JoeCoT

See also the NYT article about the CIA being extremely involved in the war in Ukraine, and the many ways they assisted in escalating things before Russia invaded. Not a Russia fanboy, they shouldn’t have invaded and I hope they’re defeated soundly, but there was a lot of hand washing pretending that the US did not provoke this war, and it did.

At least with Gaza, I actually kinda hope it’s true and US Special Forces are in those tunnels fighting Hamas members. Because that’s a far more effective method of stopping this fight than Israel carpet bombing civilians. I would like the US to beat Hamas before Israel does, in the same way Germans wanted the US to get to Berlin before the USSR.

Not a lot of products have to do that. The one people bandy about is McDonalds adding “Caution: Coffee Is Hot” to their stuff, but the actual coffee spill lawsuit was over coffee hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns. Few things need cautions against their intended use.

Q-Tips / cotton swabs are an almost uniquely bad tool. It’s incredibly easy to rupture your ear drums. There’s no actual health benefit to swabbing your ears – it just feels good your ears get itchy. A safer tool could be made, but it’d be more expensive, more involved to use, and there’s probably several but I can’t be bothered to find out, and neither can you. They make a product that they know is inherently dangerous to use and has no specific benefit. So it has a warning against doing it. Same as cigarette packs have a warning that they cause cancer, even though everyone buying them knows that and smokes them anyway.

Arduino in the same vein. There’s a great “30 Days Lost in Space” tutorial set, but even to play around with by yourself for cheap, you can get an off brand (the hardware is open source!) Arduino Mega for 20 bucks. All sorts of cool programming and electronics fun.

They were specifically created for cleaning ears. First line of the wikipedia history.. The reason Q-Tip says not to use them in ears is plausible deniability. They know they mostly get used to cleaning ears. But it’s incredibly easy to puncture your eardrum doing that. In order to stop people from suing them for using their product in its main use case and hurting themselves, they simply specifically instruct against using it that way. While that is a wholly ridiculous falsehood, without it they’d have probably been sued so much that no one would make them. And then I wouldn’t be able to clean my ears.

It’s specifically the Psychic Sports Picks Trick. And the answer is that it would be illegal at the point OP actually asks for money at the end.

Right. If the UK tries to rejoin they’re going to get no favors from the rest of the EU, as an example to other member states that you can’t just play hokey pokey with a continental union. The UK will be miffed as a response. It’ll potentially take decades for a deal to work out for the UK to rejoin the EU, if that’s even its form at that point.

My point is that, if someone really leverages the power of AWS, it is entwined into their software stack to such an extent that it is not just a service anymore. It’s a platform. It’s the glue that keeps everything together. The lines between service and proprietary software blur real quick. It’s one of the reasons for the AGPL.

Everything in development involves risk, and products will move real slow if you don’t depend on someone for some services. But developers aren’t very good at risk management, not being reliant on a single service to butter your bread. It is very quick to bring a minimum value product to market on AWS, but the followup to that MVP needs to be moving to a more sustainable, less risky infrastructure.

The vendor lock in from AWS doesn’t come from just using EC2 servers. EC2 is just linux servers, like you say. You could run them anywhere. In fact, if you’re just running AWS EC2 servers without leveraging their other features, particularly auto-scaling, you’re probably just setting money on fire. Everything EC2 offers can be done much cheaper at a different host.

The AWS lock-in comes when you expand to their other services. Route 53 DNS, Relational Database Service, Simple Email Service, etc etc. AWS offers a ton of different services that are quite useful, and they add new ones all the time. And if your company uses a bunch of them, and then realizes they need to leave AWS, doing so is incredibly painful. Which is the point.

Problem with Intel cards is that they’re a relatively recent release, and not very popular yet. It’s going to be a while before games optimize for them.

For example, the ARC cards aren’t supported for Starfield. Like they might run but not as well as they could if Starfield had optimized for them too. But the card’s only been out a year.

Spoiler: it fits very few company’s business models. Some companies can avoid it, if their owners/board want to. But once they take venture capital, or go public, they lose that choice. And that “don’t be evil” promise, and most any other, is void.

This. After my first Android phone I had only gotten Nexus phones. I had a Nexus 6p when the Pixel was announced, and it wasn’t going to have a headphone jack. I tried multiple dongles with my Nexus 6p, and none of them both reliably worked with my headphones and fast charged my phone. My wife ordered a Pixel, I ordered a Note 9.

I’ve gone Note 9, then a One Plus Nord v10, and now an Asus ZenFone 9. Every time a manufacturer ditched the headphone jack (or made it only available at ludicrous price), I just switched manufacturers. I don’t even use a headphone jack that often, but when I need it I want it to be there and just work.

