scarabic

As far as I’m concerned, Tom Waits solved ticket scalping back in 1999. He did two shows in my area on the Mule Variations tour. When you bought tickets, you could only buy two, and you had to give a name. Not an id, just a name. And then at the door, you had to show ID. You would anyway because it was a 21-and-up show, but the name on the ID had to match the name on the ticket. They didn’t scan shit. Just the doorman glanced at the name, and compared it to what was printed on the ticket. You could buy as many pairs of tickets as you wanted under the same name, but you couldn’t then sell them to people because their ID wouldn’t match at the door. Simple. Non invasive. It worked. The show was amazing.

There is a difference between authoring and submitting, right?

Also, having buttons on your clothes is an abomination. Hooks and eyes only.

What accountability has there been for bad code by humans?

That’s probably why they say “a human is responsible” not “a human must validate it.” I certainly agree that validation is not always possible. And this problem will get worse in time.

C'est l'année de l'ordinateur Linux! It’s the year of the Linux computer! Oh man! I thought this was going to be the rare case where you could actually say the thing in French with fewer characters, but French loses by 1. Dommage! And English doesn’t even have a contraction for “the,” of which there are two in this short sentence!

You can get by on public fast chargers for the interim. 120V is also more viable than I expected. I was all ready to install a 240 line for a charger when we bought our EV but a year later we haven’t actually needed to yet. No long commute in our household, so 🤷‍♂️BTW we did exactly what you described: bought a very low-miles used Bolt on Carvana. Take the plunge if you want to.

You have to imagine that there’s always someone who is right in the middle of the car purchasing process and perhaps on the fence about which way to go. A sudden change in circumstances can influence which way things fall. There may also be people who’ve been thinking about switching who suddenly feel convinced it’s the right choice and go take the plunge. Basically people are out there primed to make a choice already and this just tips them one way.

I hope more people try it because hot damn, I love having an EV. We got a gently used Bolt last year and it’s exceeded my expectations in every way. It’s quick and QUIET inside and so far we haven’t had the need to go beyond a regular old wall socket 120V charger (we mostly just drive in-town). But wow I love driving it and never stopping to gas it or even change the oil. It’s such a simple and satisfying experience.

Can we yet call the discovery of fusion a “thing that happened to energy?” ;D It’s getting there, I suppose!

7 in 10 children remain on major social media services? Does this mean they got 30% of the children off of them? I’d say that’s something other than total failure. A start.

I see, thanks. I consider it a general term but I can see how it may have strong associations with Russia, especially because many Americans probably heard the term for the first time after Crimea.

Ironically, this post hassles people for saying things.

I’m not sure I get it… some ports can stay open all year, some cannot. The ones that can are called warm water ports. It’s a very helpful geographic feature for any country to have so they can enjoy uninterrupted shipping for trade and transport. Dude is making the case that Texas could stand alone as a country.

Christ go rub one out and touch some grass. I hope you feel better soon.

Add to the scary list: that some people think it’s no cause for alarm if a country resorts to grain reserves to survive.

“There you go, bringing class into it again.”

if my own government was conducting mass surveillance on me I would be particularly furious at the betrayal. But I would also not support it conducting surveillance on foreigners either. I’m not trying to pin you here, just explain why it did indeed sound an awful lot like you were saying that. Conducting no surveillance is pretty much not having any intelligence operations. Are they supposed to wait by the phone for tips? This is where I was coming from. You didn’t use the word “mass” then. If you tell me you meant something different, I believe you, but this is how I got you wrong.

The more I learn about this guy, the more amazed I am that his staffers stood up for him when he got fired. I guess they just hated the board more.

I know what you mean. It’s a pretty vague term though. You could argue that as soon as it enters the midsection of the bell curve at all, it’s “in the mainstream.” It doesn’t have to have captured a full 90% of the bell curve.

Yeah instead of arguing over whether Anthropic is actually good, let’s unite around “fuck OpenAI.”

Crossing off mass surveillance and automated killing isn’t everything they could have taken a moral stand on. Personally I don’t think any list will be long enough for the Pentagon, and if it were, there wouldn’t be anything left that could be worked on. But I keep hearing you say that no mass surveillance and no automated killings is so very little - almost nothing. That doesn’t seem right to me. I think those are both pretty big things. I’m not horrified that their moral stance would include only that.

We can safely assume that alternative app stores would have less effect on iOS than they have on Android, where Google desperately wants others to step in and develop their ecosystem. And they aren’t very significant on Android at all. I tried distributing my app on Samsung Galaxy in addition to GPlay and despite its preferential positioning with the world’s largest phone maker, I got peanuts for installs. Not even a rounding error. I literally took the app down. Oh and then Xiaomi got banned from the SDK and they stole my APK for _their_ third party app store and began sending me bug reports about how it was “broken” there. Ah yes the power and glory of alternative app stores… Apple are wise not to dump this cesspit into their ecosystem, which people love because all they want is one decent, unified default that works well.

