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psivchaz

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psivchaz ,

They already remade Little Mermaid too recently. Terry Crews as Rapunzel, though, is still on the table.

psivchaz ,

https://reddthat.com/pictrs/image/7cfbfa82-e6e5-480f-bdc5-765014e76fb0.jpeg

psivchaz ,

We all know that the hate for Mexico is nonsense. They aren’t coming over the border and stealing highly coveted jobs. The jobs that have actually been taken by immigrants are largely middle class jobs that require degrees, things like IT and medicine.

In part, this has been fine. It drives the salaries down a bit because they’re willing to accept less to move to the country and even the lower salary is still much more than they would make at home. Companies win because there weren’t enough qualified people to go around for a while, so immigration closes the gaps.

This is pure conservatism though. Allow foreigners to come study here in unlimited numbers, then let them stay to take middle class jobs at lower salaries in these non-union industries. It’s like outsourcing but everyone is in the same time zone and they won’t resist your return-to-office mandate.

Microsoft Edge nags users with a 3D banner to change Windows 11's default browser (www.windowslatest.com)

Would you use Edge as your default browser on Windows 11 if Microsoft nags you with a 3D banner? Microsoft thinks you would. In a new experiment, which appears to be rolling out to Edge stable on Windows 11, Microsoft has turned on a banner that uses 3D graphics to promote the browser....

psivchaz ,

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.

psivchaz ,

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.

psivchaz ,

My fear is them going public or selling. If that happens, it’ll probably be Microsoft willing to spend any amount, and the government hasn’t really been in a “preventing monopolies” mood for a while now.

psivchaz ,

This has to be terrible news for conspiracy theorists. Our government got caught doing something shady overseas but it was encouraging other people to NOT vaccinate, which is the thing the conspiracy theorists thought our government wanted everyone to do.

I’m legitimately interested to see how/if Fox or OAN report on this. It should be entertaining.

psivchaz ,

And then interrupting that hold music at seemingly random intervals to tell you that they care about you, or to tell you that you could do this faster on their website.

I had to call Assurant recently because their website literally threw an error and told me to call in and wouldn’t let me proceed. I was told by the automated messages no less than 4 unstoppable times that the website is faster, and then after explaining the situation to the person she told me that the website is faster.

She was clearly reading the script and it’s not her fault so I kept quiet, but I have rarely felt such extreme rage in my life.

psivchaz ,

I would argue that the concept is flawed. The base idea is that you calculate statistics on how much you would be likely to have to pay out, then set premiums such that you’ll always be ahead of payouts. Essentially, everyone pays so that the unfortunate few who need help can get money out of the common pool to help.

This is just taxes, basically. We already do this with fire departments and such. However, insurance adds a profit motive on top because it’s a company, so the amount they take in must always be significantly higher than the amount they pay out. And if it’s a publicly traded company then the amount they make above and beyond the amount they pay out must always be higher every quarter.

Like at a certain point, why not just do taxes and better disaster relief? As an added bonus, the government would have an extra incentive to care about things that may make the payouts increase, like poor infrastructure or climate change.

psivchaz ,

I was mostly focused on how irritating it is that there’s yet another way that basic necessities are monetized, rather than on the actual implementation details.

The government already tracks average home and property values for determining property tax and also for determining what is a reasonable mortgage for a given area. I was kind of thinking that it would just be in addition to property tax so based on your home value, so those with very large houses would already be paying proportionally more into it.

psivchaz ,

A moral panic is when people freak out because they’re scared for the nation’s morals or values. The Jungle made people, rightfully, freak out about their health (whether that was the intention or not). I don’t think it qualifies as a moral panic.

psivchaz ,

Worthy, sure. I just mean that what actually happened with The Jungle was people focused on how gross meat packing facilities were. The working conditions were treated as kind of a secondary, less important issue.

psivchaz ,

Even the stupid things that hurt everyone! That’s the best part. We’ve been so into racism as a country that we shoot ourselves in the foot constantly to spite black people.

There’s plenty of examples, but the one that always comes to mind for me first is public transportation. We led the world for a while there. Buses and trams and all sorts of ways to get around easily. It feels awfully coincidental that we let black people ride wherever they wanted on the bus and all of a sudden public transportation takes a back seat to car infrastructure right after.

psivchaz ,

The trick is that it has to be a threat, and if we’re being honest then the more money and power you have the more obviously threatening it must be.

DON’T SAY: “I’m going to kill you.”

DO SAY: “It would be great if you died right now.”

