Agreed on both, though if I ever get a personnal macbook (which I’m definitely considering, their silicon is so good), it’s definitely gonna involve a sticker
But they’re overpriced and have made many anti-consumer choices and as a consequence have made other platforms worse, because many other companies like to follow Apple.
I spent a little bit of time looking for true alternatives to a MacBook that would fit my needs, but there really aren’t any. Once you check out laptops with 16+ hour of battery life, then add a bright, HDR, color-accurate display, then add the performance of the M-series chips (which are not THE best, but certainly close to the best options from AMD and Intel), and decent speakers, there really isn’t anything to compete.
A base 14" M3 Pro is around $1750, which isn’t that far out of line for high-performing laptops in general. If someone needs something cheaper, they can get a used 14" M1 Pro for around $900-$1k. Also, if you’re someone that already owns an iPhone, it’s kind of hard to even see why you would go with something else unless you are required to use Windows applications or want to play a bunch of AAA games.
I’m beginning to think that people that diss MacBooks are just people that never owned them.
For people that are really struggling financially, but still want the above features, the 2020 13" M1 Air w/16GB RAM and 256GB storage can be found for about $500.
I was an Apple employee, though… And they’d bin it and give me a new one every 24 months because upgrading’s not an option. Wouldn’t even wipe them and hand them/sell them to employees.
All the actual workhorse machines were Lenovo. If you worked with external clients, you’d get a Surface Pro so they didn’t have to work around your incompatibilities with their software, systems, and enterprise environments.
Also used to use an old Pentium 4 we found as a team server because multi-threading and 64-bit wasn’t available for some MS Enterprise applications in macOS then, but 365 and applications like Power BI is obviously what Apple runs on. This ancient box had a 4:3 monitor and an IBM logo on it, so it was made some time before 2005. But 64-bit CPU and no macOS, so it crunched calculations faster than the 6-core i7 in the MBPs. The day we could finally use all cores and 64-bit on the macOS systems was amazing, but we still kept the old IBM box around to monitor and log connections. I like to think my old friend is still kicking on…
Find another well build machine in a similar form factor that performs similarly, and gets even comparable battery life. Raw benchmarking performance isn’t the only value to a laptop.
The dell xps 13+ maybe? But that’s 13th Gen. intel and battery life is pretty awful.
But its all chained to shit rabidly anti consumer borderline soyware proprietary ecosystem software, so it’s basically trash.
Also, they’ve been making some really fucking stupid design decisions. Fucking camera in the middle of my fucking screen? Kill yourself, I’d rather just not have it.
Most people probably wouldn’t even recognize the gateway logo anymore. It would work on me though. My past experience with gateways is entirely negative.
I don’t necessarily agree. If a brand makes high quality stuff I’m not gonna avoid them just because they put their logo on their stuff. I have a kickass Adidas backpack from 2014 that is by far my favorite, and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna get rid of it just because it has an Adidas logo on it.
I also have perfectly good clothes with various brands on them, and I’m not just gonna throw them away because that’s wasteful as hell. I don’t go out of my way to buy stuff with brands on them, but that won’t stop me from buying something I genuinely like and find to be high quality.
Literally impossible to avoid Nestle. Even going to a restaurant or getting take out, benefitted Nestle in some way. Really it’s the fault of governments for allowing a corporation to get that big
Oh really? Funny I haven’t seen any nutritional deficiencies in my year on that way of eating, and haven’t died of scurvy even once. In fact I’m in the best health I ever have had since I was a youth
Ethics? Eating animals raised on grass (in places which don’t support other agriculture) is worse than clear felling forests to support monoculture cereals?
My food supports the land it grows on, which hosts a myriad other species
I live in Australia near our mountain pastures. The meat supply is a mix of local grass fed and finished beef and lamb, and grain finished beef from up north
The grass finished meat has a healthier fat balance and tastes better
I always ask butchers where my meat was raised and how it was finished as that affects the ethics and flavour. I agree with you that meat raised on grain is wasteful.
Where’s the waste in what I buy? They drink from mountain streams, they eat grass. Most of their meat goes to human food, most of the rest goes to pet food, the skin becomes leather
When I cook more meat than I can eat, the extra goes in the fridge and I eat it for the next meal
On the relevant subreddit (which hasn’t moved to Lemmy) I have heard it’s easy to get grass finished beef in the US too
I live in a ranching state (South Dakota) where beef is processed locally, and it’s nearly impossible to get grass-fed meat. Sure, some of it is labeled “grass-fed” with a drastically higher price point (unsustainable for most people), but the whole industry is so corrupt and ethically bankrupt that it’s a meaningless label, just like almost anything else you buy here.
no OP but that REALLY depends on where you live. rn i know about 4-5 farmers that raise cattle ONLY on free range pastures and dont subsidue their feed with anything else and can buy directly from them without any middle men
and i fucking hate the “so what if you can, others cant” argument in threads like these. OP was stating that they do this and its better for them. never did they say its better for everyone to do this
I can’t help but notice you have disagreed with the comment above you, then gone on to explain that the exception to your disagreement is the exact scenario they described.
