I’d settle for a crack so I can make it a plain ole linux htpc.

Bonus points if I can configure the remote.

Yeah, the image doesn’t have a ton of genre references (at least not that I can identify) which I think is why responders defaulted to retrofuturism. Which is a really broad category: it’s basically “what people from the past thought the future would be like” so any sci-fi that stays in the public consciousness long enough becomes some flavor of “retrofuturistic” by default.

I feel like cyberpunk, and all the *punk genres, tend to be darker and grimier than this picture though. This feels like someone fed a diffusion model “sci-fi landing pad” and it created this generic pastiche of scifi-ish buildings and aircraft, which is probably why it’s hard to pin down: it’s a synthetic average of a million stolen stories, sanded down to dust and reconstituted as a standard issue art wafer. Which is pretty cyberpunk dystopian, I think, so I guess I’ve come around to agreeing with you.

I’m about halfway through We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It was originally published in the 1920s, and has a lot of the hallmarks of sci-fi of the era: everything’s made of glass, everyone has access to personal helicopters, Government scientists can do imagination-ectomy procedures on subjects to keep them in line, everyone has a number instead of a name. It’s very “in the year 1999” kinda vibe. I like it. Also a pretty snappy read, I’m not struggling to get through it like some other so-called masterpieces (one day I’ll make it through Gravity’s Rainbow… maybe)

I’ve never had this particular model, but I’ve had pretty good success printing off Brother printers with the generic print drivers, I don’t think I’ve used the proprietary downloads in a while.

Of note: I don’t have occasion to do scans all that often, so I can’t say if that works. Ditto the fax function, if that’s important all I can say is you have my pity. But I’ve used the print function to good success on a couple different machines.

Still I’d recommend testing it before committing to permanent changes, if possible. Printers are mysterious and capricious.

I do too, I think general-purpose compute has become a too-cheap way to solve problems that have more durable (and repairable) mechanical solutions. It makes the sticker price lower even if the total cost over the lifetime of the vehicle (or laptop, or washing machine, etc.).

I think it would be nice to have a law that certain hardware needs to have user-autitable and user-replaceable control software. If you want to ship your hardware product with some preinstalled software, the source code must be publicly available. I don’t know how it would get passed in America because it would make consumer electronics more expensive to manufacture, but I think it would be helpful in the long term to legally decouple hardware from closed-source software.

It surprises me too, but I actually think that’s fine. Lots of people have different skills and not everyone has to be the tech expert, as long as everyone acknowledges that it is an expertise and that that expertise deserves weight. But, most technical mistakes in an office setting don’t result in serious injury or death, and that happens a lot in mechanics shops. People who decide whether dangerous machines are safe enough would need to have a higher level of technical professionalism than your average desk jockey.

I think that attitude is pretty common among people who make software that can get people killed (e.g. medical) but my experience is limited to a few secondhand conversations so I don’t know how well-established that culture is. I’ve only ever worked on software that, if it failed, meant that a few people would get very upset and a bunch of people would get mildly upset, then we’d fix it and everyone would move on pretty quickly.

If we’re ever going to have cars that run user-repairable software, we’re going to need mechanics (or at least independent mechanic shops) that know enough about software to get around. I’m not saying it’s the only thing or even that it’s the top priority right now, but it’s gonna take a while to get there from where we are, and I think the sooner we start thinking about it the better off we’ll be.

That makes sense. I’m not familiar with CA policy specifically but in the southeast, all cities (at least, the ones I’m familiar with) have in common:

1. most constituents already have cars (or limited access to transport).
2. constituents who must walk are much less likely to vote (for related and unrelated reasons).
3. Fixing transportation infrastructure is actually hard, and expensive, and it takes forever, and it often goes wrong.

So, it’s political safer to just continually complain about it than to spend one’s capital on actually addressing the problem.

Below a certain threshold, being a pedestrian is less a lifestyle choice and more the only way to get around. A lot of those cities have high poverty rates.

I wonder how it correlates with municipal spending per capita on public safety and walkability infrastructure. Lot of underfunded, red-state cities on that list; I imagine Republican cities in CA might similarly underfund their safety infrastructure.

That’s why I believe its worthwhile to put out reminders for other sides, too. ;-)

I concur ❤️ Technology is a complicated thing, and making the whole stack work for humanity is a full team effort.

I think both are necessary, and I don’t think “automatic solution to all problems” is the bar for something to be worth pursuing. I also don’t think that you have to start with one or the other; progress in one domain makes progress in the other domain easier, and they can and should work in parallel. I just happen to be more on the software side so that’s where my mind naturally defaults.

But yes, generally agree we need decentralized, de-corporatized hardware as well as the software to operate it.

What if, instead of swapping out American tech barons for European tech barons, the free people of the world decided that critical software needs to be free and open source in order to be verifiably secure? What if we all decided to make our governments make free software and just… everybody share?

What if that?

One of the reasons I don’t play the newer mario karts much is I find the levels hard to parse visually. They just cram so much stuff into every frame. I don’t mind having plainer tracks to drive around on if the driving and interactions feel good.

New polymarket bet: in what year does the first king (or queen or dictator) of earth ascend the throne, plunging the earth into a centuries-long dark age of techno-totalitarian dystopia? If you can predict the exact day you get a 5x multiplier applied to your winnings.

I’m gonna guess July 4, 2029

From the title I assumed it was a discussion critical of Thiel, and he had pressured the festival to remove it. Really did not expect that Thiel was presenting, and therefore presumably chose that title. I wonder if he was planning to do his supervillain monologue explaining how he has finally assumed direct control of enough world governments to declare himself King of Earth at that conference.

There are good reasons for hiding a paper trail. Specifically in a self-hosting community, I understand operators wanting to hide their particular technical details from those who would wish to target them. This can be government agencies who like to arrest or kill dissidents, or freelance assholes who just like to attack queer infra where they can. I don’t think deleting posts is particularly effective, and the privacy concerns would be better addressed with a safe alt or a burner account, but I get why some people do it. Privacy is hard and when the stakes are high, people tend to over-secure rather than risk under-securing.

I have mixed feelings on post deletion. On the one hand, historical technical forum conversations are an incredibly valuable resource, and /c/selfhosted is a technical community. The value comes from having a history in context, and deleting part of the context damages the whole and makes the whole corpus less useful overall. It also allows incorrect or outdated information to fester when there isn’t a strong historical context that can be referenced.

On the other hand, people are right to be concerned about leaving large tracts of text available on the open internet, where it can be scraped, profiled, and possibly de-anonymized. I am very sympathetic to those who delete out of concerns for their own privacy, and I don’t know what a good solution is.

Maybe a compromise would be (on user “delete”) to leave the contents of a post intact, but simply delete the username from the post, and the post from the user’s history? Deletion on the fediverse is a bit of a sham anyway, and it would leave valuable discussions intact for other users.

Yep. Actually ran the rollout for Cursor at my last job, right before I got laid off lmao. I trained a bunch of devs on what do and what not to do. A bunch of my recent interviews have incorporated variations of the question “Do you think you could manage an LLM orchestration that would replace our junior devs?” and, I could but I don’t think I can muster the enthusiasm for it that people are looking for. Maybe that’s why I haven’t made it through the interview gauntlet. So much senior hiring right now seems to be looking for people to be the scapegoat for LLM bullshit and I ain’t looking for that kinda work.

That’s me with pistachios. Once it became possible to buy them pre-shelled I knew I was in financial trouble because I can eat them non-stop. I need the shells to rate-limit myself.