Meta should probably never be blamed for innovating when all they do is steal ideas from potential competitors and crudely duct tape them onto existing products. Instagram was once a useful, good app and now it’s 80% features from Snapchat and TikTok and you maybe see a friend’s post a week late.

I think it should be 16 or so. If you can wreck my car, you should be able to vote.

Multiple electronics stores caught on fire. I doubt Mossad found a specific box that said “To: terrorists” on it and only rigged those pagers. They just don’t care about killing civilians.

Because the U.S. government gave them $6.6 billion to do it under the CHIPS Act: https://www.reuters.com/technology/tsmc-wins-66-bln-us-subsidy-arizona-chip-production-2024-04-08/

With TSMC, it’s insurance against China invading Taiwan but Intel (and probably everyone else) got a load of subsidies too. After the chip shortage during the pandemic and Russia invading Ukraine, chip production became a national security issue.

We lived in a house where the previous owners had it exorcised and I’ve never slept better. I’d take living in a cursed/haunted house over a shitty roommate any day.

I had my suspicions before but the moment I realized for certain Elon Musk couldn’t run a software company was when he judged people by lines of code written.

You make a good point about using it for documentation and learning. That’s a pretty good use case. I just wouldn’t want young developers to use it for code completion any more than I’d want college sophomores to use it for writing essays. Professors don’t have you write essays because they like reading essays. Sometimes, doing a task manually is the point of the assignment.

If I was still in a senior dev position, I’d ban AI code assistants for anyone with less than around 10 years experience. It’s a time saver if you can read code almost as fluently as you can read your own native language but even besides the A.I. code introducing bugs, it’s often not the most efficient way. It’s only useful if you can tell that at a glance and reject its suggestions as much as you accept them.

Which, honestly, is how I was when I was first starting out as a developer. I thought I was hot shit and contributing and I was taking half a day to do tasks an experienced developer could do in minutes. Generative AI is a new developer: irrationally confident, not actually saving time, and rarely doing things the best way.

Probably Janelle Monae - Archandroid. I love Afrofutrist funk like (Parliament-Funkadelic). It appeals to my 2 identities as a space nerd and the funkiest of the funky. Archandroid was sort of the peak of her sticking close to that genre. (Her three early works called the Metropolis Saga — Metropolis, an EP, Archandroid, and The Electric Lady — form a whole story.) The albums have multiple Suites like classical works so the themes change even within the albums. But Archandroid is my favorite part. And you can totally nerd out on it forever and still find new things.

As there’s no responses, I’ll offer that my friends’ kids in dense parts of NYC, LA, SF, DC, etc. do all those activities. (Maybe the ones in LA don’t go sit by the LA “river.”) There’s usually loads of neighborhood parks and less formal places in cities where kids play (like playing soccer in an alley). And I know my friends in urban centers have their kids in just as many organized sports leagues as my friends who live in the suburbs. (It might actually be easier on the parents in the cities because my suburban friends are like youth sports taxi services every weekend whereas the ones in NYC have enough population density where the league is in the neighborhood.)

So, my impression (from the parents’ childless friend’s side) is that kids, like Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs, find a way. They’ll play hide and seek in a desert and try to hide behind tumbleweeds.

Again, sorry if I’m talking out of turn but this is Lemmy and there were no responses yet so I thought I’d toss in what I’ve seen as an adult. Gotta feed the content maw until the Fediverse grows up to be an uncontrollable beast.

For a long time — like probably into the 2000s — LSU’s Tiger Stadium had dorm rooms because when Huey Long couldn’t get funding approved for a football stadium, he got money for dorms approved and built one dorm in the shape of a football stadium.

Anything Elon Musk can track is probably a security risk until he stops being the most divorced person to ever exist.

Laziness is the number one skill anyone innovative should have. Whoever invented the wheel definitely didn’t do it because they liked work. It was because they hated it knew there had to be a better way.

So, what we really need is lazier inventors. Only then will we get lazier robots.

This is ancient history and will probably make me sound older than dirt but when Ubuntu first came out, it felt so easy to install and use. I don’t know that any of the innovations were wholly theirs as other distros were trying the same stuff. But it was the first distro I used that really tried to make it all easy and it felt like a complete OS.

Fedora Core was doing the same stuff and now, we have tons of tools but whether you like it today or not, the early Ubuntu releases were like, “Holy shit. I can partition from the Live CD? What is this witchcraft?” Debian obviously was the core project but little niceties were rare on Linux back then. I did want to install multimedia codecs when I was a teen. I did need guidance and documentation.

Not defending Snaps or whatever here but early Ubuntu was user-friendly and made it easy to transition off Windows ME or whatever was dominant and shitty back then.

A separate shoutout to Chrunchbang for customization and minimalism. That was probably the distro that got me hardcore hooked on Linux. I had enough experience at that point to not need hand holding but it was cool out of the box.

Maybe add a spoiler alert next time. Jeez.

Yep. Thanks for catching that. I meant NIH, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and accidentally combined it with HHS (the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services that NIH is an agency within) and that was apparently too many acronyms.

If it was the best healthcare in the world, we’d have the best outcomes and we don’t even have that for rich people. We have a (non-metric) shit ton of world class research universities and highly respected agencies like the FDA and NHS but Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, can’t even get the mental health services he obviously needs.

I’d obviously rather go to an American hospital than a hospital in most of the world but spending a lot to cover up a shitty system isn’t as good as a functioning system.

I’m a developer posting on Lemmy so maybe take this with a huge grain of salt but I think we need to focus less on STEM/finance and more on humanities education. Definitely in the United States but probably most of the world considering India and China focus on tech too.

When I was learning to code (in the 90’s and 2000’s unless you count a 9 year old making BASIC do loops), my mentors basically all had majored in something besides computer science because there wasn’t necessarily even a computer science major available if your college didn’t have “Tech” in the name. It was a lot of hippies who spent their weekends making pottery and got into IT or software development almost by accident; it was a job to fund their non-lucrative hobby or passion.

Basically, we lost something when being a programmer became a goal and not a way to reach some other goal. I’m not sure we can return to a time when it was tinkerers and hobbyists coming to the field with different backgrounds but more creatives should learn to code and more coders should be forced to make art.

Apparently, there’s an obsolete English word “smitham” that means (or meant) “small lumps of ore random people found.” They were exempt from taxation by English nobility so large mine owners started breaking up large chunks into “smitham” to avoid taxation. Apparently, the Duke of Devonshire put a stop to that in 1760 and the word fell out of use.

So, I think rhythm still counts as weird. Noah Webster was 2 years old in 1760 and the modern Merriam-Webster dictionary doesn’t have it.

“Rhythm” doesn’t rhyme with anything and doesn’t contain a letter that’s always a vowel.