Except no? Its not “literally impossible” to avoid nestle. You simply have to shop your groceries more mindful.
But okay, if its utterly impossible to look on the back of the package and or do a quick internet search to see if that label belongs to nestle, yeah its impossible.
Joining in because why not. The comment OP never mentioned groceries. They mentioned how it’s impossible to avoid Nestle when eating out/getting take out, which you agreed with.
This whole thread is weird. I think it’s hilarious how people are arguing with you, saying it’s impossible and then linking sites that list every brand owned by Nestlé. You’d think it would occur to them that if one is able to consult a list, that makes it possible to avoid Nestlé products, since one can merely consult the list.
Also not only are there those lists, but we all have an internet enabled smartphone nearly always with us right? So check the label, see its hierarchy and decide then.
We’re not arguing that there are lists. We’re arguing that it’s not always displayed on packaging. Subsidiary companies of nestle may not display the logo or name anywhere, or do so in such small lettering that it’s very hard to overlook. When the other commenter is saying all it takes is “a bit of discipline” no, that’s simply not the case. It takes discipline AND either an external resource, or an encyclopedic knowledge of every company nestle owns. If you want to sling insults at people at least understand what they’re saying.
You’re talking to someone with celiac disease and severe lactose intolerance. Sure, it’s “impossible to avoid Nestle,” in the same way that it’s “impossible to avoid gluten and dairy.”
Aka, it’s possible. I rely on reading labels, researching brands, and researching a restaurant before ever setting foot inside. If I can do this, then someone who wants to avoid Nestle can too. It’s very possible.
Celiac and lactose intolerance are completely different from avoiding a brand. Both of those are specific compounds, we have laws stating we must list ingredients included in items, and “lactose free” and “gluten free” have been turned into marketing terms,very proudly displayed on a lot of packaging. It’s also pretty simple to understand both lactose and gluten, where they come from, and narrow it down to a single ingredient, maybe with a few alternative names, that will cause issues.
You also have a direct response to the things that trigger you. If you make the mistake once you probably figure out what item it is, and don’t make the same purchase. That feedback doesn’t exist on a brand level. This (for example) peanut butter tastes the same as the other, has the same effects on my body. You have to do ACTIVE research on the brand to find out that they’re owned by nestle. These are not equivalent in the slightest.
I would bet money that if I looked through your pantry and fridge right now you have something you didn’t realize was nestle. They actively use deception in the form of different brands that don’t display the nestle logo in order to hide the fact that it’s a nestle item. Again, you’re completely disregarding the arguments people are putting forth and actively calling them less than intelligent.
You’d think it would occur to them that if one is able to consult a list, that makes it possible to avoid Nestlé products
I think you’re forgetting something. This entire chain started with an example to support the theory of it being impossible. The one about eating out where you don’t know the ingredients being served to you or what brand they’re from. You chose to ad hom without even addressing it. 🤷
Was that supposed to be a coherent response? Everyone eats out. I think you would have to scour a nation pretty thoroughly to find even a single person that hasn’t at least had a McDonald’s shake or something. Whether something is mandated or not was not the conversation. The conversation was whether or not it’s possible to actively avoid completely, and restaurants hardly ever list their recipe as it is proprietary.
Are you legally mandated to go shop at the grocery store? No? Then why would you posit that response? You’re going to need more to support your claim than what you’ve said here before you can justify dismissing people.
hasn’t at least had a McDonald’s shake or something
What they’ve done in the past is irrelevant. If they choose to forgo Nestle products from this day forward, then it is possible.
Are you legally mandated to go shop at the grocery store? No?
I never argued that one was legally mandated to shop at a grocery store. Whether one shops at a grocery store or not, one can consult a list and therefore not buy Nestle products. This is quite simple.
Then why would you posit that response?
Just as an example of how it is possible not to buy certain products, regardless of how ubiquitous they are.
Past, present, or future- it doesn’t matter. People need to eat. Suggesting that people just don’t go to restaurants is as helpful as suggesting people just don’t go to grocery stores. That’s why this fact:
restaurants hardly ever list their recipe as it is proprietary.
is doing a great job of convincing me that it is actually impossible, and if I’m honest you’ve said nothing to convince me otherwise. I think that’s the disconnect.
I’m not going to stop going to restaurants. Don’t get me wrong, I hate Nestle as much as the next lemming, but restaurants are not something I’m ever going to be able to cut out of my life completely. And I’m willing to bet my life on this being true for a lot of people.
If the idea of consulting a list and calling ahead to a restaurant is too hefty of a concept for you to hold onto, then yes I can see why there’s going to be a disconnect. Let’s just go our separate ways, and I feel confident that eventually you’ll get there.
