themagician

Search doesn’t work well anymore anyway. Half of what used to be searchable has either been consolidated or is gated.

Gmail search doesn’t work well either. It simply doesn’t find things. Almost as if they have stopped indexing and repurposed resources towards LLMs.

And whatever there is left to index and search has been completely overrun with slop.

Search is over. Internet as we knew it is over. Something new has emerged in its place, and we are still calling the new thing the old thing.

LTSC is the “real” Windows. It’s so boring and terrific.

What I don’t understand is why they don’t make it more available. Just let people pay for it. I do not understand why they don’t.

Please just make W11 IOT LTSC more available. Please. Pretty please?

It is primarily driven by the expansion of the diagnosis itself. DSM-3 Autism (1980) is quite different from DSM-5 Autism (today). We use the same word to describe two different things. Today's autism includes things that used to have totally different names. It also "allows" for a diagnosis much later in life. Autism used to be something very specific and discreet. From another perspective, the rate may not be soaring. That is, many more people in the 1980s and 1990s would be autistic by today's new standard.

I would 100% pay for this, as long as it let me login with my YouTube account to remove the ads.

This is happening everywhere. In every industry.

Our economy is being propped up by this. From manufacturing to software engineering, this is how the US economy is continuing to "flourish" from a macroeconomic perspective. Margin is being preserved by reducing liabilities and relying on a combination of increased workload and automation that is "good enough" to get to the next step—but assumes there is a next step and we can get there. Sustainable over the short term. Winning strategy if AGI can be achieved. Catastrophic failure if it turns out the technology has plateaued.

Maximum leverage. This is the American way, honestly. We are all kind of screwed if AI doesn't pan out.

The pairing has become almost flawless as well. Years ago, it was slow and inconsistent, but now the hotspot feature is almost perfect and automatic. Honestly, I don’t really think about it anymore.

Patient: "Doctor, it hurts when I do this." Doctor: "Then don't do that!"

Only because people drive everywhere. If you live in a well designed city you just walk everywhere and you don't have to do anything extra.

It's only hard because we make it hard.

"That golden age was short lived because all our favorite websites were unprofitable and shutdown."

Painfully true.

Monopoly in charge of the world's video content shows users what is most profitable instead of what they want to see. "Content creators" suffer as a result. Brain rot content is real, it's profitable, and it's only going to get "worse".

Does anyone remember the internet before pop-up blockers? Like, right before. It felt like the same thing to me. The internet was infested with pop-ups and becoming borderline unusable, and then comes along the pop-up blocker (and other things, but I'm simplifying here) and there was a "golden age" which is now giving way to a new wave of advertising-based atrophy. Not sure what happens next.

Love it.

Yeah, I didn't even account for that. Drive enough and you get into an accident. Add all the hours and cost to dealing with that. You'll probably get somewhat injured, even if minor. Physical therapy and healing time. Lifelong back pain. Now you DO need to drive to a gym for physical therapy. More car time.

I also think about how my nutrition has declined DRAMATICALLY with a car. Gone are the days of fresh lettuce and berries unless you drive to the grocery store every day. Gas stations should sell ozempic at the pump.

Issue for me with cars isn't space vs no space, it's the amount of stress, time and money that is wasted in car-centered societies. 20 minutes to work. 20 minutes home. Add another 20 minutes if you do anything else but home to work. That's an hour a day. You've also wasted an hour doing nothing that might have otherwise been spent walking. Now you need to borrow another hour for the gym or some kind of physical activity… and that assumes you don't drive to a gym (one of the the most bizarre things people do). But that's two hours a day that just feels "wasted," and that's a best case scenario. Then there is the cost of the car, insurance, gas, maintenance. The hours that all translates into. Add it all up over the year and you spend like 15-20% of your waking hours dealing with the reality of the car. For some, it's more.

I also feel like a peculiar externality of car-centric society is anger. I get why. You are wasting all your time in the car. You aren't walking. No exercise. Fast food. Parking. I can see why people who are pro-car want space—they are angry all the time. They need space to cool off. There is even a face that I call "car face" which is that kinda pissed off for no reason always in a rush face. People who "love cars" and don't find it "stressful at all" seem to have this face to the max.

BTW can your neighbor, who keeps saying that he's going to kill you, or maybe your friend, obtain a machine gun?

Definitely. This is America. There is nothing I can do to stop them.

Would you approve of that?

No, but I don’t really have much of a say in the matter, and that’s kind of the point. I just have to accept it and try to make peace with my neighbor.

Are you suggesting that if your neighbor threatens you that you should just go over and murder them first?

USA says Iran can't have nuclear weapons. Says China can't have modern silicon.

USA only has a limited amount of time left to dictate these things. We are playing with fire before the world order shifts. It is inevitable, and we would all be better off recognizing this and working towards a better future for all of humanity than trying to pretend like the USA is always going to be able to dictate who gets to do what.

Am I seeing something different than anybody else?

Maybe. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow.

As others have mentioned, the core problem with Meta today is the dark patterns. They move, edit, and remove UI elements specifically to optimize against whatever behavior they want the user to take. I'm always amazed when things end up posted, shared, or alterated in a way I did not intened or can't even remember having taken an action against. Things just seem to happen with Meta products… even for accounts that are idle.

