nick486

I'm really surprised at the hurry. The EU, and many EU governments, have been ramming through deeply unpopular legislation at a breakneck pace for no apparent reason, lately.

It feels like the last turn in a board game where everyone is busy taking points with no regard for the impact of the decisions on the theoretical next turn - because there is no next turn. Its really weird.

blame-laundering mechanism

Also, I'm stealing this.

Where have the hardcore nerds gone?

Chased away by activists. I know of a couple guys who used to be active and eventually just gave up. There's only so much passive aggressive insinuations along the lines of "you're an evil person if you don't care about $issue" one can take, before feeling unwelcome, and just leaving. And that's especially true for often shy hardcore nerds.

Even if the money had been available. you can't just spawn millions of teachers out of nothing. there aren't that many people who can and want to do the job.

for me, some ads also utterly ruin the brand of the ad host.

For example: here in France we have this one company whose business model is "get a 18.xx€ refund on your order (20€/mo subscription)". its rather obvious how this kind of system makes money.

i had some elderly family members get scammed this way, and I absolutely refuse to ever return to any webside that displays this "offer from our partner". after checkout ofc.

so i get my train tickets on trainline, and amazon gets what businesses fnac and darty should have gotten. manomano must've lost a couple thousand euros of purchases from me already, hope it was worth it to them.

I guess thats one important upside of age verification systems I didn't think of. They encourage creativity and a healthy disregard for stupid rules.

what would be the point of the government fining itself though?

Now that I'm thinking of it, it would create the need for an extra gaggle of bureaucrats to oversee the process,so I suppose someone might see a point to it ...

Nah, sorry, enshittification is not "just an excuse". My current 2020 phone(xperia 5-ii - I wanted that sd slot&jack) is noticeably slower than when I got it, even though the battery is holding up decently(it basically needs to last a day, and it usually does). Software shops seem to get focused on testing their stuff on "modern" devices. It looks like, once your device starts to slip out of that "testing pool", things get increasingly buggy until it eventually makes general use enough of a pain to require replacement.

I think last couple years' improvements to battery tech made software take over batteries as the bigger contributor to device obsolescence.

So this change, while welcome, is a bit late.

good. now do the software enshittification part, which is the real driver of device obsolescence. being able to replace the battery is nice, but if the new battery lasts half as long because the software needs twice as much resources to perform the same tasks - you're not really fixing anything.

You don't have to replace the phone. You can go to some repair shop and get the battery replaced. It will be several times cheaper than a new phone.

Very few people do that. I don't. Because a) general software enshittification makes me need a more powerful decice anyway, and, more importantly, b) people are just happy to have an excuse to get the the new shiny.

its a question of degree. going to the barracks when you get called up by mail vs getting grabbed off the street, punched in the face and shoved into a bus headed for the training center.

Human responsibility is not the same as human decision making.

this is going to end up being interpreted as "well, the president signed off on the operation. see - there's a human in the loop!" - is it?

I think its also important that while people may callously say "just nuke'em", if you were to hand them a red button and tell them to go ahead and do it - most wouldn't. But that latter part doesn't end up in the training data.

China...where you cannot criticize the CCP?

I'd be more worried about the data being stolen and resold even faster than elsewhere tbh. staying out of the way of the ccp as a random guy on the other end of the world should be doable.

assuming the hegemon is benevolent. if the hegemon isnt, you have nowhere to run. welcome to the labor camp, please leave your belongings here, the showers are to the right.

saying unipolar is better is like saying absolute monarchy is better. sure it is, as long as the good king is alive.

Fair enough, but so is 800cal/h exercise. And I'd rather overestimate the intake.

I think it sort of depends on how you look at it. If 800 is an hour of running - that's probably "a lot" for quite a few people. But 800 is also just a sandwich. Which isn't all that much.

So if you view this from a time use perspective, just skipping that sandwich is way better than running for an hour. And many people can't spare an hour a day just to make up for a sandwich. Hence - "not a lot" - Its too expensive time-wise for the caloric balance effect it provides. Just skip the sandwich instead.

this will arguably be worse.

you'll just get replication rings in addition to citation rings.

People who cheat in their papers will have no issues cheating in their replication studies too. All this does, is give them a new tool to attack papers they don't like by faking a failed replication.

the alternative - not buying ads - is worse though. No one knows about you, and you sell nothing. so it ends up being seen as a cost of doing business. that is passed on to paying customers.

I'm really starting to wonder how much of the "ground level" inflation is actually caused by "passing on" the cost of anti-social behaviors to paying customers, as opposed to monetary policy shenanigans.

you would still be bottlenecked on human's ability to actually evaluate and verify what it is doing and reconciling that with what you wanted it to do.

this sort of assumes that most humans actually know what they want to do.

It is very untrue in my experience.

Its like most complaints I hear about AI art. yes, it is generic and bland. just like 90% of what human artists produce.

people use aws despite it being 2x-10x the cost of self hosting. cost isnt everything.

questioning someone's moral authority isnt equivalent to supporting his opponent.

when evil dies, the need to pretend to be good in the face of it, dies as well.

Its always been foggy. Even without AI, you were always at risk of having your field disrupted by some tech you didn't see coming.

AI will probably replace the bottom ~30-70%(depends who you ask) of dev jobs. Dont get caught in the dead zone when the bottom falls out.

Exactly how we'll train good devs in the future, if we don't give them a financially stable environment environment to learn in while they're bad, is an open question.

"it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence.

I wonder for how long this will keep working. Can't be too hard to prompt an AI to avoid "tells" like this one...

Update and Shutdown

and if you pick that, there's a high chance that it will reboot and leave your pc running anyway.

"sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from stupidity."

Last time i had to get a visa through these kind of channels, it looked almost deliberate. Outright bribing is now frowned upon, so they make the visa process as frustrating and opaque as possible. So that people have to either waste several days at the embassy, or go through one of those visa agencies instead. You pay for a totally legit above-the-table service, but it is effectively a "socially accepted bribe". And the administrative problem magically disappears.

Taking a zoom call in a car sucks. Taking one in a train with face to face seating, wifi, Power plus and a table between you is a much better experience.

Not for all the other people around you, no.

its how most home networks already work, when you think of it. you have a small locked down isp-provided technically-a-computer, that manages your connection, and behind that, you have all your own stuff on your home network.

if anything, it would be mobile computing "pulling the modem out of the computer", like home desktops did in the 90s. I probably still have that 14.4k pcmcia modem card laying around somewhere...

realistically, the end point for moderately tech savvy folks is going to a be two-device setup. one cheap phone for basic communication , all the corpo stuff like banking and shirt-and-tie social media + a wifi hotspot. then a second "practical use" device that uses the hotspot, that you fully control and do your tinkering with.

edit: coming to think of it, teaching people to have a device for the "clean stuff" and separate one for the "stupid stuff" could even turn out to be a benefit.