Alrighty there bud. You have yourself a terrific day. Try not to forget to breathe. 😁
Just so we’re clear BTW:
The law does not require retail or food service companies that make food to order to give ingredient lists or allergy warnings to customers. That means any restaurant, cafe or food cart that makes food to order does not need to give you the ingredients list
Subsidiary companies, basically companies that are owned by another, to my knowledge are not required to display that they’re owned by another company. Or if they do, it’s in EXTREMELY fine lettering.
A lot of the time, you have to have an encyclopedic knowledge of what brands are nestle brands, or yes, it’s actually impossibly to make a decision.
Sure they do own many companies. I just dont think its impossible, as I steer clear of anything nestle. Sometimes I grab something new and sounds interesting like the Vegan products by Gourmet Garden and just putting it quickly back as I saw nestles logo printed on the back.
I think you’re missing the point I was making. There’s a lot of Nestlé products that don’t have their logo anywhere on the packaging because it’s instead made by a company Nestlé owns
Because all those products en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nestlé_brands are made by “companies” that on first look are not “owned” by nestle even though I always saw their huge logo somewhere on its packaging.
Lol, no, you don’t understand. Companies (literally millions of them) own many other companies that they never put any logo on or anything. For an outside of Nestle example, check out this list of companies owned by Kroger that you will never find anything labeled by Kroger inside of:
Food 4 Less, Ralph’s, and Jay C Foods all have Kroger brand foods on their shelves. Not sure about the rest as I haven’t shopped at the rest of those stores. Also they are attempting to acquire Albertson’s.
I’ve never seen Kroger nor any of that companies. Do they sell in Germany?
And if the umbrella company is proud of thier products they bought, of course they put their label on it or state it somewhere. Where else would be the point of it? Brand recognition and all.
Also, you should work on your tone, speaking like you’re holier than thou is already cringe, but when you’re wrong it just makes you look like a big idiot.
I don’t think they were saying it ONLY takes a bit of discipline. To me, the charitable interpretation is, they’re saying that they see something new they want, and see the nestle logo, and the act of denying the want takes discipline.
You’re both right, of course. It DOES take discipline to always put back the nestle-labeled goods, and there are MANY nestle-subsidiary-owned items that don’t have a nestle logo in sight
Edit: ok, a bit lower hea def being holier than thou a bit lol
The issue with boycotting a huge company like Nestlé is that you put in a ton of time and effort while denying yourself lots of useful products and on Nestlé’s end, they lose out on less profit than they bring in in a single minute.
They made $9.7 billion Net income in 2022. That’s over $18,000 EVERY MINUTE. You can’t make a difference and they don’t care. The only ways to enact change are either through the legislative/regulatory route or through the extralegal route.
Sure, its pissing against the wind. And I lose out on kitkat and lion (damn i liked that bar) or I need to buy “clones” but I can’t wholeheartedly buy their shit. It may not be much, but atleast i can live with myself.
The amount of sugar and palm kernel oil in Nestle chocolate makes me not even enjoy their products if I get them for free. They barely taste like cocoa
You could order KitKat from the US. Hershey makes it here.
I wouldn’t recommend it though, Nestle KitKat is much better. It’s a shame Nestle is so evil or else I’d be driving over to Canada to stock up every few weeks.
That’s awesome! I think it’s important to note, however, that the burden of change here is not on the individual. The average person is not an activist, and shouldn’t be expected to be. Nestle knows that, too.
Change on this scale can only happen through government regulation.
Doing your own part as much as you are aware or capable is good, but if I were to try to avoid anything unethically sourced, I simply would not be able to participate in the modern world.
Do you use electricity? Do you have a cell phone? Have you ever used anything battery operated, like a flashlight? Have you ever eaten a hamburger? Have you worn a shirt?
Going around shaming people for things that are simply inevitably contributing to some unethical corporation is useless. We just need to agree that there is a problem, and do our best to make change.
I’m all for making personal commitments on topics you feel passionate about. But the fact is, that won’t make a difference on the grand scale. Only through government action is that possible.
Oh you’ve consumed Nestle, you just don’t know it. They have over 200, brands and millions of individual products. Not to mention their non food companies. Again, it’s an issue that governments should have dealt with long ago, and never should have let them get that big
Nobody associates it with paedos now and their “take existing videos and put our horrid moving shitty contrasted watermark on it” starting strat worked a dream
I prefer public trackers and torrents just because I don’t like gatekeeping piracy. I want those bits to be distributed as far and wide as possible. So anything I get and/or seed will be public.
Even if there are bad peers that don’t give back (which there are many), plenty enough times it’s just people with shitty under served Internet connections. I’m fortunate enough to have a good enough connection where that doesn’t bother me.
I hate the whole meta of private trackers. When I’ve joined a few in the past the whole focus on needing to keep up your ratio has been a larger barrier to downloading than leechers ever were on public trackers.
You can’t seed because several users have seedboxes with perfect connections and already have a billion-to-one ratio. I ‘theoretically’ have access to all this content, but I’m downloading ‘80’s workout video volume 7’ in the hopes that I can actually seed it for someone to get enough ratio to actually download something I wanted to watch.