I really think this move blows and I wish they would reverse this decision and make an exception. However Tim Cook didn’t wake up one day and wonder how he could fuck creators. Apple takes a 30% cut of all app transactions. This is how they benefit from the enormous and highly successful app platform and ecosystem they created. It’s not pure evil to say “hey use this platform all you want but you must share some of what you make there with us.” It does suck that they won’t let creators off the hook though. This is like taxing rips.

One factor here is that they are all under pressure from their boards and investors not to miss the AI wave and get left behind. All companies are doing some level of AI theater. Some actually believe it. But it’s not like hundreds of CEOs all came to this judgment purely on their own, with no outside influences. It’s a mass craze.

I think this is just panic from the higher ups at Mozilla who have no idea what in the fuck the company should be doing or is about, even.

There’s another possibility I don’t see anyone talking about. It could just be the higher ups at Mozilla doing the old performative “we’re doing AI” dance for their shareholders and the investment community. Everyone assumes they are 100% sincere about embracing AI but this could simply be them paying the AI tax that all companies seem required to pay right now.

If this is plausible, then we should just wait for it to manifest as actual feature changes and then judge. Right now this is just high level messaging and PR.

This is pretty much the only metric that matters. There is absolutely plenty of room to improve on human drivers! One crash per 500k miles sounds extremely low to me. But if the cars are not better than humans, they should not be on the road.

They say it’s not a DEI initiative; they just want to get this talent onboard for their business. Ironically, that’s exactly what DEI initiatives were all about: recognizing that if we let white bros excluded all others from the workplace, like they have in prior decades, we will shut out the majority of the world’s talent, and we should do whatever it takes to make sure everyone can join, work, and truly focus without watching their back all the time.

Yeah fostering waste heat into useful energy sounds very very much like “making entropy go down.” We know we can make entropy go down in one spot by increasing it even more in others. But for them to do that here. They’d be turning high entropy into low entropy PLUS more high entropy, which sounds circularly self-fueling or essentially perpetual option. Most of our electrical generation capabilities use heat at some point to boil water, but what makes that work is water’s phase change behavior, accessible temperature for that phase exchange, and water’s ubiquity. If they can pull this off: amazing. But it sounds very much like a quixotic adventure for a legendary inventor’s final days. Someone call me when they have something applicable.

Anyone who has knowledge of or works in any areas adjacent to any of these could provide some kind of insight. Fuck me for wanting some grownup conversation about why businesses do the things they do, instead of a circle jerk of hating on mustache-twirling villains.

As predicted, a one-dimensional answer. Let’s say they want more money: they do have a healthy software subscriptions business. How can they get more by becoming the world’s tiniest streaming service? And won’t that cannibalize their subscriptions business as the experience gets shittier and shittier? Some actual “whys” within this would be things like (made up, but for example) the subscriptions business is dying - less than 1% of users ever buy a pass and efforts to increase that failed for (another reason here) streaming services are dumping cash into viewer acquisition because a war is on for dominance in that space and Pled is capitalizing on that Plex has high overlap with gamers and are making good money on midroll gaming ads during these streams Plex has legal concerns about facilitating piracy - this is the real reason why sync is shit and they killed watch together. They are desperately trying to pivot out of their old business before they get sued - OR all this streaming nonsense gives them a kind of fig leaf over that somehow See, issues can be complex and interesting. Just calling them greedy is neither. How is this the greedy play, even?

I hate headlines like this. I’d love to hear the REASONS WHY Plex are doing all of this. But no, it’s just “4 ways in which Plex now sucks” which we all know already. Before someone says “the reason is money” we need to ask: do the developers of Jellyfin not use money? Before someone says “enshittification,” we need to ask: does this mean Jellyfin will soon have the same problems? We all seem to love Jellyfin so I think we need to understand the actual reason why, or this will just continue happening.

Someone should write a Reddit client that automatically hides the top two comments and all their children, because they’re inevitably stupid jokes that add nothing. Oh right. No one can make new Reddit clients anymore.

I’ve managed entirely on Google Sheets for years now. And I was a really big fan of Excel. It was never viable for me to rely on Windows to be everywhere I need to be, and the functionality gap closed steadily over the years to the point where the benefits of it being on the web now overwhelm the feature gap. Being free helps too, especially as Excel has gone through various pricing and bundling contortions over the years. Someone might tell me here that it’s now completely free but can I really be blamed for tuning out Microsoft years ago?

Trillions of dollars worth of compute mining dogecoin

I wish i knew more about the guts of LLMs because I keep thinking it must be easier to optimize them than to put data centers into space.