vga42

Great question. Force of habit that I really should get better from.

USA used to be cool (or so I thought) back when I started participating in this place. They have sunk very low in the last 15 years.

Let's make this actionable. This is the last time I read or write here. Bye. You guys won't lose much but I will gain a lot.

I think you're absolutely on point and right that you shouldn't be listening to me, a potential internet nobody. There's no way you could tell me or anyone here apart from an AI at this point.

You should be listening to actual reporters, such as Jonathan Rauch from The Atlantic: https://archive.is/Maalh "Yes, it's Fascism"

Non-paywalled article here: https://archive.is/Maalh

Gabe is pretty cool and Valve is an amazing company that has done great things for both PC and Linux gaming. But this is not enough to counter the absolute shitshow that is USA right now.

But hey, they have midterms coming up this year. That's a great opportunity to redeem some of their earlier sanity. That is, if the democracy still exists then. It's not just the left that is worried -- many american centrists have started to wonder.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/america-fascism-tr... -- https://archive.is/Maalh

"Fascist" is not a buzzword. It's your political reality. Are you culpable of letting that reality be?

That's kind of an odd thing to point out. If my buds are stronger, I use less of them.

It's like having a bottle of beer vs bottle of whiskey. I don't exactly imbibe them in the same way, do I?

If only it was legal, I'd happily replace my alcohol use with cannabis, and I don't think I'm alone in my age group. Not a big surprise that that yields improved brain health.

I thought it was utterly interesting, like I was reading a sci-fi novel that was actually happening right now.

Sure, but how many people/companies are perfectly served by serverless functions + queues + gateway + database + file service? I'd guess >90%. How much of that remaining 10% can be adequately patched by lauching virtual servers?

Scaleway and OVHCloud both provide all of that. The problem is more about marketing and a modern variant of the good old "nobody got fired for buying IBM".

OpenStack by Huawei

If you mean to say that OpenStack is made by Huawei, that is not true. They are a major contributor and a platinum member of that open source project, though.

and it most likely works that way in your country as well.

Wow. It absolutely does not. What the fuck?

I have used this for a few hours now, and it's pretty great! I'm quite thirsty for replacing American tech with European tech, so it's pretty cool that Mistral is this good now.

It has broken editor integration (Zed) though at least for the time being. But the CLI works. Hopefully that's just a temporary thing -- as much as I like working in the terminal, this is a bit awkward.

Vibe keys seem to be somehow different from other API keys: I wasn't able to create a working key manually, but when navigated via a link that Mistral Vibe gave me, things started working. Or at least I think that was the reason.

If the officers believed the armed man they were scuffling with fired a shot then it wouldn't be murder.

Is that really how it works in USA? A belief that an incapacitated person fired an accidental shot is grounds for murder and execution? It is technically a murder even if those people legally have immunity, in the same way as the 1930s nazis committed crimes even though they were legal in their country.

Didn't the execution of Pretti get videoed? Wouldn't it be trivial to find out from the audio whether his gun fired accidentally before ICE murdered him?

And to be clear: they murdered him and as far as I can tell, none of them are facing any murder charges.

Helium Browser's existence finally probably weaned me off of Firefox. RIP, was nice using you for 20 years.

But don't worry guys, given my selection strategies' success lately, this will mean that Firefox's user count will start rapidly increasing.

I was vacationing in New York, and we went to some pretty standard-looking mall bookshop somewhere near Poughkeepsie some time in mid 90s. And I bought an interesting looking comic book, something I had never seen before.

I liked Dilbert for a long time, but Adams's Trump Dementia became so bad in the last decade that it completely tainted his legacy for me. His role in enabling Donald Trump to rise to power is undeniable, and his death makes me wish I had reserved a bottle of sparkling wine for the occasion.

I yearn for the time when it was possible to never meet your idols.

Sorry but there's no way #BEGIN_xxx is better than ```

Ok, I can give you that as a subjective thing you might have.

or 4-space indent.

Ok, you saying this practically invalidates every single opinion you have on everything. So thanks for playing, I won.

Seriously though, you don't have to like org.

Can anyone tell me an actual reason to use Org mode over Markdown?