I was on what.cd back when that was still a thing, I poorly chose my first few downloads and then never had enough ratio to download anything else ever again until I was finally kicked for inactivity.
Instead of actually fostering a working seed economy, most seem to just replicate a capitalist dystopia where a handful of users hog all the seed slots, earning more ratio credits than they could ever use while everyone else desperately tries to scrape together enough ratio to get something of value.
So by chance I was in university and invited into what by my roommate. I literally bought more internet bandwidth from my uni to handle an early freeleech event where I got to mega game the system (By accident! I didn’t really know what I was doing. And good thing it was a private tracker because I was on a bare connection. I didn’t know what A VPN was at that time, much less how to hide my identity online).
I thought my ratio was totally unfair so I never really abused it, but that’s kinda the problem. Only by chance I had like a 500 ratio, whereas someone like you had no chance ever to catch up to the earlier established players. Even though I wasn’t a victim of the ratio, the concept of your story is just another reason why I dislike private trackers.
That said, the best thing about what.cd was just how well organized and categorized it was. Library of Alexandria style shit, now lost to us. Plus the forums with some real music-heads were great, too, and you could really expand your music horizons by talking with those people. I liked that it was NOT a Reddit-style forum, so when something new dropped everyone had a say. Upvotes didn’t influence that kind of conversation. At any rate, I stopped pirating music so much maybe beginning in 2013 or 2014, but every time I look now the uploads are either 320kbps (overkill bitrate, garbage ancient codec) or FLAC (nice for archiving, but not what I want). So I end up DLing FLACs and then converting them into 128kbps Opus. It works, but my music horizons aren’t broadened without that what community. I guess all I mean is I don’t miss the private nature of what, but I do miss the community.
I've been a newbie on a bunch of private trackers, and there's almost always some way to get ratio, you just need to figure out that site's method, and be patient in not-downloading-everything until you can afford it.
For example, like many sites, what.cd generally had freeleeches around the site birthday and the winter holidays: nothing you downloaded counted against you, and whatever you uploaded got added to your account. They also often had artist freeleeches when an artist died; if What was around today, the site would be going wild with Jimmy Buffett traffic. Other sites have bonus points, where you get points for seeding even if no one downloads from you; and then you turn in your points for upload credit. Still other places, you can cross-seed content to get past the newbie ratio restrictions, then move on from there.
It is incredibly frustrating to be new on a site that has a whole bunch of content that you want, but if you're patient or you figure out how the site does things, you can get a lot out of them.
So you both agree that the system fucking sucks. Fundamentally, the hoops you have to jump through to do anything are far worse than the annoyance of bad seeds on public torrents.
The counterpoint is that obscure torrents are better seeded on private trackers. If what you’re looking for is even mildly popular however, private trackers just suck.
Do you need a private tracker? IMO, most people don't. Most people are happy with what they have, or are happy with what they get from public trackers and other places. It's really only if you're finding yourself unhappy with public trackers - you're not comfortable with the lack of privacy, for example, or you're often looking content that you can't find - that I would suggest looking into private trackers.
Sounds like you're just not the intended target for private trackers, and that's fine.
Ya, I just want to get content. I don’t mind giving back to the community for it, but needing to figure out some sort of ‘system’ is too much. I’m not looking for a mini-game.
This is a reason why I’m not on any private tracker. When there are 200 seeds all with better connection than me, then my ratio isn’t going anywhere. It creates this weird dynamic where you’re sometimes wishing people would stop seeding stuff; and that is clearly counter-productive.
I exclaimed “YES!” and started clapping after reading your comment. Just hell yeah. Beyond the weird issues that come with the model of seeding to gain access, there is something fundamentally off about the idea of private trackers, and you nailed it. It is antithetical to the whole enterprise of sharing. This transactional shit serves as a price tag that only the privileged can afford
Many times that’s true, too. One of the saddest things in torrents is seeing two torrents with identical contents that were created separately, or one just recreated so someone can add their website to it or something, thereby dividing the pool of possible peers.
I think one of the most interesting ideas in BitTorrent v2 is that hash trees are formed per-file, not per-torrent. So two torrents with identical contents could, if I understand this right, basically be considered one and the same. It would be cool to see more wide adoption and promotion of BT v2 blog.libtorrent.org/2020/09/bittorrent-v2/
Your employer does not care about you. You are not important or irreplaceable
Take your time and energy and put it into your life, not their business
I have had coworkers die (not work related) and by the time you hear about it (like the next day) they have already worked out who will get the work done so the machine doesn’t have to stop
I had a workmate develop a chronic illness after an infection of COVID, and he had to leave under hardship. People that hung out with him as best mates for years stopped talking to him in a matter of days.
I sent him a few 3 message to see how he was doing. NGL we weren’t super tight before COVID, we never hung out outside of work, and people not masking around me really drove a wedge between us. I’m trying hard not to justify what happened, but who knows maybe I am a little bit.