And if you have influence and/or money, feel free to say: “I wish someone would kill you.”

psivchaz ,

I spotted the problem. It talks about “education” which is really just code for “communist indoctrination” obviously.

psivchaz ,

I think the problem is that search does not make money. Ads make money, and subscriptions make money. Convincing people to switch from Google ads to New Google ads would involve dumping tons of money into becoming popular enough to attract advertisers. Convincing people to pay for search, like Kagi is doing, is probably even harder.

psivchaz ,

SyncThing has been great for me. I tried NextCloud and OwnCloud first, granted years ago, and they were not great. So I’ve been using SyncThing at least 5 years now.

psivchaz ,

I just want one of the “You can’t vote for Biden!” people to outline what I should do instead. What’s the play here? Dismantle the government? Sure, outline your plan and let’s see if it has any merit. Protest? Great, tell me when and where but it doesn’t preclude the need to vote.

They talk big, but if their entire plan begins with “don’t vote” and ends with “bitch about it online” then it’s not a great plan.

psivchaz ,

Here’s the thing. You’re sometimes right. There’s definitely negligent parenting that leads to juvenile crime. There’s also circumstances outside of the parent’s control… The community, the schools, the other children they interact with outside of the home, any mental illness or problems the child might have.

The common theory here is that the parent should be more involved. But two things:

  • Children NEED some level of freedom. I’m so fucking sick and tired of the people who believe children should be monitored at all times. When you see it in practice, you immediately recognize it as a problem. Those children are stunted socially, emotionally, and in terms of their abilities. A parent who can 100% ensure their child does no wrong is 100% ensuring their child becomes a neurotic or entitled mess.
  • Available time and resources are not split evenly. Before someone says, “but someone who can’t raise a child shouldn’t have had a child” please keep in mind that peoples circumstances change. Ignoring the whole abortion debate, access to birth control, etc, a person who has a child with a loving partner with plenty of money can end up destitute and alone and still have that child. A person who has a support network of siblings and parents can lose them. A person with a reasonable amount of money for having kids can be financially overwhelmed caring for a child that has unexpected difficulties in life.

Yeah, there’s shit parents in the world. But the law is a hammer that lacks the ability to discern a terrible parent from one who is just unlucky. It’s not the right tool for this job.

psivchaz ,

I don’t know what your particular situation is but if you’re just using it on computers you could use LUKS or BitLocker or FileVault. Then if you want to wipe it, you only need to destroy the key and the data is rendered effectively gone.

psivchaz ,

I have a similar one! I did house calls. I got called out on a warranty call, someone said a coworker of mine didn’t fix the problem. I look in the notes and the coworker says he did a standard virus removal, suggested virus protection but was turned down.

I get there and sure enough it’s riddled with viruses again. Coworker was legit, notes all in order, I tell the client that this isn’t a warranty issue, the work was done, and it has now been reinfected and will need another removal. He seems fine with this, but his wife flips out and demands I prove it got reinfected.

I suggest that we can check the web history. Since it was popping up ads, we’d see when the pop-ups started, and more importantly we’d see if they had stopped after coworker left. Guy says that’s unnecessary, it definitely got reinfected, and this time he’ll buy an antivirus. Wife is having none of it, says go ahead and check and I’ll see the problem was never fixed. I ask if they’re sure, guy kind of resignedly says to do it.

I’m not one to kink shame, but when all the trans porn site titles came up, the dude was clearly mortified. I didn’t get very far into trying to figure out if I can prove it’s related before the wife says “just fix the damn thing” and stormed out. I hope it wasn’t too bad for him, she seemed a bit difficult to deal with.

psivchaz ,

It’s not entirely unlike my plan: No more externalities. That’s the big problem with the environment and with a bunch of other things. Economists call it an “externality” when the things you’re doing have side effects that you don’t have to account for, such as pollution.

The thing is, we let industry and capital get away with it for a long time. And there’s no doubt that fixing it would also impact people. If the cost of properly disposing of a tire was built into the price of the tire, it would be passed along to customers. But it’s the only way to rehabilitate ANY system that uses currency.

psivchaz ,

And that’s becoming it’s own problem with search, especially with technical questions. The good answer is also old and out of date.

psivchaz ,

A compiler that uses an LLM to function mostly off of vibes. That’s… An idea you’ve had, for sure.

psivchaz ,

I’m trying out something mildly nutty by putting .steam in /home/steam, then making user-neon, and symlinking so that I can try kde without reinstalling steam games. If I succeed I might try it with other files.

psivchaz ,

All these comments and no one is going to point out that this is invalid?

