effectively levied a tax on everything (without representation). Even if you pay cash, you pay (e.g.) Visa if the vendor accepts Visa. Businesses are contractually obligated hide the transaction cost from the consumer. This means all products and services have their prices jacked up to cover the cost of accepting Visa, MasterCard, etc. Even if you're paying cash, you're paying into it.

"Cash back rewards" are essentially a discount on the tax they've imposed.

So they tax you, they decide what you can buy, and you don't get a say. Kinda fucked up.

Yeah it's kind of weird that people want things to work as well as they do in Xorg. While I completely understand that it works very well for you, the "for you" doesn't actually make it so for me.

While I understand that it's probably my fault for not discovering the same combination of software components and configuration that you did through brute force... Xorg no longer makes me do these sorts of things. Probably because it's not in a hurricane of development where every wheel is reimplemented monthly. You want people to switch to Wayland? Restart development on Xorg and introduce lots of breakage until it's just as much of a pain in the ass as Wayland.

I've tried it as recently as this year. The deal breaker? Toolbar popups in LibreOffice would not show. While I could submit bug reports to hundreds of different projects wait for them to be a duplicate of a closed won't-fix-not-our-bug-good-luck-figuring-out-who's-bug-it-is-becasue-they-sent-you-back-here, I just don't have the patience I used to have for that. I got to get something done. So, back to xorg until some update discards my preference and loads Wayland again.

Yeah, why should I be mad? Just be patient another 13 years for the pain points (which simultaneously don't exist) to get worked out.

Most common tools havent changed their names since win95

The trick is to rely on decades of acquired arcane knowledge about .exe filenames. What a great UI!

Now I try to write dumb and simple (yet sensible) code until there’s a good reason for abstractions.

Good abstraction is a lot harder than most think. We tote abstraction's benefits as a reason for abstraction but fail to recognize bad abstraction and how it completely negates any would be benefit.

Too often abstraction (so called) requires a lot of research into how it's implemented. By the time you figure out enough implementation details to use the abstraction, you could have implemented it yourself quicker. It saves no time or effort but you're stuck with it because existing code is hard to part with.

If you're not reliving your users of a shit ton of implementation details then it's just not good abstraction. Code for someone who doesn't want or have time to learn the details. Often this will be your future self despite your current believe that your mind is a steal trap and would never forget how you did this stuff.

I thought vitamin D supplements were lacking efficacy in studies and therefore we need to get sunlight.

I'm more excited about them reactivating some dormant genetic code that would make tomato spicy like their ancestors... what ever happened to that promise from some years ago?

Also SMS not nearly reliable enough. You should have alternatives for that reason alone. My cell carrier was blocking many SMS verification messages for a good two months. It caused me all kinds of problems when my credit union merged with another and I had to change account numbers all over the place. Many had the option of using an email address, but there were quite a few that it was SMS or play find the human on the 800 number.

If it really is that devoid of merit it'll die on its own.

Bring on the homeopathy! It hasn't died yet so it must have merit.

Is this some kind of a trend that I'm not up to date with?

It's called planned obsolescence and it's part of the factory-to-landfill pipeline. It's not exactly new.

Do we know how to make a long lasting laptop fan? Yes. Would nearly every consumer pay $0.25 more for a laptop with a longer lasting fan? Yes. Can you buy laptops with high quality fans? Yes, but seemingly only by dumb luck.

By the time you figure out that a product has a high failure part the company will no longer be manufacturing it and therefore reviews won't be relevant (granting relative immunity to bad reviews). And when every brand is doing it, there's no way for "free market" competition to sort it out. It's a race to the bottom. (3. 2. 1. Cue "The morality of protecting share holders eclipses the morality of ripping consumers off.")

I only buy used laptops now. The significant reduction in price is a reduction in risk. Also a used product has had "burn in" time to weed out the lemons. The engineer calculated xx% of fail-early laptops often aren't the ones being resold.

I'm bitter. I'm cynical. Despite being aware of my mind's ability to find patterns to confirm my biases... I'm really struggling to be excited about new products. I'm spent like nuclear fuel; I'm toxic. They say knowing is half the battle... not in psychology. Doesn't help me a damned bit.

Today's sponsor is Better Help. I should just stop now.

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Leakage tests really should be a strongly enforced part certification. I still find myself taking apart products to add foil tape to them. Go nerdy me I guess?

it makes the admin job feel unnecessarily messy

Many admins feel like a Jedi when they memorize all the trivia about a file's path.

There's no shortage of people in a particular profession that feed on unnecessary complexity even when the original reason for said complexity (i.e. tiny drives) doesn't exist any more.

Now if you'll excuse me I have to figure out why sound doesn't work on Linux in 2022 like it's 1997. No seriously, I legit have to do that now. Someone should really develop another system for sound, again.