I was a Sega kid in the Genesis generation. A friend of mine got a Saturn and I so desperately wanted to like Nights because it was the thing for Saturn. I didn’t like it at all. It felt hard to control, hard to understand, and was just not pleasant for me.
Meanwhile, a different friend and I had a blast trading off playing Mario 64. Hands down, way better for a 9 year old me.
Nah, this one has a margin of error. It’s just that “take down a large percentage of all computers in the world simultaneously” is quite a bit outside of that margin for a security software.
I keep arguing this and people don’t like it. The pain is necessary, we need people to be inconvenienced so they demand we solve the problem. Our greatest enemy is little stopgap solutions that kind of help people now at the cost of their future, like subsidizing oil to make gas prices cheaper.
It really sucks that people who are already having a hard time, people who don’t have money or time, are going to be the first to feel the pain. There’s definitely things we can do to help, but we all know that at least America isn’t going to do those things. I just don’t see a better way. Kicking the can down the road isn’t going to help them either, it’s just going to put them in a worse spot later.
Everyone’s like, “It’s not that impressive. It’s not general AI.” Yeah, that’s the scary part to me. A general AI could be told, “btw don’t kill humans” and it would understand those instructions and understand what a human is.
The current way of doing things is just digital guided evolution, in a nutshell. Way more likely to create the equivalent of a bacteria than the equivalent of a human. And it’s not being treated with the proper care because, after all, it’s just a language model and not general AI.
Outright bans are because government bodies are scared of nuance. You can also see this in “zero-tolerance” policies that do things like punish the victim because they were “involved” in a fight, or punish a kid who nibbles a chicken nugget into the shape of a gun.
To be fair to schools, nuance is hard. Suppose that the rule is “phones may not interrupt class.” Now, what counts as an interruption may vary between classes, between teachers, and based on what’s happening in class. A student may use it during a quiet period in the class when they’ve already completed their work, and that’s acceptable. A different student will then use their phone ten minutes later, when they’re supposed to be doing something. The second student will get in trouble, but then complain that the first student didn’t get in trouble. The parent will hear, “Brayden was using his phone and he didn’t get in trouble but the second I used mine, I got in trouble. The teacher has it out for me.”
If you’ve talked to any teachers in the past few decades, a common theme is parents siding with their kids against all logic, reason, and evidence. They’ll assume that teachers are petty goblins, just looking for an excuse to pick on their kid. And parents can be outright hostile and unreasonable. When my wife was a teacher, she received more than one actual death threat from parents because she enforced rules that did NOT have any nuance or discretion. Imagine if enforcing the rule was up to the teacher’s discretion versus an outright ban.
tl;dr I agree that a ban is silly, but I totally get why schools are doing it.
Are we so bad we need corporate sponsorship of our lanes?
On the plus side for them, they can probably use Gemini to write their apology blog about how they missed the mark with that ad.
It is legitimately useful for getting started with using a new programming library or tool. Documentation is not always easy to understand or easy to search, so having an LLM generate a baseline (even if it’s got mistakes) or answer a few questions can save a lot of time.
There’s a lot of hypocrisy around. The issue isn’t pronouns, the issue is: Does a child have a right to keep secrets from their parents?
The ones saying “no” are probably keeping or kept a fair amount from their own parents. I mean, the ones who say “yes” probably did too, it’s pretty universal, but they’re not being hypocrites about it.
I wonder, if you changed this question to some other hypothetical secret, how would the responses change? What about… “Does a teacher have an obligation to report if a student is dating someone?” Or maybe, “Does a teacher have an obligation to report every book a student reads (on their own time) in case it’s a book the parents don’t like?”
I get it, too. I’m a parent. The idea that my kids might have secrets kind of bothers me. I want to be a part of their lives, I want to help them with any problem they have. But they have a right to their own lives, and the only way I could even try to prevent it would be immensely damaging to them in the long run. I can only do my best and hope they’ll see that and be comfortable talking to me about the important stuff.
I’m about a year in. One interesting thing is that older games seem to work better with Proton than they do on Windows. For example, after installing Psychonauts on Windows I had to Google why it wouldn’t load and try a few ini changes until I found what worked. On Linux, I just started it and it worked with no issues.
The thing about all the doom and gloom is that I don’t think anyone is seriously expecting the end of humanity. We’re not talking extinction, at least not yet and probably not for a very long time. We’re talking really hard times for people, though. Some previously habitable areas becoming uninhabitable, reduction in how much food we can produce and therefore how many people can be fed, things like that.
There’s this idea that we’re making Earth unlivable but, short of large-scale nuclear war, I don’t think we’re really capable of that. And humans are smart, when they have to be, and very adaptable. As a species, we’ll survive. But how many of us, and in what conditions, is very much up in the air.
In theory I guess it provides better security in some ways, but certainly not all over giving you hardware and a VPN. So there’s that. But yeah, it sucks.
Beaches are tougher but I believe there’s a nudist resort in every state in the US. You can visit the AANR website and find the closest one. If it’s a “family resort” that means it’s probably very welcoming, if a little boring depending on location.
I don’t think I’ve ever gotten an ad from the OS on Android. I know some manufacturers, Samsung in particular, include ads but that’s not “Android” so much as “Samsung’s shitty skin of Android.”
The closest I’ve gotten to an ad on Pixel is a thing to review new features after updates.
It’s the downside of open source: You’re at the mercy of companies that don’t care and developers who are primarily interested in the hardware they’re using rather than the hardware you’re using.
The best experience is going to be hardware that’s built and certified for Linux. System76, Tuxedo, a bunch of other smaller names and the rare Dell or Lenovo. But that’s definitely not practical for everyone, or a good idea to convince people to buy new hardware for Linux.
It’ll be a slow transition. The more enthusiasts hop on the bandwagon, the more manufacturers and hardware vendors will care about support. The more Microsoft keeps irritating their customers, the more companies will move away. The support will come, it’s been improving for a long time.
All that said. I’d recommend CachyOS or PopOS if you get the urge to try again. I’ve tried a bunch of distributions and those seem to have the best focus on “just make consumer hardware work right out of the box.” That’s no guarantee of course, but it’s a start.
Of these, I’d like to point out that unironically Uber is the obvious choice for Best. Hear me out…
Outside of the really big cities, taxi service was trash. You had to find a number and a phone, the price was almost impossible to figure out in advance, and none that I am aware of were doing anything to keep up with the times or improve anything. The competition that it hurt deserved some pain.
People can now paw drunkenly at their phone and generally arrive home safe. Easy access to rides has almost certainly saved lives. I don’t think you can say that about any of the others on the list.
But wait! I’m not saying that Uber is good. I’m just saying that, theoretically, you could start a service like Uber that isn’t hot garbage, that has employees or at least better paid contractors that take home a more reasonable share of the money. Hell, a local government could create a ride hailing app that passes the entire amount back to the driver, and it would be a net benefit to society. Though at that point, maybe they should have just been looking into better public transportation and planning instead.
You are correct that a reboot will trigger a full rescan. I’m always on the lookout for better sync. I just don’t think it’s out there right now for easy bidirectional sync.
Basically, if you want to set and forget, Syncthing is the best option. If you want more control, you’ll need to look into setting up rsync scripts or similar, which will at least better let you control how often to sync.