The git stage and git commit don’t have any terminator, so it’s all one “command” and will fail. Then there’s a single & between git commit and git push, so it would run in parallel, so it would also fail.

Also, don’t git stage . people. Or at least do a git status before to make sure you didn’t stage file-with-all-the-production-secrets

psivchaz ,

I think the difference is that generative AI is allowing the spammy bullshit to outpace the anti-bullshit measures faster than before. I don’t think it’s demonization to point out that it’s a problem.

psivchaz ,

I feel like we always do things exactly the opposite of whatever rational would be.

“These people aren’t using the land to it’s full potential so we’re justified in murdering them and taking the land.” - About the people living half naked off the land.

“You can’t just make people move, even if you compensate them and are doing it for the greater good.” - About the people who drive a pickup truck to Walmart.

I know there’s more nuance, it’s just funny to me.

psivchaz ,

Don’t worry, they’ll just change and lower the requirements until they no longer have to rely on smart people.

psivchaz ,

There’s certainly some of that, but I don’t think it’s as widespread as you think. I think the base problem is actually a breakdown in social trust.

Not everyone can be a doctor, or economist, or scientist. So we rely on experts to tell us what’s up. The trust in the very idea of expertise has been eroded, in part due to legitimate fuckups by top officials, in part due to a rise in “Facebook experts” and conspiracy theories, and in part due to a concerted effort by conservatives to destroy that trust for their own gain.

Basically, these aren’t people thinking “I don’t care if these kids die.” These are people thinking, “The medical establishment is full of liars and thieves, so these so called vaccines don’t even work.”

psivchaz ,

The true mildly infuriating is the comments. Whether this is rage bait or not, we should all be about to agree on some basic things:

  • Domestic violence sucks regardless of who the victim is and who the perpetrator is.
  • Helping one group of victims, like males, does not have to and should not take away from helping another group.
  • The number of victims should not be the deciding factor on whether victims deserve empathy and support.

People in here are going out of their way to defend what is clearly a biased oversight, treating women like an automatic victim and treating men like an automatic perpetrator. Why? Just acknowledge that it’s dumb, shows bias, and move on.

psivchaz ,

I’m not sure what you’re talking about. One result affirms that you should feel safe and provides a hotline, the other starts with outright victim-blaming. The second result under “Maybe it’s your fault for not listening?” is not a hotline, at least for me.

My point is that if they just made the result the same then it would not detract from women, nor would it hurt the men who don’t need the advice. You’re going out of your way to defend an unnecessary bias by claiming it’s more relevant, but that’s not the point. They could choose to just not have the bias, and it would be a win while hurting no one.

psivchaz ,

I tried it, then uninstalled pretty quickly. If I say, “Play music” then 10% of the time it would play music, and the other 90% it would tell me it can’t. Same with many other assistant commands like controlling lights.

What even is the option here? When Google got rid of adding things to lists, I started my official transition away from them by moving to Proton, self hosting more stuff, etc. But for a voice assistant it seems like open source just isn’t there yet, it doesn’t have the hardware, and my only remaining option is to switch to Amazon (no.) Or Apple.

psivchaz ,

The truly wild thing about subscription pricing to me is how viscerally I’m against it. I’m not shitting on this business model, I think it makes perfect sense and is probably the only logical way to run a business like this. I’m just saying that everything in our lives is trying so hard to turn everything into a recurring fee that my first reaction to every recurring fee is pure hatred.

Alright, so the amount of data I’d need for pictures is probably the 500GB tier, so $9.99/mo. My first thought is that’s way too expensive, my second thought is that I’m not doing another subscription. My subscription-trauma addled brain will happily justify buying a little server, and a 1TB hard drive, and spending hours configuring them. By the time I’m done, I’ll have spent the equivalent of at least 3 years of the cost of this service, plus tons of my free time, and it will never work exactly right because there’s always going to need to be updates, and sometimes those will break something, and I’ll need to fix it myself.

Anyway, it looks cool though.

psivchaz ,

I use Photoprism. It is sufficient, amazing even for what it is, but there’s a definite curve to getting it set up properly and there’s some babysitting involved to make sure everything keeps working.