I think the reason in general is simply that org-mode is better, i.e. more carefully defined. I'll mention the things I like more specifically:

- Link syntax in markdown is something I never remember how it goes. Org-mode is [[link][description]].

- Text styles in org-mode make more sense. In markdown, * is used for italics, * for bold. Additionally, * is for lists, which might be confusing.

- Markdown blocks are freaking awful and seem to work by luck more than anything else. Code blocks even worse -- they are made by indenting 4 spaces or a tab! I couldn't come up with a worse way to do that even if I tried. Org-mode has clear #BEGIN_xxx / #END_xxx blocks.

- Markdown has a weird YAML frontmatter syntax. Org-mode has keywords which can be attached to the whole document and properties, which can be attached to every heading.

- Org-mode has tags.

- Org-mode has timestamps.

hiding emergency door

That's a horrible mistake from their part, but has nothing to do with UX.

Curious how did you consider a car forcing a giant tablet interactions ... opening a "top of the line" ux, compared, say, to Kia EV6.

By having good taste, I guess?

1. Why Musk made such a hard-right turn politically, alienating most of his customers. People on the left were always far more likely to buy an EV than those on the right.

Yeah, makes no sense. Also anecdotally, I bought their EV out of concern for the environment and the thought that oil should be consumed as little as possible for geopolitical reasons.

Philip Low, a long-time peer and friend of Elon Musk offered one theory shortly after the nazi salutes: https://old.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/1ibajmf/philip_l... (sorry about the format, couldn't find a better source)

He claims that Musk is just attracted to power and trolling, and will do both cynically instead of from any kind of principles. He guesses that Musk was worried at the time of losing the support of some actual nazis in the actual US government and wanted to signal them publically.

I'm not sure if a cynical nazi supporter is better or worse than an actual nazi. Could be worse, because those are the people who could and should be making better choices.

Yeah, I was also utterly disappointed at Volkswagen early last year. After Musk's nazi moment, we started looking for a replacement, and after months of reading about how Tesla is the worst car that has ever existed, I thought this would be an easy trade.

But nope, turns out that Tesla's UX is actually top of the line and everybody else, even the best chinese models, are fumbling about, trying to catch Tesla's quality and failing.

ID.7 was absolutely the worst. As you say, the cars are good as cars, and indeed climbing into the car felt good. That shattered utterly in 10 seconds -- we talked loud with the family how neat the car felt, and turns out that the car was listening to us and started blabbing "sorry, I didn't get that" in loud volume over our conversation. Trying to find out how to permanently turned that feature off revealed how dismal the UX of the media system is. Perhaps a testament to the Android system it's built on.

It might be fastest I've ever experienced a mildly positive feeling dropping to absolute zero point.

VW needs to fire 80% of the interface designers they have, starting from the top and perhaps hiring somebody from Tesla to help them restart from scratch. They had the moment of a lifetime 2 years ago and they totally blew it.

This one is probably also -- if not completely invented by -- at least seriously boosted by russotrolls. And weaponized for several pro-Russia talking points, such as campaigning against Kamala Harris ("she is not against Israel so don't vote for her") and driving global gaze out of Ukraine.

I testdrove a BYD Sealion early last year. A presumptuous piece of junk with a lot of style over substance was my verdict. China seems to be really interested in over-doing americans in this sense.

Some scams are pretty great.

I'm always baffled by the language used for acquisitions. More correct would be, "ManusAI gets bought off by Meta".

I think software outsourcing will die with AI, since there's less and less reason to not just do everything in-house.

So the companies themselves that used to outsource before will capture the gains.

This would be awesome. However, EU declaring this is a bit like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy.

How to say that you don't understand taxation without saying you don't understand taxation.

I'm just guessing here: Because the "discussion" is either direct propaganda, or people affected by the propaganda spreading the propaganda.

Vibe coding benefits from hard limits relatively more than human coding. So in that sense, we should be coding in Rust (where raw performance is needed), Idris 2 or Haskell, and specifying with formal methods.

Perhaps the programming languages of the future will be designed with AI in mind: to properly put guardrails on it.

Could also be that the models just accelerate to the future so fast that they'll simply stop making mistakes. Then we'll be coding in Assembler, because why waste CPU time for anything else?