I think LLMs are fine for specific uses. A useful technology for brainstorming, debugging code, generic code examples, etc. People are just weary of oligarchs mandating how we use technology. We want to be customers but they want to instead shape how we work, as if we are livestock

It’s because they have taken too much of the economy for themselves. Too much wealth in the hands of too few. The wisdom of crowds dissipates and they move as much more of a herd, and more erratically. Things begin to swing from one shiny object to another more quickly, with nothing to keep their greed in check

Servo is new web engine that Mozilla was building with Rust. Both Servo and Rust were initially developed by brilliant Mozilla engineers, cast aside by their incompetent, corrupt leadership and only thrived when they were unyoked from Mozilla, where good ideas go to die

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If you’re familiar with the controversy around the Honey coupon addon, there are a lot of parallels in terms of privacy, ethics etc.

Eh in my pretty touristy hotel I was not able to use Google or Meta sites on wifi. But I was surprised vpn worked and allowed me to access anything I wanted over wifi. I had prepared with shadowsocks configured as a contingency but didn’t end up needing it. But people visiting a year earlier had reported vpn did not work for them.

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They can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Everyday Iranians know what the world outside is like. They can’t suddenly become a black box like North Korea. But maybe a few decades of murdering protesters, like mowing the grass, will allow them to limp along in the East German model. Where people know what is available outside but are too afraid and demoralized to make an organized resistance

China seems to vary. When I was there, VPNs worked, even Meta and Google sites were accessible on my T-mobile SIM. Other times those things are not accessible

The committee tried to appease Trump by offering it to a Venezuelan right winger. They learned the lesson so many have learned; that these people cannot be met halfway, if you give them an inch they WILL take a foot.

I am worried, because there are increasing cases where open source docs are going offline because they can’t take the bandwidth costs of the big LLM bots recrawling hundreds of times per day. Wikipedia is also getting hammered. There is so much waste and diminishing returns

How the hell else are PMs going to get positive reviews this quarter? Waiting for Excel, Word, Powerpoint and Windows to all be called Copilot

The article doesn’t single out Tesla. They call it Tesla-style since they pioneered this kind of design and most Americans associate Tesla with it, but as the article mentions, in China, various brands have adopted that motorized retractable handle setup, or the push to expose handle of the Model 3, or the complete lack of handle like the Cybertruck. I was in a couple EVs when I visited China and each time was completely mystified on how to get in the car, lol. Because these retracting handles are not standardized, it produces hazards, such as when people are rushing to pull a driver from a sinking or burning car, when every second counts.

I still feel the handles where you have to press to make it appear are unintuitive and an example of form over safety. I have used them in Ubers and I always have a quarter second remembering how to open them. I don’t want a first responder to have to deal with that delay.

These recessed handles usually have some sort of fallback. For me, I don’t want rescuers to have a single second of uncertainty of how to open my car. They should be able to quickly yank the door open, not fumble for some recessed/hidden button. Every second counts.

I have long observed that moving parts, particularly involving motors, are destined to give me grief as a car ages. The difference is that little motorized interior luxuries aren’t going to prevent people from pulling my unconscious body out of a burning wreck, while these door handles have for dozens of people

In Python it can work but sometimes with crazy inefficient methods incorporated. In obscure geospatial stuff it often loses the plot. Still occasionally recommends functions that don’t exist

Our economy increasingly is consumed to serve the rich. They are eating the world. Grocery stores increasingly cater to the wealthy. So do the automakers. Billionaires are buying up whole city blocks for themselves. And now we won’t be able to buy electronics because they’ve taken the resources for their speculative investments, and if they crash the economy our tax dollars will be appropriated to bail them out. It’s almost like we’re barreling towards a violent confrontation between the classes…

I wonder if normally, such a light outage would trigger a remote operator to intervene and drive the car through the intersection, but the sheer number of disrupted lights, combined with the spotty connection due to parts of cell network going down caused the remote operator system to not be able to keep up across the city.

I would recommend playing a mediocre game you don’t intend to replay. If you’re anything like me, I associate movies and games with the feeling of sickness I felt watching it. So Shadow of the Colossus, for some reason, is strongly associated with the feeling I had being home sick playing it as a teenager. I still replay it but have that kind of aftertaste of the memory lol. I similarly associate the movie Dark City with having chicken pox!