edwcross

18 dagen geledendiscuss

Yes but for local political points, they left Twitter last year, because "it was trendy". Besides, lots of old people living here, so they can't leave Facebook, otherwise the old people won't get their news!

As if they cared, most news are only useful for working people and families anyway... but oh well, they vote, they have time to complain loudly, and they have all the houses around here (because of course, why would they move to a better-suited flat place, and leave their now-too-large-for-a-couple houses so that families could move instead?), so the mayor has to be on Facebook, and not on Bluesky or Mastodon or somewhere else.

edwcross

18 dagen geledendiscuss

Law forbids my local administrative entities from engaging with porn and gambling. Yet they force me to use Facebook if I want to see events that are happening (and paid with my taxes).

So, sorry, but the liberal ideal paradise of "let loose and people will choose" does not work in practice, at least where I live. I need some laws to force my less tech-savvy nearby citizens to make the right choices.

edwcross

30 dagen geledendiscuss

It requires a paid account though, doesn't it?

edwcross

vorige maanddiscuss

Does it affect the photo quality? It used to require letting go of the default photo app and thus a downgrade in photo processing.

edwcross

2 maanden geledendiscuss

I worked in a building that had that kind of "smart" controls. It was anything but.

In practice, it started opening and closing shutters for no reason, when clouds obscured the sun, and then went away. Or even when some sort of reflection hit some sensor, somewhere in the building.

I'm sure it's doable, but unlike factories, where automation is related to income and thus profits, most commercial buildings are built by the cheapest of cheaters, and so they will skimp on sensor, on intelligence, on integration, or whatever, just to follow the minimally-compliant features. So you get all kinds of erratic behavior, lack of redundancy, stupid intelligence that ends up overridden by humans.

edwcross

2 maanden geledendiscuss

Are there modern kits that connect similar to this one? Instead of requiring breadboards and cables?

edwcross

2 maanden geledendiscuss

Interestingly, the mobile version of the website contains a hamburger menu with an "Equipe" (Team) link that returns a 404 error (https://soberania.ai/equipe).

This link is absent from the desktop version.

Isn't it a bit odd that the team responsible for it is nowhere to be credited?

edwcross

3 maanden geledendiscuss

OCaml has had labeled arguments for decades, so I assumed other languages would have added something similar by now. In C-style, it would be like:

  createUser(user, ~isAdmin:true, ~sendWelcomeEmail:false)

Even though in OCaml's functional style it is actually like this:

  createUser user ~isAdmin:true ~sendWelcomeEmail:false

Using the fact that a variable named exactly like a labeled argument is automatically assigned to it, we can make the call more concise (especially if reusing existing variables):

  let isAdmin = true in
  let sendWelcomeEmail = false in
  createUser user ~isAdmin ~sendWelcomeEmail

edwcross

3 maanden geledendiscuss

It must be an issue with the European implementation, but I have a Costco not very far from home, and yet I never stepped inside.

Because simply asking to see what it sells requires me to subscribe upfront.

It's not like I cannot buy without a membership card; that is perfectly understandable. But I cannot even see what's sold inside, which prevents me from knowing if I actually want to become a member. They do have a "catalogue" of sorts... showing the prices of about 30 products or so. That's all. And the website describing the general aisles, with a few pictures.

So, they want me to subscribe to something before I can even see what they have to offer? What the heck is with that?

On the other hand, you can just walk straight to the food court and buy pizza, soda, and cookies, without being a member.

Is this how things work in the US as well? If so, how is that justified?

edwcross

3 maanden geledendiscuss

> I promise I won't be a dumbass with them

That's not very empathic of fellow people who might just have mistakenly forgotten food in the container.

It's not like they were intentionally using this for brewing some illegal substance or misusing it in a way specifically forbidden in the manual or obviously unsafe (e.g. removing a magnetron and all of its protections from a microwave to make pretty wood carvings).

edwcross

3 maanden geledendiscuss

c-testsuite is not made by the author of Kefir.

edwcross

3 maanden geledendiscuss

Relevant ACOUP (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, Bret Devereaux's military history blog) post: https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower...

edwcross

4 maanden geledendiscuss

Great! I'll finally be able to buy all commerce spots in Berlin (cheapest city) to avoid any competition, and _then_ open a restaurant.

I used to deal only with "ice cream" (illegal weapons) trading, buying in one city and selling them on another, to quickly earn lots of money, and then buying commercial spots but never opening them (too much hassle, having to micro-manage shops).

But after having bought about 200 or so, the game would inevitably crash a few weeks after my save file, so in the end I stopped playing it. I never got the exact details about the bug, but I hope this remake won't have it!