True but there’s also absolutely no reason to think they care. Even if someone dies. Because they really don’t. So it feels extra soulless when they send out the email redistributing tasks right after the generic condolences email that goes out to the whole floor
I mean, how do you gauge how much someone cares? What would make you think someone cared (either at work or anywhere else)? I think all actions by a company would make people think it’s just an unempathetic gesture. Even if it was a small company and the employee was there for very long and was actually missed.
It’s not even a matter of when. I was recently given an i7 6700K, and no game, old or new, comes close to fully using it, and it’s not even overclocked. If anyone is in doubt about the requirement being artificial, try this CPU.
The windows 11 cpu requirement isn’t a requirement per se but a “it’s validated to work on this or newer”. 6th gen Intel is no problem. Even 4th gen or older aren’t a problem, performance wise. The problem is the mandatory TPM 2.0 support. Intel CPUs only massively support that from 6th gen on and AMD CPUs even later (I think Zen 2). On some older boards you might have luck, especially if you buy a hardware TPM but my PC for example, running a i7 3770, only has a TPM 1.2 and no way to upgrade to 2.0. Now, there are ways to circumvent the need for a TPM all together on Win 11 but tbh, Win 10 installs perfectly well still on Hardware as old as Athlon 64 and in my experience even better than 11 anyways.
It’s a requirement both on paper and in that, even though Microsoft document an official way to bypass it, they will warn you that they do not even guarantee security updates unless your CPU is supported. Moreover, we know of at least one game, Valorant, that will not work on Windows 11 unless you are meeting its hardware requirements. The bottom line is that installing Windows 11 is a risk.
True, but getting that thing that’s older than you to actually work is going to require recompiling your kernel with some specific options, downloading a driver from an obscure git repo, running a tool to generate a config file, manually editing that config, and then running another tool to install the driver and then troubleshooting what went wrong.
Oh, wait, that was me trying to use my relatively new Sound Blaster sound card when experimenting with Linux 20 years ago. Linux had terrible support for ISA Plug and Play cards for some reason.
By comparison my solution to windows dropping support for a thing was to grab the cheapest PC I could find that might hypothetically work and stick an old version of windows on it that still had support and just not connect it to the Internet.
20 years ago? Try installing Linux on that same hardware now. Now try installing Windows?
Try the same experiment with any hardware 5 years old or older. Linux wins every time.
People will say that on newer hardware, Windows is better. Partially true. New hardware that was designed to ship with Windows will work better. A fair comparison would be hardware that ships with Linux.
Proprietary firmware has always been an issue ( like Broadcom and like NVIDIA ), especially on distros like Debian that could not ship non-free firmware. The situation has improved though. Even NVIDIA will ship out of the box soon. And Debian will shop non-free firmware now so those old Broadcom cards should work.
One of my favourite things about Linux is how much easier it is to get it running on random hardware, especially “out of the box” without having to track down drivers or install stuff after. With older Apple hardware, it is not just easier but it may be the only way to use modern software at all. I confess though that I am mostly speaking about older hardware.
Hell, I can get a 30 year old HP LaserJet 4 printer working just fine on almost any version of Linux with the official HPLIP CLI software provided by (shockingly) HP, which was updated 2 months ago with support for over 50 new printers and the following OSes:
LinuxMint 21.1
MxLinux 21.3
Elementary OS 7
Ubuntu 22.10
RHEL 8.6
RHEL 8.7
RHEL 9.1
Fedora 37
I HATE HP and their printers (PC LOAD LETTER WTF FOR LIFE) but I will admit that this is impressive support.
Back when I was a kid and got my first computer, I was mostly offline except for the occasional dial-up session. I didn’t have much to do on the internet anyway and it was quite expensive. I remember being amazed the first time I have set up to meet a friend over ICQ, rather than a phone call, of being able to communicate with other computers from mine. It didn’t matter whether these computers were at a neighbors’ house, a different city or entirely different country. I was looking forward to the internet giving us ways to connect like never before. No barriers, just directly communicating and bridging cultural differences and whatnot. Little did I knew that this was just one phase, as the internet gets more and more segregated. Rather than connecting with people, it gives you the ability to filter out whatever you don’t agree with, while staying connected with those who share your beliefs. It’s like we are no longer living the same reality and can’t even agree over fundamental things. I miss the old naive days of the internet when we feared viruses and the occasional pedophile in a chat room. Nowadays it’s the possibility of spreading misinformation that could overthrow a government. Either having it going uncontrolled and unregulated, or having a private company in control of such power.
Personally, I think that this should be the choice of an individual user rather than the platform.
At least it answers the question whom it will be reported to. In all likelihood the administrator is me anyway, at least on my personal devices. People won’t worry anymore that it will be reported to the police or, heaven forbid, to Santa Claus.
