It all makes so much more sense when you accept the fact that the vast majority of the population doesn’t know what the Windows Terminal is, but instead can tell you every detail about Taylor Swift’s engagement.

Sorry for your loss. Linux is there for you though.

Not having access to Alexa and other invasive products sounds liberating, not a punishment.

The tools to manufacture content are more accessible, sure. But again, information has always been easy to manufacture. Consider a simple headline:

[Group A] kills 5 [Group B] people in terrorist plot.

I used no AI tools to generate it, yet I was able to create it with minimal effort nonetheless. You would be rightfully skeptical to question its veracity unless you recognized my authority.

The content is not important. The person speaking it and your relationship of trust with them is. The evidence is only so good as the chain of custody leading to the origin of that piece of evidence.

Not only that, but a lot of people already avoid hard truths, and seek to affirm their own belief system. It is soothing to believe the headline if you identify as a member of Group B and painful if you identify as a member of Group A. That phenomena does not change with AI.

Our relationship with the truth is already extremely flawed. It has always been a giant mistake to treat information as the truth because it looks a certain way. Maybe a saturation of misinformation is the inoculation we need to finally break that habit and force ourselves to peg information to a verifiable origin (the reality we can experience personally, as we do with simple critical thinking skills). Or maybe nothing will change because people don’t actually want the truth, they just want to soothe themselves. I guess my point is we are already in a very bad place with the truth, and it seems like there isn’t much room for it to get any worse.

If you just want to know when the clothes are dry, there’s an easier way that keeps you in full control: put a ct clamp on the power cord. Doubles as energy monitoring. You can then block that crappy wifi spying system off altogether.

Yes, there’s that, but it’s also just straight up gaslighting as a means to bully sovereign countries and further brainwash people into whatever reality the administration dictates. Next time, it’ll be an executive order to have Greenland renamed, etc. The pen truely is mightier than the sword.

The electorate is the final check on power. The electorate failed their responsibility. The electorate now has to suffer the consequences of their actions.

Trump’s power is not derived from a piece of paper. That was the Democrats mistake.

Trump’s power comes directly from the people. In a democracy, ultimately the people get the last say.

The transactions are far from over. There are many more transactions to come. From as little as continuing to support Trump-freindly representatives, all the way up to not actively rebelling against his administration.

All people deserve the fruits of their labour. But not all labour bears fruit worth harvesting.

And I say that fully in support of the idea that unchecked capitalism doesn’t have all the solutions to properly recognizing the value of toilet plunging.

Honestly, UBI probably cuts through all those problems, including the elephant in the room which is the march of automation continues to devalue more and more and more labour.

If we don’t learn, then WTF are we doing with ourselves. The human existence is the pursuit of knowledge. The only depressing thing here, IMO, is the idea that living out a life as grazing cattle, concerned with nothing more than gorging oneself with the next meal is the only reason to live.

Comfortable? Sure. Self-actualized? Not a chance. There’s more to life than living out only the most basic biological needs.

Not all jobs are measured by time spent on the clock, so no it doesn’t have to be that way. Many jobs can and should be measured by simply meeting productivity requirements. A parking attendants job is being present on shift because that is a requirement of that job. But a programmer’s job is to create software that performs a certain way. There is no time requirement of the product there.

Just cause you suffered your way through it doesn’t mean you should encourage others to do the same.

You are not wrong about the lack of corporate culture. But at the end of the day, is that worth giving up family time, company of your pets, a corner office of your choosing, with access to your own fridge and amenities, being able to receive people at the door at reasonable hours, and not having to commute asinine hours?

Many people will reject that notion.

But here’s the kicker: companies don’t care about your well being. They only care about the bottom line. What incentive do they have to cater to your needs? None, other than the minimum for employee retention.

This idea of “team building” is just smoke and mirrors. An excuse to not have to admit the real reason: adapting away from buts-in-seats as a performance measure is hard.

Just ask if they are law enforcement. If they say no or say nothing, then assume they are just some creepy citizen and stay away. If they say yes but can’t produce a badge, they have instantly committed impersonation.

Law enforcement has to identify itself in an official capacity if you are being detained or questioned. This should be obvious. Policing powers are only given to police officers, so it behooves the police to be very clear that they are the police.

The carbon sequestered in the earth in the form of coal, oil and gas hasn’t always been in the earth. After all, hydro carbons are in fact hundreds of millions of years of dead trees buried under mud sequestering atmospheric CO2. Which implies there was a time with all that CO2 in the air yet still trees to capture it. By releasing it all, we reset the biosphere’s clock to about a time when earth supported a different kind of life (one without us in it), but life nonetheless.

Frankly, the comparisons to Mars and Venus seem a bit overblown.

Driving off with the rental car is a fine analogy if we were comparing this to not returning a DVD you rented.

But this is not that. And that is kind of the point.

Piracy is a breach of contract for sure. The point the author is trying to make is that our current licensing contracts around media are out of touch with the social contract (you pay for something, you get it).

Hence the moral hazard. So companies will flaunt the social contract (like in the case of Sony) with impunity but will get rightous as soon as people flaunt the legal contract. It’s a double standard, where all the power is in the hands of those with the biggest legal department.

You can’t define “theft” untill you first define justice. And if consumers and media holders can’t even agree to a just system, then why bother categorizing anything as theft at all?

Cataloging individual DNA data casually at a massive scale opens the door for massive genetic discrimination of all kinds, from discriminatory health insurance premiums and hiring discrimination to aparthied, eugenics, and genocide. “Don’t be silly that’ll never happen here.” Is the height of affluent arrogance.

Humans have proven themselves to be fully capable of these horrors, it is just a matter of time until it happens again, and when we create tools of consolidated power-- just like IBM created machines that enabled Nazi concentration camps–we only increase the chance of enabling some deranged element of society oto repeat these catastrophic horrors.

All that downside just so we can consume 15 minutes of dopamine.

https://youtu.be/yYAw79386WI

That’s a weird way of saying that all manufacturers will from now adhere to the NACS or SAE J3400 charge standard, further breaking down the barriers to locked in–or monopolized–charge networks. It’s also a very weird way of saying that a common charge standard will further diversify stakeholdership in an already pretty diversified charge network stakeholdership ecosystem.

Musk isn’t even Tesla’s founder, BTW. Musk just bought the place.

Typing characters is maybe 1% of the job. The other 99% is understanding how the change affects everything else. Changing a single line of code in a function called by 1000 other functions each themselves called in 10 other functions can still potentially be more work and a bigger change than changing 9000 lines of code in a function called once.

Debatable whether minified JS is “open source”, in the same way that compiled machine code is technically still visible, just unfeasible to comprehend (despite, or perhaps in spite of decompilers).

Anyway, minified JS lacks comments and prompts to read from. The explanation I have accepted is just the sheer massive quantity of JS code and libraries coupled with all the documentation surrounding it.