admiralteal

admiralteal , 4 months ago to programmer_humor in FLOSS communities right now

It's real-time chat. That's fundamentally different, philosophically, from the way a forum/wiki works.

You can cludge forum-like features into it with stickies and bots and yada yada yada... or you could just use a platform that is designed from the ground up to be a permanent knowledge store instead of extended, glorified AOL chatrooms.

admiralteal , 4 months ago to programmer_humor in FLOSS communities right now

The children do not yet know how much they yearn for the mines of listservs.

A new, novel solution to an already-solved problem that is worse in pretty much every way. But at least it is anathema to retention of institutional knowledge.

In short: just do a fucking PHPBB forum, it's better than this shit.

admiralteal , 4 months ago to news in Some college students find it harder to vote under new Republican laws: In Ohio, new election legislation championed by the GOP as a way to deter fraud has caused confusion on campuses

What's the Robert Reich quote? Democratic apathy is a self-fulfilling prophecy, something like that.

These more left-leaning internet forums are full of evangelical apathists trying to convince people not to vote. Convince people that being strategic is immoral and that the flawed good guys are the exact same as unrepentant bad guys.

admiralteal , 4 months ago to technology in Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED

Makes me presume power harassment.

On the flip side, he was using up millions and millions of company dollars on his singleminded pursuit with no obvious results to show for it. Had things gone even a little differently, things would've gone very differently indeed. Hard to imagine most companies tolerating an employee flat ignoring instruction to change to another task when their old task was proving fruitless.

Hindsight is clear enough here, but in context it was pretty nuts what the guy was doing.

Makes you wonder how many great inventors of revolutionary tech were shoved off their path by dumb luck.

admiralteal , 4 months ago to news in Why isn’t the Biden administration suing Texas for taking over the job of Border Patrol?

I’ll ask again, does a migrant entering somewhere else and simply invoking “asylum” make their entry legal?

I feel like my last reply addressed that, but since you are asking directly I'll be explicit. It does not make their entry legal. Their entry was already legal.

That's what I mean when I say it is up to us to guide them through the complex process we've set up -- they are seeking asylum which is a status we recognize. They might not know the proper legal incantations or arcane procedures for that, but they aren't the ones who invented those legal incantations and arcane procedures. They are refugees doing their best. They should be treated as innocent until proven guilty.

It is not illegal to, while acting in good faith, get lost in the bureaucracy, ESPECIALLY when that bureaucracy is designed from the ground up to be unmanageable in order to disparage your right, ESPECIALLY when your own personal circumstances leave your life at risk.

Sure, you can point towards people who clearly knew that particular point of crossing was not legal. And I will point to people who already had their proper rights disparaged without due process based on how much of a failure the "legal" crossing was.

If you're only using these words like "illegal" in a 100% legalistic framework, where we care about the letter of the statutes and not the actual rights and people the statutes assert and protect... stop. Don't do that. That's harmful.

admiralteal , 4 months ago to news in Why isn’t the Biden administration suing Texas for taking over the job of Border Patrol?

Domestic US law recognizes that right of asylum. Don't need to bring up any international law.

We have weaponized our incompetence against these people. We're so bad at managing the border that we are unable to process them in a fair, safe, and orderly fashion. We're unable to even follow our own laws and offer the due process our Constitution requires.

The expectation should be that the asylum-seekers do not know the process. Do not know the proper rules. Are desperate and maybe even afraid and just doing their best under life and death (i.e. coercive) circumstances. As the ones who defined that process, it is our job to catch and guide them through it. It is our job to give them their due process. There should be no presumption of their criminal intent. That should have to be proven in a court of law.

It's definitely complicated. Feeding into the right-wing rhetoric about the "illegals" is a way to simplify and thought-kill that complexity.

admiralteal , 4 months ago to news in Why isn’t the Biden administration suing Texas for taking over the job of Border Patrol?

...asking for rights for non-US citizens who are in the active process of breaking the law.

It is not illegal to seek asylum at the US border. Refugees are not "illegals".

admiralteal , 4 months ago to news in Why isn’t the Biden administration suing Texas for taking over the job of Border Patrol?

Presuming that the administration doesn't really want to do any liberalization at the border (a very safe assumption), what is the actual victory condition of escalation the confrontation here?

