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torpak

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torpak ,

The best solution to this problem is not to buy one in the first place.

torpak ,

Is there anyone who likes landlords? Why would they?

torpak ,

That homelessness and hunger are not ended in the USA is not because the money needed is spent on other things, it is because the government doesn’t want to end them.

torpak ,

No, you kill thousands of innocent people and say they were terrorists or helping terrorists.

torpak ,

I did the switch twenty years ago, starting with dual-boot and Wine. Nowadays dual-boot is gone and I never use Wine outside of gaming.

Unity CEO John Riccitiello is retiring, effective immediately (arstechnica.com)

John Riccitiello, CEO of Unity, the company whose 3D game engine had recently seen backlash from developers over proposed fee structures, will retire as CEO, president, and board chairman at the company, according to a press release issued late on a Monday afternoon, one many observe as a holiday.

torpak ,

You only get to become CEO when you have friends in high places. Why would anyone risk the backlash for hurting you when silently letting you go with a golden handshake doesn’t cost their own money or at least a neglegible part of it.

torpak ,

Like, do it in private, but don’t bother other people with it. Seems fair.

torpak ,

Problem with bulshit is, once the pile is high enough it’s very hard to convince people that there is no pony underneath.

And this particular pile has been heaped on for centuries…

torpak ,

Would you be ok with surveilling everyone to make sure they are not Nazis? While I am uncomfortable with the knowledge that there are some people out there who are Nazis in secret, that is still much better than them feeling comfortable enough to be Nazis in the open.

Also I would prefer even Nazis marauding in the streets to universal surveillance, which for me at least is hardly imaginable without at least a little Nazi ideology at government level.

Also I was talking about religion which in contrast to Nazi-ideology can be benign, when practiced in private.

torpak ,

Well, as I see it, it’s only organized religion that is harmful.

torpak ,

The only thing that surprises me is that anyone is surprised by this. If you buy a physical book from anywhere, you own it. If you “buy” the rigth to play a movie (or read a book) from amazon, you own nothing. Usually they don’t show that so clearly but that’s the reality.

torpak ,

I wouldn’t do that if I hadn’t warned everyone who would and wouldn’t listen about this since the start of the business model. I’m just frustrated, that nobody listens until it’s to late.

torpak ,

When it comes to corporations, the problem is there are no good actors. They are required by law to do what ever maximizes shareholder value.

torpak ,

If I recall correctly there was a time, where they did a deal with Disney a few years back. Disney wanted to bring one or more of their classic animations back to the cinema and Amazon disabled playback of those movie(s) for that time even for people who had “bought” them.

torpak ,

I remember the 1984 incident. At the time I thought this is so ironic, it has to be satire. Now, just a few years later it doesn’t even register as odd anymore.

Meta wants to charge EU users $14 a month if they don't agree to personalized ads on Facebook and Instagram (www.businessinsider.com)

Meta wants to charge EU users $14 a month if they don’t agree to personalized ads on Facebook and Instagram::Meta is considering offering ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram for $14 a month – but only in Europe.

torpak ,

So you give them $14 and hope, they don’t sell your data? I never had a facebook/whatsapp account and never will and I know why.

torpak ,

The funny part is that contextual ads are at least as effective as targeted ads. So not only is facebook violating your privacy. They are ripping of their customers at the same time.

torpak ,

Ad targeting should just be banned outright. It serves noone and creates huge pools of easy to abuse data.

torpak ,

When you make your business dependent on a single supplier, that’s a massive risk. I don’t quite understand why many Managers don’t grasp that concept. There are two solutions: build your own infrastructure or use something that’s either publicly available (like open source software) or easily replaceable (like a library with a common interface that many others also implement in a way that would also solve your usecase).

If you don’t do that, one day in the future your supplier will increase the cost until it’s just below the cost of switching. If the cost of switching is more than you can afford at that point, you are screwed.