And if you spend enough time with Meta products, you'll start to realize that no two users are guaranteed to have the same experience. There is no standard experience. The experience changes based on region and langauge and honestly who knows what else. They are constantly testing and optimizing for dark patterns in production. Spend an hour with the Meta Business Suite. The entire platform is essentially a dark pattern labyrinth of broken links, broken features, and UI elements that go nowhere or to deprecated functions. One team is trying to get you do X and use feature Y, and another team is trying to get you to do Z and use feature W. Business Suite just mashes it all together. You could freeze the codebase today and study Business Suite for months and you'd find that it's dark patterns all the way down.

No people, no supply chain, and no total lack of environmental regulations mean most manufacturing jobs are not coming back no matter what the tariffs are. It's not just one reason that the manufacturing jobs have left, but a conflation of reasons.

Unless… well, unless you eliminate the EPA, invade Canada and Greenland and take their raw materials, and make people so poor that they take up factory jobs again.

Courier will only pay the tax if it's a DDP solution, and then bill it back to the actual merchant. FedEx, DHL, and UPS provide this as an option. If it goes USPS, or no DDP solution is in place, it's going DDU and it will simply be stuck in a sufferance warehouse or at the local post office until the recipient comes in and pays the bill.

This is an interesting idea, and I am actually curious what Apple is going to do going forward. A "Snow Leopard"-esque release would be nice, but I think what would be better is an LTS release. Historically, you get a new Mac and you usually only get 5-6 years before they drop your model from the latest release. This has always made some sense to me, as after 4-6 years, you do start to feel it.

I bought an M1 Max that is now almost 4 years old and it still feels new to me. I can't really imagine a change that would happen in the next 2 years that would make this thing feel slow where an M3 would feel sufficient, so I'm curious to see if Apple really does just go hardcore on forced obsolescence going forward. I have a few M series devies now, from M1 to M3, and I honestly cannot tell the difference other than export times for video.

I can imagine some kind of architecture change that might come with an M6 or something that would force an upgrade path, but I can't see any reason other than just forcing upgrades to drop support between M1-M5. Maybe if there is a really hard push next year into 8K video? Never even tried to edit 8K, so I don't know. I'm guessing an M1 might feel sluggish?

It's actually wild to imagine what could be done, with current compute power, if you had the full genome of every person in the US in addition to their healthcare records. I would bet that you'd be able to determine, with high confidence, the probability of many serious health conditions years or even decades before symptoms appear. And it would completely change the manufacture and administration of medicines. It would change the course of human history.

Of course, we'd totally !@#$ it up and use it to put group X, Y, and Z in camps or try to breed super soldiers.

The main risk is denial of insurance due to genetics. Insurance company buys database and uses it in the future to deny claims or terminate policies.

What is there to even search anymore? Almost everything is gated, and whatever remains public is connected a faucet that pumps out AI slop at an ever increasing rate.

The internet consumed itself. Telling someone to, "Just Google it," is now terrible general advice.

They are trying, and will eventually catch up, the same way they have in software and in hardware in many other spaces. Maybe it will take another 10 years. Maybe another 10 months.

This idea that EUVL is—and always will be—outside of the reach of China is, frankly, silly. It's a silly strategy to maintain dominance. They will straight up steal the technology if needed.

We should stop pretending like we can roadblock the technological development of the largest country. It's just going to make the fall that much harder. Once they do attain the ability to manufactuer EUVL domestically, capital is going to flood out of US tech stocks like no tomorrow.

You haven't seen anything that hints at it, because most news about what happens in China doesn't leave China. The propoganda machine is hard at work reminding you that China is terrible and eveyrone in China is poor. You'll learn about China catching up only after it's already happened.

When you are Elon, or Trump, or even a moderately succesful business… all the government does (or at least what you perceive) is tell you no. You can't dump that here, you can't build that there, you can't fire that person for that reason, you can't do that without a permit, etc.. They just want to clear all the roadblocks out of the way for their PERSONAL gains.

Get rid of the government and you can do whatever you want. That is what they want. These are people who feel they have "won" the game of capitalism, and were still told, "No." That greatly upset them. How can a winner be told they can't do something?

A big part of what the government does is provide stability. It's supposed to be slow an inefficient. It provides a lot of jobs to people who are otherwise unemployable.

If we aim for 100% efficiency we end up with massive unemployment, because a lot of jobs and businesses are just not necessary. We all just got to experience that first hand, as when COVID hit something like 1/3rd of people either stop worked or worked massive reduced hours and the truth of the matter is the world kept spinning JUST FINE, save for a some inconveniences.

The more efficient things becomes, the more another mechanism is needed to control people, so you are going to eventually have to bring back some kind of formal class system or slavery.

It's actually wireless, via 5G as part of the AI designed MRNA vaccine.

Softbank is being granted a block of TRUMP MEMES, the price of which will skyrocket when they are included in the bucket of crypto assets purchased as part of the crypto reserve.

"People don't want to see arbitrary fake worlds or places on earth that aren't real."

What? This is 90% of the Instagram/TikTok experience, and has been for years. No one cares if something is real. They care how it makes them feel.

The audience for this is every "creator" or "influecner". No one cares if the content is fake. They'll sell you a vacation package to a destination that doesn't exist and people will still rate it 3/5 stars for a $15 Starbucks gift card.

Affinity was acquired by Canva.