optimalquiet

A major example is the US drinking age. Federal highway funds, which provide money for interstate highways, major US routes, etc, are partially contingent on states (who are given authority over alcohol laws both by the general police power and the 21st Amendment) setting the minimum age for the legal purchase of alcohol at 21. The National Minimum Drinking Age Act withheld 10 percent of highway funds from states that didn't comply. The fact that it wasn't 100% let the Supreme Court allow it to slide, but eventually all the states did comply, and effectively the US has a drinking age set by the Federal government instead of the states even though the states technically have the power to set an age themselves.

The Federal government using the withholding of funds to get the states to do what it wants is a well-documented phenomenon.

Agreed. I think in and visualize in words, generally not images. I see something akin to [Spreeder](https://www.spreeder.com/app.html) in my head most of the time, and I often can somatically feel punctuation.

I've found they are increasingly doing this in ways that are somewhat creepy. For instance, you might share something, and the AI will say, "One of the things I most frequently notice..." or "What I often feel..."

It used to be that the "you are not an I and you must not pretend to have experiences" training that produced the "As a Large Language model, I don't have experiences like humans do, but..." in replies I remember from the early days of LLM chatbots kept these to the minimum.

But one of the things I most frequently notice is that LLMs increasingly make those claims, about things that are very obviously out of their wheelhouse as far as even theoretical experiences, like pretending to have played a video game.

If Canada is similar to the US, a mixture of SMS, Discord, and iMessage. The kids use Snapchat, your aunt uses Facebook messenger or iMessage, and occasionally someone might be into Telegram although mostly scammers. Teams or Slack for official workplace or college chat groups. GroupMe was popular for college groups when I was an undergraduate though that’s long since gone by the wayside.

Most importantly, if you show up as a “green bubble” person you will be lightly teased about it, including on a date.

Interesting, I’m an American English speaker but that’s how it feels natural to me to use dashes. Em-dashes with no spaces feels wrong for reasons I can’t articulate. This first usage—in this meandering sentence—feels bossy, like I can’t have a moment to read each word individually. But this second one — which feels more natural — lets the words and the punctuation breathe. I don’t actually know where I picked up this habit. Probably from the web.

Inevitably windows search fails to highlight what I’m looking for almost all of the time, and often doesn’t even find it at all. If I have an application installed, it picks the installer in the downloads folder. If I don’t have an app installed, it searches Bing for it. Sometimes it even searches when I do have the application installed!

Microsoft seems not to believe that users want to use search primarily as an application launcher, which is strange because Mac, Linux, and mobile have all converged on it.

My interpretation of what happened here is that a legislator who opposed the bill inserted the names of the lobbyists as a joke against the bill, which has now paid off. The article says that the original list did not include the names, they were added during the legislative amendment process by a legislator.

While corporate authorship of bills is a concern, I don’t think this particular mishap is a direct result of that and in fact seems to have been an attempt to subtly criticize it.

You’re entitled to your experience and spirituality, but nothing about Twitter or Bluesky has ever struck me as ‘divine.’ Rather than being a nihilistic flight from value, I think there’s far more value to be found in cultivating friendships and companions in the real world. There’s more divinity in a single hug from my wife than in everything I’ve ever read on the internet. Words have to bend to flesh at some point; we are embodied creatures. I’ve found my mental health improving massively when I take a step back from the firehose of social media and focus instead projects where I can use my hands and spending time with people I can eat with and hug.

Not quite. In order to make TLS certs work on a per-site basis, requests sent over HTTPS also include a virtual host indicator in cleartext that shows the hostname of the site you’re trying to connect to, so if the IP on the other end is hosting multiple domains it can find the right cert. For this reason some people feel that DNS over TLS is pretty pointless as a privacy measure.

Yeah -- it's happening as we speak.

For what it’s worth, I’m a student, and have had the benefit of seeing both the AWS and Azure web interfaces for the first time in the past couple of years. Azure was astoundingly more intuitive and less bizarre than AWS as someone with no experience working with the big clouds.

Even doing classwork involving AWS was an exercise in frustration. I couldn’t actually believe the sort of button trails and on-hover menus I was told to use to access various functions.

I don’t have the experience to evaluate the technical functionality, or whether AWS’s interface is better for experienced users, but I can definitely say it was far less approachable as a novice.

Imagine what we could have had in our communities if we hadn’t wasted $3,000,000,000,000 on Iraq.

What we would've had was $3,000,000,000,000 less debt, and still no splash pad filtration.

The Iraq war was put on the credit card.

Microblogging is one of the many aspects of the internet where the only winning move is not to play.

I see it used more often by hobbyists interested in crowding out alternatives they don’t like. “Why are you using snap? Flatpak is the future!” “What, you’re still using Xorg in nvidia? But Wayland is the future!”

And I like flatpak and Wayland! But the contexts I’m discussing aren’t “We’re creating the future of x at Company Y”… of course that’s a sales pitch that can be ignored. But there is a context where it’s more like bullying.

