Almost like they’re looking for an excuse to hang NATO out to dry.
Almost like they’re looking for an excuse to hang NATO out to dry.
It never is. People don’t “slip up” that way unless they use it all the time when in private.
It makes more sense if you start from the premise that there are “good people” and “bad people”, and bad people need to be punished to protect good people. The people who do the protections–like Joe Arpaio–can do no wrong. Even if they seem to do bad things, that’s just in the service of protecting good people.
This premise is bullshit, but everything follows from there.
Neither is all that great in practice.
Gopher has many problems as a protocol. The original versions of HTTP had much the same problems, such as closing the connection at the end of a transfer rather than having a length header or a signal that the connection is actually done. HTTP went on to fix most of those problems, but Gopher never got the chance. Gopher+ started fixing it up, but it was a victim of bad timing. The Mosaic browser was released shortly after Gopher+ and everyone started switching over. To my knowledge, nobody has ever implemented Gopher+ on either a client or server. Not even after over 20 years of a “revival” movement.
Gemini intentionally limits things, such as not having inline images. This is supposed to be done to keep out methods that have been historically used to track users, but things don’t work that way. I can just as easily send my logs to a data broker without using a pixel tracker if that’s what I want to do.
In the end, you can just use HTTP with a static web page, zero cookies, and no JavaScript. That’s what I ended up doing for my old blog (after offering a Gemini version for a while), including converting a bunch of YouTube <iframe>
tags to linked screenshots so you don’t even get YouTube cookies.
Attempting to replace people in the workplace without changing society so that people can live without work.
Companies are expected to make money, not revolutionize the world
I’d like to believe that, but I don’t think investors have caught on yet. That’s where the day of reckoning will come.
AI is a field that’s gone through boom and bust cycles before. The 1960s were a boom era for the field, and it largely came from DoD money via DARPA. This was awkward for a lot of the university pre and post grads in AI at the time, as they were often part of the anti-war movement. Then the anti-war movement starts to win and the public turns against the Vietnam war. This, in turn, causes that DARPA money to dry up, and it’s not replaced with anything from elsewhere in the government. This leads to an AI winter.
Just to be clear, I like AI as a field of research. I don’t at all like what capitalism is doing with it. But what did we get from that time of huge AI investment? Some things that can be traced directly back to it are optimizing compilers, virtual memory, Unix, and virtual environments. Computing today would look entirely different without it. We may have eventually invented those things otherwise, but it would have taken much, much longer.
. . . with 10% increase in performance rather than 50 or 60% like we really need
Why is this a need? The constant push for better and better has not been healthy for humanity or the planet. Exponential growth was always going to hit a ceiling. The limit on Moore’s Law has been more to the economic side than actually packing transistors in.
We still don’t have the capability to play games in full native 4K 144 Hertz. That’s at least a decade away
Sure you can, today, and this is why:
So many gaming companies are incapable of putting out a successful AAA title because . . .
Regardless of the reasons, the AAA space is going to have to pull back. Which is perfectly fine by me, because their games are trash. Even the good ones are often filled with micro transaction nonsense. None of them have innovated anything in years; that’s all been done at the indie level. Which is where the real party is at.
Would it be so bad if graphics were locked at the PS4 level? Comparable hardware can run some incredible games from 50 years of development. We’re not even close to innovating new types of games that can run on that. Planet X2 is a recent RTS game that runs on a Commodore 64. The genre didn’t really exist at the time, and the control scheme is a bit wonky, but it’s playable. If you can essentially backport a genre to the C64, what could we do with PS4 level hardware that we just haven’t thought of yet?
Yeah, there will be worse graphics because of this. Meh. You’ll have native 4K/144Hz just by nature of pulling back on pushing GPUs. Even big games like Rocket League, LoL, and CS:GO have been doing this by not pushing graphics as far as they can go. Those games all look fine for what they’re trying to do.
I want smaller games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less, and I’m not kidding.
She wrote the papers on General and Special Nugget Shape Theory.
The stock portion is reduced, yes, but there’s almost always some kind of mix of stocks in the portfolio. That’s not necessarily the main issue.