All the news keeps talking about her vaping as though that's the main problem here. Maybe don't engage in sexual activities in public. Like, actual sexual activities such as fondling genitals. Not conservatives' idea of sexual activities, which involves wearing skirts and makeup.
You pulled down a grown woman’s dress in a theater, while vaping after being asked not to, let her give you an over the pants handie, while she sings loudly and waves her arms around, in front of kids?
All of this as a silly teenager? Stones ready, big boy.
Can I get a video? Just for research… gross research. We’ve all probably acted a fool when younger but as an adult in a mixed environment you shouldn’t need to told to keep tits covered and not to touch genitals. That’s how you end up on a list.
True without question or dispute! But the fact that it happened doesn’t surprise or really outrage me at all. I hope it doesn’t seem like I’m excusing it. Someone in her position should not be doing things like this in public no matter how discrete they may have been.
But I’ve also worked in movie theaters, so I know for certain this is not uncommon behavior. Every person who works at a theater rotates between jobs, one of which is a theater checker. You’ve probably seen them come in sometimes with flashlights. And yeah…Forgot where I was going with that but I think you get it.
The main problem is that people in Colorado voted for her. Vaping is harmful and it’s a problem for her apparently and could potentially influence others. The pda stuff is icky but more of a social norms issue - so yeah, it’s next on the list. I’m still just utterly repulsed by the main problem though.
Wow, that’s a dismissive statement. So because this district isn’t Denver they don’t count as the people of Colorado? We have a diverse mix of people here–yes some of the stereotypical rednecks, ranchers, and resource extraction jobs, but also artsy types, old hippies, organic farmers, civil service for the public lands, and many members of the local tribes. People have moved here from all over the country (and in some cases the world) with many different experiences and perspectives on life. Lumping them all together as voices that don’t matter doesn’t help anyone.
And yet, their actual representation is giving everyone fits. Do you want to get rid of Boebert or not? You can double down on your statement but you won’t accomplish anything besides putting me in my place. The people of this region still vote and the way our government is set up means large cities don’t get to dictate everything. If that were the case NY and LA would be ruling Denver and they could claim to be the “real people” of the U.S.
Also, where are you getting the number 1,000? That is no where close to the number of people in her district, which is also geographically fairly large (yes, because of the lack of population density). You can be just as dismissive towards everything I’m saying if you don’t like it, but for those of you who have an interest in how Boebert and those of her ilk end up in government, I’m trying to give some insight into her district. Maybe it will be helpful to someone who cares.
The people of this region still vote and the way our government is set up means large cities don’t get to dictate everything
Quite the opposite. Pockets of people from nowhere have outsized control over our federal government. This isn’t a constitutional issue either, but an agreement Congress made to stop apportionment.
How would you fix it? If you want to address issues like gerrymandering I’m in complete agreement. Or maybe you meant something else?
I can’t agree these areas count as “nowhere.” That’s where you lose people who might agree with some of your points. The local tribes have worked very hard to preserve their culture after their homelands were previously treated as “nowhere.” Can you not see that belittling people’s homes will make your goals that much harder? As much as you want to completely dismiss anyone outside your chosen sphere of existence, you are having to deal with their representative regardless of your personal opinion. Maybe someday you will get your dictatorship of the majority but that’s not how it works right now if you want to change things.
Feel free to dismiss this next part if you don’t care, but for those of you who would like to change areas like Boebert’s district I’ll make a few more points. Personally I think the politics of this region can be helped by better investment in education (my local school district is a mess), which can be helped with improved income levels so that tax money is there. I’d start with infrastructure to support that. High speed Internet would open up so many possibilities for people who can do skilled work remotely. The local Internet provider hasn’t invested in infrastructure for the past decade. Some cities have run fiber… But then the new houses aren’t actually hooked up to it??? This is an issue we are working on locally, but we are having a hard time even getting to these “luxuries” when we are battling poverty, drug use, and domestic violence. Some homes don’t even have electricity. COVID exasperated all of the existing issues here. Local crime and drug use statistics since 2020 paint a bleak picture.
I’m actually optimistic that the new free school lunch program will be a small step in the right direction. I think that’s an example of the sort of statewide program people can get behind to improve all of Colorado. Isn’t it better to lift people up than steamroll over them?
So first off, I live in a rural suburb not unlike her district, and my wife is from a town of 300 people. I used to live in Eastern Kentucky. I am not belittling rural people or rural living. However, ask people from there and they’ll say, “small town in the middle of nowhere.”
I’m sorry, but I do not believe rural people getting “steamrolled” because there are fewer of them is a bad thing. Quite the opposite. Your town has infrastructure challenges, so who do they elect? Someone who fights against improving their own area
A tyranny of the majority is infinitely preferable to a tyranny of the minority.
Ok, then that will have to be our fundamental disagreement. I don’t think either is a good thing. The Constitution tried to find a balance between the two. Whether it is successful or not is another good debate.
It’s fine if the people of Kentucky want to call themselves middle of nowhere. Other areas may not view themselves in that way.