A phrase I hate even more than “modern” is “x is the future”, especially when used to describe a technology that only works for certain use cases.

It’s an attempt to use social pressure and bullying tactics to enforce a technological consensus. I particularly dislike it when it’s used to dismiss legitimate concerns with missing features in new technology instead of acknowledging room for growth and development and the real diversity in user needs.

I think Apple cares a lot about software.

On iPhones.

Macs used to be so great, but a lot of their sheen has worn off, and Microsoft has really improved their UI generally in the past 15 years even if there's still a lot of rough edges. MacOS is one of those things that seems like it was really impressive back in 2010 but hasn't kept up with UI development. The window management in particular feels retrograde; Windows and FOSS window managment has embraced snap-to-edge while Macs try and make people use the clunky full-screen mode that gets rid of your system UI. Terminal also feels increasingly outdated, trapped in BSD utilities; Linux has the superior GNU utilities while Windows now has WSL for people who live on the command line. (And PowerShell for sysadmins.)

iPads just get this weird franken-OS that has a lot of the theoretical power of MacOS, just glued to an iPhone interface.

To me, they're behind in desktop and tablet software, and are continuously trying to make up the difference. And not by following the trend of UI development, mind you, but by making their non-phone interfaces more like their highly popular phone interfaces. The iPhone has taken over the company.

and also has the fun side-effect of being a cute easter egg to anyone who went to star tours.

I don't think that was an explicit callout to Star Tours -- which opened at Disneyland years after RotJ came out (1983 and 1987). If anything, the easter egg went the opposite direction!

Windows 2000 was part of the professional NT line, though, and was the companion of Me for the millennium releases. As far as I know, 2000 wasn't marketed to home users. I think what the comment you replied to is saying is the the transition away from DOS wasn't completed for both professional and home markets until XP, which unified everything under NT for all markets.

Did blockchain startups ever provide any real value to end-users? Like, at all? Speaking from my technical but not SWE perspective, the only things I'm familiar with using the blockchain are cryptocurrency (obviously) and NFTs, which as far as I'm concerned are a scam.

AI does seem different in that regard, I think it is providing tremendous value to people. Just probably not in the random places where people are throwing it in where it doesn't actually fit.

As it turns out, the massive money generated by software produces quite a lot of status.

But the IT world is meaningfully different from software engineering. IT infrastructure (as distinct from creating software) pays less, generally, and is also regarded as much lower-status. IT is like auto mechanics to software engineering's automobile design. It's the blue collar equivalent, especially at the low level. At the high level, as far as I understand, it morphs with "cloud-engineering" or just general management and becomes higher-status.

Unfortunately, I think this comes from how the entrance into IT is gated by working on low-level ("have you tried turning it off and on again?") problems, and putting slightly awkward, new-to-the-workforce nerds in a position where they need to help a lot of people with their computer problems. Many of whom are (understandably!) frustrated that their computer systems aren't working and/or don't totally understand why they won't work. So IT gets to see people at their worst and most frustrated, and people get to see IT at its most awkward and least experienced. So hostility forms on both sides. And first impressions sometimes last very long.

I used to do the same. And I got it to a point where my feed was great, I could check it every few days and get updates from people I know and community organizations.

But the issue is, it seems Facebook is now injecting algorithmic content into the feed, so suddenly my feed was full of random internet drama (that the algorithm obviously pushed because it was maximally controversial, leading to more engagement).

I deactivated my account not long after, and don't miss it.

Soma-zone software in general is pretty neat for Mac power users. I especially like Launch Control, which lets you configure and inspect launchd (the mac service daemon) services.

A question: where did the hobbyist/small business crowd go?

And this is why, as a hobbyist, I’m very skeptical of, for lack of a better term, the consumer cloud. We’re not talking about AWS here, we’re talking about companies’ servers (that are actually AWS on the back-end) that they use to offer services to consumers. They insist on calling that “cloud” because everything has to be confusing, I guess. And I think that distinction gets lost in the translation between hobbyists/power users and IT professionals/software engineers. I think those two groups often miscommunicate, because they use the same terms in different ways, because their worlds are so different.

It’s not about on-premises vs cloud for corporations, it’s about control over your data and what Apple’s marketing once called “your digital life” (before they went all-in on cloud) for consumers, for normal people, whose recourse when a company does something wrong isn’t “hire the best lawyers in the business and sue them” but “get screwed.” I don’t care what corporations do with their infrastructure, my concern is my own digital life, which is more important to me than the market cap of FAANG.

I’ll do you one better, I use IaC techniques to configure VMs at home, on an old workstation I’ve turned into a server.

It’s great for hobbyists, too, and doesn’t require the cloud although I will admit it’s easier to go all the way when resources are totally spin-up-as-needed. But I don’t need to go all the way, I’m just a simple hobbyist.