Google tests a feature that calls businesses on your behalf and holds until an agent is available | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)

Google tests a feature that calls businesses on your behalf and holds until an agent is available | TechCrunch::Google is testing a feature that places a call to a business , waits on hold and then give you a call once a representative is available.

psivchaz ,

This seems like an overly complicated explanation when the alternative explanation is so simple: More call center employees can answer more phones, but call center employees cost money to hire, and businesses do not like spending money.

psivchaz ,

Um literally billions of people are dying from the vaccine and you just don’t know about it because the media won’t cover it. Or something.

psivchaz ,

It’s unfair to discount Google’s early days. They DID have technical excellence. Search was leagues better than the competition. Gmail was an amazing leap from other providers. Android started as trash but improved rapidly. The Nexus line of phones was amazing. Google Maps was a huge improvement over what else existed. They did a lot right.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when the fall started. Was it when Pichai became CEO? When they removed “don’t be evil?” I remember a speech Pichai gave where he talked about “more wood behind fewer arrows” as why they were getting rid of employee child projects, so maybe it was that.

psivchaz ,

TBH I don’t get why people criticize selling out as if they wouldn’t do it, too. I don’t want to sit and amass wealth indefinitely, if I have a company and someone comes along and offers “retire rich forever” money, I’m taking it and fucking off to somewhere fun. Especially if we’re talking billions, no one will ever hear my name again.

psivchaz ,

I don’t quite understand. Are you saying it’s immoral to sell a business? Is it retiring that’s immoral? I didn’t say that everyone secretly anything, I just don’t understand why the hate.

Look, there’s no such thing as an ethical billionaire. I get that, and fully believe it. But I don’t get why people think “selling out” is a thing when it’s often basically short hand for “retiring and letting someone else make the money.”

psivchaz ,

He wasn’t saying it was a bad idea, but that it was a bad name. You want to get something done in a democracy, you gotta get people on board. You want people on board, you gotta sell it.

psivchaz ,

I know this is a bad idea but I want to know parameters. Is ONE ice cube okay? Or say 2 ounces of ice, but not 3? How big could the splatter get? Could I make a party game out of putting a fryer in a driveway and having guests throw ice cubes at it?

psivchaz ,

“Nearly forty years ago? This person must be old,” I thought. Then I did the math on how long I’ve been out of school. Oof. Sorry for judging your age, fellow millennial.

psivchaz ,

Maybe it’s the Communist in me, but I don’t get why some people are so eager for Nintendo to file a lawsuit. Nevermind whether it actually infringes anything, it isn’t eating away at Pokemon’s sales or anything. It plays very different, a little closer to Arceus than any traditional Pokemon game. I see it as a win. Maybe it will encourage Nintendo to take Pokemon in a more open world direction with more features.

psivchaz ,

It’s a bit of both! Certain commands to the car can be done locally via Bluetooth OR via Tesla servers. The tricky bit is that status always comes from the server. If you are on a VPN that is blocked (like I use NordVPN and it is often blocked) then the app can’t get status and as long as it can’t get status it may not even try a local command. It’s unclear to me under what circumstances it does local vs cloud commands, and it may have to do with a Bluetooth LE connection that you can’t really control.

When you don’t have service, or you’re on VPN, it may be worthwhile to try disabling and reenabling Bluetooth. I have had success with this before. If you’re using android, it seems like the widget also uses Bluetooth, so you could try adding the widget to your home screen and using that. You can also try setting the Tesla app to not be power controlled, so it never gets closed.

Either way, there’s a definite engineering problem here that feels like it should be fixed by Tesla. But I can at least confirm that, even in situations with zero connectivity, you should be able to perform basic commands like unlock and open trunk without data service.

psivchaz ,

I agree but I think it needs to be slightly more practical. Sometimes a line of business just dries up and it would damage the company to try and keep that service going. It wouldn’t make sense to force a company into bankruptcy to keep one line going that few people use anymore.

Earlier today, though, I was thinking about sunsetting guarantees. Companies can and should decommission things when it makes business sense, but the user generated content it has gathered shouldn’t just disappear, and they shouldn’t be allowed to destroy the user experience of things people have bought.

So I would propose rules like:

  • If a service is being decomissioned or an entry point to that service being shut down, the content available on that service must be made available as a bulk export. Personal data, such as account data, messages, etc should be made available to users individually, while publicly accessible content should be made available publicly.
  • If a public service is being taken down completely, source code should be made available publicly.
  • If the service for a device which was physically purchased by consumers is being taken down, an update must be provided to allow users to use a local or alternative backend service. The source code for the service must be released publicly.
  • If features are being removed from a service which backed a physically purchased device, an update must be offered which allows users to point to a local or alternative service for either all functionality or, at minimum, the removed functionality. Looking at you, Google, keep removing features…
psivchaz ,

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.

psivchaz ,

I don’t understand why OP is attacking me like this.

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