First, you may not get to choose the timing. A lot of older people got trapped in the 2008 downturn. They were planning on retiring a few years out, but they lost their jobs and never got them back. Not only was their portfolio unprepared just based on when they planned to retire, but also the stock crash killed a chunk of what they had. Double wammy of losing their job and destroying their portfolio.
Second, inflation hits hard. If there’s a period of high inflation right when you retire, that can really hurt your savings regardless of how it’s distributed. One of the things those forced 2008 retirees had going for them was that we had a period of relatively low inflation for the next decade. If you took out housing (older people often own their home outright), inflation was sometimes negative.
Capitalism, even when it generally makes line go up, does so in a spiky way. Those spikes cause problems that tend to hit the working class the hardest. Sometimes in ways that cannot be recovered.
There are some liberal economists, particularly of a Modern Monetary Theory bent, who do argue for policies that would flatten growth in return for predictability. Capitalism always goes for the sugar rush of high gains, though. For example, the Fed left rates at rock bottom for far too long, thus letting the market continue extremely high gains (over 20% per year of the sp500, when 7% is a typical long term average). Likewise, you have corps chasing high profits and assuming post pandemic pent up demand would continue indefinitely. Which is now leading to layoffs while major stockholders continue to sweep it in. Both of these lead to the recent high inflation.
I think the efforts to flatten it out are doomed. Capitalism can’t solve its own problems.
There are certain restaurants that everyone says are absolute trash, and yet they stay open.
My wife and I call them Shitty Tacos, and sometimes we say things like “would you like some Shitty Tacos tonight?”. The answer is often “yes”. Especially if we can’t decide on anything else.
They’re not sending their best.
MTG doesn’t like that Loomer has Trump’s direct ear. That’s it. She picks fights with other republican women whenever she feels one of them is trying to be better than her.
The old plan was that you’d have three things in retirement: Social Security, a corporate pension, and a 401k. Each of these has problems, but if any one of them fails, then the other two are still there to provide enough.
Problem is, pensions have all but disappeared, Social Security gets fucked with, and 401k’s are highly dependent on market conditions at the time you retire.
Electronics usually wants to control the temperature range more tightly than a butane soldering iron could do. Fine for plumbing work, though. Electronics soldering irons usually don’t have the thermal mass to handle plumbing work.
My biggest complaint about the ts100, Pinecil, and the iFixit station is that the tips are specialized and rather expensive.
I have a ts100, and the barrel plug is loose enough that it sometimes disconnects in the middle of working and loses its temperature setting. Got a Pinecil to replace it, but haven’t used it much yet.
Firmware was always there in a soldering iron more sophisticated than an old, dumb Radio Shack wall plug iron. That’s how you get good temperature control. Pinecil is just letting you modify it officially.
How precise are you talking? Usually, cheaper soldering stations get that way by not having a lot of thermal mass, which is particularly needed for desoldering. Otherwise, the PID control tends to keep things good enough. Tuning the PID parameters can make a difference, but once you have a heater and a heat sensor, the software is more or less the same for everyone.
You’re probably adding $25-35 to that for a USB-C power supply that can handle it, but yes, it’s cheaper than this. $50-75 if you want it battery powered.
But yeah, I’m not sure what iFixit is bringing to the market that’s better than what exists.
I’ve met him; we rented some office space from one of his properties. Extremely chill guy. Does not understand Internet fame. He charged us a fee because we forgot to mop the floors on the way out, but that was about the worst you can say about him as a commercial landlord.
I have a bit of schadenfreude around this. For years, people said Europe was fine, and didn’t need to invest more in their military. “No, you silly American, we are just fine with the military we have because we don’t go invading other countries.”
Now here we are. Thing is, I wasn’t even talking from the perspective of Europe becoming warmongers like us. I wanted Europe to be armed well enough to handle what the US has been doing, and the US can draw down its military. Then we could put that money into healthcare and schools and shit, but Europe would have to pick up the slack (and also Japan, S. Korea, Taiwan, and Australia). This is still a good idea.