Unfortunately for us the Democratic candidate also didn’t care about infrastructure. That actually frustrates me more than Boebert. The same candidate is running again. He sucks but it was close enough last time maybe he can give her the boot. I’m not convinced he’d be an actual improvement, more of a status quo placeholder.
Like there weren’t warning signs before? She was even re-elected. Colorado is getting what they asked for with this idiot, and yeah, I kind of feel like they deserve it. The most foolish are the ones that didn’t even vote. I hate bad politicians, but if she betrayed your expectations you’re just not even remotely paying attention. Voters need to bear some of the responsibility for their own mistakes.
She was caught on camera fondling a guy in the theater. It probably would have gone unnoticed if she hadn’t called attention to herself by disrupting the show, vaping, and then denying that she was vaping.
One of the things I like most about my customer-facing technical role is that users find the craziest bugs. My favorite is a bug in a chat program that would keep channels from rendering and crash the client. The only clue I got was “it seems to be affecting channels used by HR more than other departments, but it’s spreading.”
Turns out the rendering engine couldn’t handle a post that was an emoji followed by a newline and then another emoji. So when the HR team posted this, meaning “hair on fire” it broke things:
User reported bugs can be wild. I had one where the user was tapping a button repeatedly so fast that the UI was not keeping up with the code and would no longer sync certain values properly. I’m talking like tap the button 15 times in a second. Another issue involved flipping back and forth between the same page like 10 times then turn the device Bluetooth off and immediately back on.
Why the fuck are your users flipping a page back and forth 10 times. I understand the Bluetooth bit, they wanted it to restart probably from a device not showing up. Also what was the issue
I can’t remember what the exact issue was that was produced by those steps. I want to say it was some sort of visual bug where parts of the page wouldn’t load. I do know that it only happened if you toggled Bluetooth within seconds of flipping the pages so many times. I honestly have no idea why the user decided to change pages so many times. You could take a little bit of time changing the pages, so maybe they kept viewing a page and backed out only to want to view the page again?
Gotta love user reported bugs. I had one that reported a product of ours crashed only on Mondays. We spent a total of 5 minutes thinking of a cause and appointed customer support for a Friday morning. Lo and behold the app still crashed.
In this case the app only crashed on Mondays… because that’s when this user actually used the application
I did actually find a very similliar bug in the experimental rendering engine of element (the matrix client). So yes, this is something that exists somewhere else too.
A lot of open source software is written by people working for corporations. Red Hat may have started out as a plucky co-op but it's now part of IBM. MySQL is written primarily by Oracle. The fact that the source is open doesn't mean it's all volunteer work.
That doesn't mean it wasn't a massive transfer of wealth, just that for a lot of it people were paid a fraction of the wealth they created rather than none at all.
Valve probably stands at the company who has “given back” the most in recent history (making Desktop Linux viable for the first time ever, mostly through gaming), but even Valve has corporate America skeletons in their closet. (Like the only reason they have a decent refund option now is because Australia basically forced them, and they had to change their flash sales for European laws.)
Valve still is a corporation, decently good at open source, but still a corporation that develops and distributes a lot of closed source software. Like the github ceo once wrote: open source the engine not the car, that’s what drives open source development for them. When many use their software and contribute patches and more importantly report bugs, everyone wins.
I don’t hate Valve, but let’s be real, they’re not adding to Linux out of the goodness of their hearts: They’re doing it to protect their profits because they see that Windows is quickly becoming more closed and has its own Xbox gaming storefront. It isn’t about belief in Linux as a product, it isn’t about improving it for everyone, it’s about improving it enough for gamers so that Steam won’t be eventually locked out of the digital games sales market by Microsoft. They’re basically just buying their way out of the vendor-lock-in of putting their store on someone else’s proprietary operating system.
I don’t think Linux desktop usage jumping from 1% to nearly 3% equals “everybody wins.” Sounds like to me a lot of fuckin people are still losing. Like 97% of them at least.
I don’t get what you try to say with your last paragraph. It sounds like you are worried that the poor 97% of Windows and Mac users are losing something because Linux is rising. Which makes absolutely no sense.
It sounds like they’re implying most people are losing because they use windows and Mac, instead of Linux, which I don’t completely disagree with because of the insane monopoly they have. Just look at all the ads and bloat on windows 11 for a brief example.
Computers must suck for the average user. I’d assume most people on this site would have no issue disabling annoyances in Windows. But most people probably just leave the defaults enabled, which is terrible.
I’ve been watching old episodes of Computer Chronicles lately - it’s amazing how much more user friendly Microsoft products were back in the day.
Enshittification is hitting windows hard these days. Windows 10 was okay in my book. I‘m probably not going to use windows 11. Currently preparing an ubuntu daily driver for operation.
But as doctorow said here, we are crawling back to old anti trust standards which we lost. It’s going to take a long time but it’s going.
I’m not the one who said “everybody wins” in regards to private corporations adding to open source projects while also not making clear what people are “winning” from it.