Cloud computing anyone?

torpak ,

That is definitely not inevitable. It could very well be that we reach a point of diminishing returns soon. I’m not convinced, that the simplistic construction of current generation machine learning can go much further than it already has without significant changes in strategy.

torpak ,

he reality is if you give it a simple prompt, it generates the blandest, most uninspired, badly paced textural garbage imaginable

Which is not too far from the typical sequel quality coming out of hollywood at the moment ;-)

torpak ,

No amount of ethics teaching will change the behaviour of a narcisistic psychopath like musk.

torpak ,

You can have a bad government with any kind of economic system. As evidenced by the USA. They tend to commit most of their atrocities outside their own country but that doesn’t make them any better than china or russia.

torpak ,

Climate change. I live in a city with decent bicycle infrastructure and good public transport. Yet most people still argue they need their damn car to get to work alone without luggage, less than 5 kilometers away.

torpak ,

It’s worse. They use “machine learning”. So nobody can know the failure modes before they happen.

torpak ,

I would even go so far as to say: I want every household appliance as dumb as possible. Once things are smart enough, they are used to spy on you, or defraud you or both.

torpak ,

I think part of this problem is that the USA has split more or less into two different cultures that have developed different languages to the point that they don’t even understand each other and what seems a rational argument in one language is perceived as hate speech in the other.

Europe is going into the same direction but it’s not as extreme yet.

torpak ,

It is inevitable with scaling quickly. In the early days of the internet there were unwritten (and later written) rules how to behave. And people who didn’t accept those even after being educated were usually banned for a time.

This worked because the early internet users were mostly us nerds and we tend to be able to have civilized discussions.

Every time new users came, those were quickly educated and if they didn’t fit in they either left or built their own communities.

Of cause there were always trolls but they were few and quickly isolated.

The problem with people who couldn’t behave started when people came in more quickly than they could be educated. And those who knew the rules didn’t want to repeat the rules 20 times a day to some newcomers. So either a community stopped accepting new members or started accepting shitstorms.

torpak ,

I don’t know about Trump. But the climat that allowed Hitler to gain traction was widespread poverty and hopelessness in post world war one Germany.

torpak ,

You must be new here.

They’ve grown up online. So why are our kids not better at detecting misinformation? (www.thestar.com)

They’ve grown up online. So why are our kids not better at detecting misinformation?::Recent studies have shown teens are more susceptible than adults. It’s a problem researchers, teachers and parents are only beginning to understand.

torpak ,

Misinformation predates the internet. I would bet it even predates written words. Humans are bad at detecting misinformation unless they are tought a scientific mindset and even that is not a 100% fix.

torpak ,

To be fair: not pushing lies that are big enough to provoke a successful lawsuit any more is not the same as telling the truth.

torpak ,

I’m sorry. Before that adapted educational system is ready, civilization will already be doomed by climate change. We have the next 15 to 20 years to act and we are already much to late to prevent some really bad stuff.

Reddit users are reporting Christian websites for violating Virginia's new porn identification law, citing vulgar passages in the Bible (www.insider.com)

As more and more states pass laws targeting "pornographic material" in books and online, they are repeatedly running up against a problem: The Bible has not just a few passages that could be considered indecent

torpak ,

Reddit against religion. Hand me the popcorn.

torpak ,

For anyone who thinks that is surprising: I have a bridge to sell you.

torpak ,

That’s a really unhealthy diet. Don’t do that! But honestly: As long as you have a smart elite, you can change things for the better by getting enough people to protest loudly and a few to protest violently. If your elite has degenerated to much over the generations your only option is revolution, which is usually bloody and not fun.

Tesla braces for its first trial involving Autopilot fatality (www.reuters.com)

Tesla braces for its first trial involving Autopilot fatality::Tesla Inc is set to defend itself for the first time at trial against allegations that failure of its Autopilot driver assistant feature led to death, in what will likely be a major test of Chief Executive Elon Musk’s assertions about the technology.

torpak ,

I’m literally waiting for the moment when a disproportionate ammount of Musk-critics die in car crashes.

torpak ,

I’m an atheist and consider all organized religion evil. But restricting what people can wear in school (apart from covering their genitals and not restricting movement or vision to the point that it hinders education) is indefensible.

torpak ,

You are doning it wrong. Whenever I buy new hardware, I read up on linux support before. Formated my last windows partition at home 5 years ago.

torpak ,

Also the half life of windows knowledge is a lot lower than linux knowledge. Under windows: when you have this problem, click here, click there, find this button, select this option and then it might help, until the next version changes everything. Under linux you find this config file, change this line to that and the fix will likely survive multiple system upgrades and could even work on different distributions.

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