The global south is largely a terrible place because of the wealthy north. Especially the US. First they had to throw off their colonizers. Then they had to suffer the punishments of their former colonizers. Then the US took it upon themselves to attempt to overthrow every socialist leading government in the western hemisphere, elected or not, and replace them with a dictator. Then in the Western Hemisphere the US War on Drugs have made Mexico, Central, and South America a war zone run by cartels.

So yeah, much of the world is much worse to live in than the US. Mostly because of the US. Western Europe is still a far better place to live.

When I was 19 I tried an IRC Vampire the Requiem game. I got banned after arguing with the admins about the rules (in retrospect I was right about how things worked but they’d already house ruled it and I should’ve just gone with it). In response I wrote a whole website for managing character sheets, and a connected IRC bot to handle dice rolls, and pull things from character sheets.

I did all of that, and then proceeded to run a terrible vampire game on IRC for a couple months. The code was all in PHPNuke so it’s useless now. But it taught me a lot about coding for the web. During that time I showed my work at a job interview as a software dev, and I got a job while still in college. But as part of the coding questions, I learned that you can use sql to join tables. I went home and started rewriting a lot of stuff, but the game died before I was finished.

My solution is more complicated but doesn’t require switching browsers

1. I run a tor client on my home server in docker, the same place I keep my vpn access, torrenting, etc
2. I run a socks proxy on my home server, that sends all requests through the tor network (and a different socks proxy for when I want to use the VPN)
3. On my desktop and laptop, I use the FoxyProxy firefox extension (SwitchyOmega on Chrome). I setup the socks proxy (proxies) on it, using URL patterns.
4. When I go to a .onion link, FoxyProxy uses the pattern, and sends the traffic over my tor socks proxy

For note, this is an option on Kbin. You can go to /d/thedomain.com and block the whole domain

I use kbin.social mostly because I liked the interface better and I wanted to be contrary, and if I ever self-host it, I’m much more familiar with PHP than Rust.

For sure, they’ll make some spec that isn’t very compatible with lots of cables, chargers, devices, etc. But, it will charge. A normal usb c cable might not Super Ultra Mega Charge your iPhone like an apple cable and adapter would, but it will charge, and vice-versa. That’s basically what we have with usb-c standards currently, though.

To an extent. But whenever there is a political discussion on Hacker News, the lib right response is very, very loud, and I try to remind myself I appreciate Hacker News for its tech news.

I think the culture is just different. Lemmy was started and run by Tankies. Hacker News was started by Y Combinator, which incubates silicon valley startups. They’re going to attract different audiences, or at least different groups of people who will put up with different politics. I can’t claim to be particularly upset about the .ml domains being pulled and the center mass of Lemmy moving away from those instances.

I setup a Mastodon instance at leftist.network back in 2020, when I was worried that the COVID/Trump situation was going to quickly transition into something more serious. Besides Jan 6th that didn’t happen, but hey, it was a cool domain for people to join when Twitter started tanking!

But the thing is, I never really used Twitter. My social media was Facebook and reddit. Both of them for the discussion groups (Facebook isn’t boring if all your friends are gay communists). Mastodon didn’t quite scratch the itch, mostly because there’s nothing like Facebook groups or subreddits. I had looked at Lemmy before, but there wasn’t a big enough user base to really move over.

I looked up kbin and lemmy with the reddit diaspora, and they fit both social media fixes. Most communities are on Lemmy, but I like kbin’s interface more. I just want kbin to add the feature to hide upvoted posts.

I’m a little dismayed that more and more stuff is moving to Discord though. I was an IRC regular back in the day, but I could never quite deal with Discord’s 24/7 conversation to try to keep up with.

This. I was a redditor for 14 years. I was a moderator, I ran reddit meetups in Philly and Jersey. I have a badge on my profile for working with one of the admins 13 years ago to add /r/friends/comments, for use in a 3rd party app for Ubuntu (the kind that will now be dying). I was there for the Digg migration, Secret Santa, Global Reddit Meetup Days, Reddit Gold, Reddit Mold, Team Periwinkle, I was Snapped. I run a subreddit, different_sob_story, that was literally a meta subreddit about bad reddit posts.

Did I have a reddit addiction? Yeah, probably. But it was a large background in my life, for 14 years. If there’s a famous reddit moment, I was probably there for it. I had 2 real life relationships, because of reddit. I made a good chunk of my real life friends through reddit. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

So yeah, it’s a lot. And some redditors will get over it quicker than others. Bear with me; My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, And I must pause till it come back to me.