I really want everyone to think very carefully about the counterfactual here. What's to be gained by going full scorched earth against Texas? What's the political or practical benefit to going in and arresting government employees / Texas national guardsman who are acting according to orders of the governor?

Texas isn't going to handle the border any better than the feds did. They will almost certainly handle it worse, and look like assholes and monsters while doing it. They'll prove the administration right that the border is hard and these "simple" solutions are idiotic and ineffective. Denying fed access is unquestionably illegal and frankly seditious/secessionary. Even the people defending them know and agree that it is a bad look for a state that is begging for federal aid to be simultaneously refusing federal aid.

On the flip side, if the feds feed into the New Civil War politics by escalating or even turning violent against Texas, the entire Confederacy will close ranks and use that momentum to likely win elections. That's what Abbot wants. That's WHY he is making this very public provocation. If you actually look at the hotspot here, you'll see that the actual "disputed" area is basically just one fucking park. It's barely anything.

The controversy here is both literally and figuratively borderline inconsequential. It's just a big, stupid political trap. "That's nice, hun" and waiting for them to wear themselves out is the correct response to it.

admiralteal , 4 months ago to news in A 7,000-Pound Car Smashed Through a Guardrail. That’s Bad News for All of Us.

I did not know that, but it unfortunately makes sense. You should always be absolutely terrified for your life when you see a uhaul for a reason.

God, it truly is "for non-commercial use only". I hear a chorus of sovcits cheering.

admiralteal , 4 months ago to news in A 7,000-Pound Car Smashed Through a Guardrail. That’s Bad News for All of Us.

Pretty much all of those vehicles require a CDL.

Seems like vehicles over a certain weight requiring a special license classification is a pretty straightforward and reasonable requirement.

But we can't do it without simultaneously addressing mass transit, bikeped, and our general absolute psychological fixation around designing all of our society around cars first and people second.

admiralteal , 4 months ago to technology in ‘There is no such thing as a real picture’: Samsung defends AI photo editing on Galaxy S24

Analog cameras also do not catch an image exactly as-is. Most likely, the idea of a "true" image of exactly how a thing exists in the real world is just a fantasy. This is qualia. An image is definitionally subjective. Just look at the history of film technology and the racial biases it helped perserve.

But there's undeniably a huge difference between how you interpret and commit the photons going through the lens versus entirely inventing photons going through the lens.

admiralteal , 4 months ago to technology in Mozilla’s new service tries to wipe your data off the web

No, because you are asking the data broker to do something with your data that they possess. It is not possible for them to delete your data without knowing which are your data.

The only alternative is fully banning this kind of data collection. Which would be nice, but isn't happening anytime soon.

admiralteal , 4 months ago to mildlyinfuriating in It seems like all packaged foods do this now

Big "How much can a banana cost, $10?" energy here.

We're talking about one of the cheapest brands of commodity pasta here. Think about how much effort you are implying the company put into this versus what 8g of major wholesale flour costs -- the only cost they'd really be saving in this conspiracy.

Even at consumer retail prices that's, what, $0.012 per box? And I bet wholesale prices are at least an order of magnitude less than that. Is the maybe tenth of a percent of cost savings worth a potential class action lawsuit and the horrific pain of Discovery that comes with it? And does that maybe tenth a percent of cost savings even come close to covering all the additional production costs involved in having that machinery calibrated so much more precisely? The juice is not worth the squeeze, my friend.

You think you're arguing that they would do evil for profit's sake, but you're actually arguing they would do evil for evil's sake even at the expense of profit.

admiralteal , 4 months ago to news in Biden Threatens to Veto Bill That Would Help Israel but Not Ukraine

I don't. We got the biggest and most important climate bill ever, likely in the entire world, by getting to ostensibly package it as an anti-inflation bill.

Politics is a game of negotiation and compromise. The same impulse as "nothing should ever be logrolled" is saying we should be entirely uncompromising on everything always.

If Ukraine and Israel aid were not bundlable, guess what? We'd get Israel and not Ukraine aid. The more deserving recipient wouldn't get the aid.

admiralteal , 4 months ago to mildlyinfuriating in It seems like all packaged foods do this now

And it would probably be more expensive to get precision-calibrated equipment to get you at the bottom end of the tolerance to save product cost than what it would cost to just aim for the correct value with less precise equipment.

This one is a conspiracy theory I struggle to get behind. It seems like the conspiracy would be less profitable than the "proper" behavior here.