The point is the claim was “everybody wins.” My point is “everybody” at best is 3% of the population who gives a shit about having control of their own software. No, mostly corporations win. Consumers get some fringe benefits at best. I’m not seeing regular people become multimillionaires simply because they use Linux instead of Windows. Mostly its weird fucking shut-ins.
You’re right, but the thing is most of the time companies do horrible things to boost their profits. Like Unity in the last few days. Valve doing seemingly pro-consumer things to protect their profits is a rarity, and it’s really only a side-effect that there’s consumer benefit. They aren’t doing it to benefit consumers, they’re doing it to preserve their marketplace. It’s a side effect that it gives consumers more options. Valve is an unusually forward-thinking company when it comes to its long-term viability.
Maybe I want to root for the unprecedentedly forward thinking companies, because it’s like a glimpse of what a lot of companies probably look like in other countries, especially the Nordic countries, that haven’t had a history that led to their governments being able to be used as a tool to stifle competition, unlike the US
Okay, I may have misunderstood the intent of your comment. I thought you were saying something like we should be mad at Valve for helping Linux because it helps their profits. It now seems like you were just making sure everyone was aware of the context. Valve has always been one of the companies that is on a pedestal in gamers’ eyes. Like Bethesda prior to Fallout 76 and paid mods/creation club. I agree, we should hold them to the same level of scrutiny of other companies.
And it’s a dumpster fire unless you devote a ton of time. It’s never been viable as a product to the general public. It’s only recently is become even close for regular users.
I wouldn’t say it’s a complete disservice. They made the Steam Deck. And while it’s just a fancy GUI (Steam in Game Mode or whatever it’s called), that’s exactly what people need for it to become mainstream. Besides, if it wasn’t for Valve’s Proton and Wine, I wouldn’t be using Linux as a daily driver today And they (as far as I know, take this with a grain of salt) pioneered the Handheld gaming space (and before you say Nintendo or PSP. They were different than the Steam Deck or the ROG Ally)
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. -Adam Smith
If you think Guilds would solve security problems instead of just propping up security theater, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
I've seen too many systems left wide open for me not to think we need some way of having actual experts vet people's resumes and not a bunch of HR people.
I don’t disagree, but a “guild” is not it. Engineers in other disciplines have to actually have “engineering” credentials. Software engineers do not, but it sounds like they probably should considering other engineers are held to standards. The States have their own engineering boards to give out and monitor engineer license status. Why isn’t there one for software engineering? There needs to be, but it need not be a guild.
In case there’s requirement to hire only software engineers with licence then companies will just outsource as much as they can.
When did the people in the outsourcing countries suddenly get a state endorsed software engineering license? I would think the opposite would happen, it would restrict outsourcing until other countries had similar licenses for software engineers.
The States have their own engineering boards to give out and monitor engineer license status. Why isn’t there one for software engineering?
There used to be one! It was discontinued (a) for lack of interest since no jobs or regulations require it, and (b) because being eligible to sit for the Professional Engineer (P.E.) exam requires having spent X years (X=4 or more, depending on circumstances) working under the supervision of a licensed P.E., and not many software engineers worked under licensed P.E.s.
(I’m a software engineer with a civil EIT license and worked in the software industry under a civil P.E., so think I would’ve actually been one of the weirdos in a position to be licensed as a software P.E. Unfortunately, they did away with it before I got the chance.)
That last bit makes a lot of sense, actually, about not having enough licensed P.E. to work under for four years or more. That’s kind of a bummer, because the person I was responding to isn’t wrong, we’re handing the reigns of sysadmin duties to a lot of relatively under-trained folks.
However, on the flip side, the fact that we don’t have such a thing is part of what makes the internet so open. Literally anyone is allowed to make their own website.
Like locksmiths who have produced locks with the same flawed design for six millennia now, and instead of fixing it, they’re still keeping the act and even went after whistleblowers before.
“I’m a locksmith, and I’m a locksmith. The unstated part of this joke is that us locksmiths make locks super easy to crack, we just don’t share the details with everybody.”
A lock is just a suggestion. A determined thief will find a way beyond it.
Not sure if someone else has brought this up, but this is because these AI models are massively biased towards generating white people so as a lazy “fix” they randomly add race tags to your prompts to get more racially diverse results.
I mean, I don’t think it’s an easy thing to fix. How do you eliminate bias in the training data without eliminating a substantial percentage of your training data. Which would significantly hinder performance.
Exactly. I wish people had a better understanding of what’s going on technically.
It’s not that the model itself has these biases. It’s that the instructions given them are heavy handed in trying to correct for an inversely skewed representation bias.
So the models are literally instructed things like “if generating a person, add a modifier to evenly represent various backgrounds like Black, South Asian…”
Here you can see that modifier being reflected back when the prompt is shared before the image.
It’s like an ethnicity AdLibs the model is being instructed to fill out whenever generating people.
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