Besides that, the most fun thing was trying weird pizza recipes and seeing that the taste algorithm was a bit weird. I could put lots of chicken, or pineapple, and mix a few ingredients, and have some age groups rate them very highly.

But sabotaging the competition was still funnier than handling a normal business.

edwcross

4 maanden geledendiscuss

What is the "BioTIER-refuse" thing mentioned in the "Bioweapons Refusal" graph?

I Googled it and found absolutely nothing.

Well, to be honest, I got 100% of websites containing the French word "boîtier" (box) with a typo.

Even on Google Scholar, the closest match is "BioTiER (Biological Training in Education and Research) Scholars Program", which is at least 10 years old and has nothing to do with that.

Is that an AI-generated image with an AI-generated name that has no physical existence?

edwcross

4 maanden geledendiscuss

Fratello. Must be a bro.

edwcross

4 maanden geledendiscuss

Indeed.

If Karen from Compliance cared, she could (and should) inform her superiors of what just happened. Let them know how much their procedure cost, in time and money. Call the IT people and say "I have a fax machine printing 500 pages". Get it noted somewhere. Reported. Make statistics out of it.

It can be as simple as an e-mail. Or she can send the entire stack of pages as a souvenir. If she cannot be bothered to do anything about it, then maybe it's not such a problem for her after all.

But keeping silent about it, is being complicit.

edwcross

4 maanden geledendiscuss

One of the only good things I got from MtG is Card Forge (https://card-forge.github.io/forge/), an open-source unofficial rule engine that also contains a desktop and a mobile app.

They allow playing a game similar to the old Shandalar from Microprose, in which you wander around a world dueling enemies (playing MtG against them), getting money and resources, and improving your deck until you can beat the big bosses.

It's one of the best ways to play the game: single-player, offline, and unofficial. Therefore you can have almost any card in existence without having to gamble with real-world money. It lets you enjoy the strategic part of the game and its meta, including deck building. The only downside is that the single-player game robs you of part of the charm, that is playing with other people.

edwcross

4 maanden geledendiscuss

I had a similar situation with a chatbot: I posted a highly technical question, got a very fast reply with mostly correct data. Asked a follow-up question, got a precise reply. Asked to clarify something, got a human-written message (all lowercase, very short, so easy to distinguish from the previous LLM answers).

Unfortunately, the human behind it was not technically-savvy enough to clarify a point, so I had to either accept the LLM response, or quit trying. But at least it saved me the time from trying to explain to a level 1 support person that I knew exactly what I was asking about.

edwcross

4 maanden geledendiscuss

Doing undeclared work.

Just had it happen to a friend: needed a plumber, impossible to find anything reliable (no one in town knows of a reliable plumber; it's a rare find). All Google Maps results contained lots of paid 5-star reviews (ratings with a full, typo-less phrase, praising the company in very generic terms, and the only review for that profile), so he had to pick one of them anyway.

Guy shows up, doesn't present a quote before doing the work (mandatory for >150€), does a mess but fixes the issue in less than 30 minutes, bills 200€, or 250€ if you want a receipt. No paperwork whatsoever, and in a position to physically harm you or do damage to your home if you refuse. And that's a "good" one. Locksmiths that charge 500€ or more for 10-minute jobs are a dozen a legion.

Then, these same people start buying cheap houses here and there, and in 20 years they'll be worth so much money that they'll become rich landlords and live on rent alone.

Several friends during PhD were renting cheap apartments whose owners were truck drivers, electricians, etc.

The point is, concentration of wealth and never-ending property values going up is only going to make becoming renter a better and better deal. And every profession that caters to renters is going to get some share of that money.

edwcross

4 maanden geledendiscuss

Not sure how it works in the US, but in some parts of Europe, blue collar trades are currently much better, for several reasons:

- Price of housing and associated maintenance keeps rising, and so do small jobs like fixing plumbing, gardening, etc; - You can easily avoid paying VAT if you know how to, so that's a 20% increase, or even more, if you can benefit from social services (e.g. since you don't earn a lot, you pay less for several services); - Doing the fixes yourself saves lots of money; - Avoids several burn out and mental health issues related to stress such as academia, bullshit jobs, etc; - No need to spend years in school, so you can save money earlier and invest it.

One disadvantage is that the barrier to entry is somewhat low; but the PhD students also have to compete with cheap international labor, so in the end, someone 25 years old that just left grad school is happy to earn, say, 2000€, while someone in the trades can easily make 200€/day with just one appointment.

So, if you're physically fit for blue collar work, there are currently few reasons not do it.

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