kbelder

It's not uncommon in the US. I'm confused why people think so. It must be regional or cultural variation? Maybe you know it if you're over 35, else not?

I can understand a lot of the dislike of that novel, but her description of how the United States slowly falls apart due to culturally-reinforced incompetence is worth appreciating.

A small fraction.

I would have wanted to know about the Mineserver affair if I was making any sort of business dealing with him. I do think the concept of reputation is valuable, and it's a sad thing that it doesn't seem as important as it once was.

That said, I wouldn't want to have any dealing with the stalkers who can't let go of the offense, and post angry comments a decade later. Those are the sort of people you smile at and slowly back away from. Too risky to interact with.

Maybe some of them are like finding the 1 millionth digit of pi. Not hard, but impossible without the right technological advancement.

Now that we have LLMs, those that are hard for people but easy for LLMs will get cleared out, leaving those that are still hard for both.

I added

  border-radius: 0px !important;

to my user chrome as per the article, but it didn't seem to accomplish anything. I've restarted with no effect. I didn't have a custom userChrome.css file before, but the instructions were clear enough. Do you have to enable it or something?

-----------------

Ok, found that you need a setting in about:config

  toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets = true

"Stupider" should be "More stupid".

Build a dome and put a spaceship on top. An improvised Project Orion.

I have animosity for most of them!

It's designed to optimize something you're not interested in. That's fine.

Only when it makes the ideas better, like this one.

A while ago I was at a playground chatting with a neighborhood mom, and her 5 yr old son fell off the top of a spiral slide, and broke both his forearms. It's sobering how quickly and unpredictably a situation can turn from pleasant to horrible because somebody's grip on a railing was an inch off.

There are things you do 100,000 times in your lifetime, with a 99.999% success rate, where failure may kill you. You can't really avoid those.

I would rephrase that more neutrally as:

It may be the case that the typical customer doesn't notice or care.

And vice versa.

But it's selling it back to us cheaper and with more utility. That's not something to sneeze at.

I absolutely agree that getting the vaccine is obviously the correct thing to do, but:

>"I casually mentioned the HPV vaccine since his daughter was entering her teens."

Is a little weird to do, and seems like it might be downplaying some provocative or nosy behavior.

4.6 km/s, if it was orbiting one earth's diameter above the surface. Seven hour rotational period. Gnarly tides.

You could add a very slight velocity decay due to air resistance, perhaps stronger nearer the surface. It should make a stable orbit impossible.

But those are all reasons to want kids!

>Last Ditch Bar's new mask-optional Saturdays.

Wow, hadn't heard of that dustup. People are crazy. I guess they always have been, but... wow.

Yes, here's an example of an AI product that is not serious:

In the built-in Copilot integration in outlook, describing an email and asking to find it, and being told that Copilot has no access to your inbox.

I agree. Look at the swing from opposing gay marriage to supporting it. It went from mostly opposed to mostly supporting it in ten years. Obama went from opposing to supporting it during his presidential term.

And it wasn't violence or obnoxious protests that changed people's minds. In large part, they just saw it, talked about it, experienced it, and became ok with it. Mostly because the culture had advanced to a point where the discussion could be had.

I remember reading a fan-made alternate history for some sort of cyberpunk game setting back on usenet in the day.

The instigating effect that diverged the timeline was some sort of technological innovation around 1983-1984 that allowed an instant leap in CPU speeds and memory densities by many orders of magnitude. The timing of the advancement was such that the IBM PC architecture was hopeless outmoded and soon died off. Apple retrofitted the tech into their Macintosh line, so they stayed relevant, but the Amiga was still in the design stage and so was able to build their new OS and UI around the enhanced capabilities. It went on to dominate computing for the next several decades.

Their version of Amiga Intuition was able to include photo-realistic VR, global networking, massive neural nets, and so forth, which all contributed to the cyberpunkness of the setting.

I so wish we could go back to that convention, rather than the silly '0x' convention. Every language I write in my head (and there's been a bunch) uses that.

This is 7 AIs playing diplomacy against each other. It's a little old now, but interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEOTKYxiIzs

It used to be that pretty much everyone who ate meat butchered it themselves. They still ate as much meat as they could.

I have seen many human-generated M-dashes, tortured analogies, and 'not x but y' phrasing. I have never seen a human refer to the shape of code.

There's a huge amount of people who need nothing but, basically, a chromebook. A Linux laptop works great for that.

My wife gave up her Dell Windows laptop because the performance was terrible. I installed kubuntu and started using it, and then she immediately reclaimed it because all she ever needs is a browser and Linux vastly improved the performance. ("Well, it is my laptop...") She knows nothing about Linux, and the only Linux-specific question she ever had was how to recover when it sometimes doesn't wake up from sleep. Overall, much less frustration than Windows.

I've been very happy with the low-end moto phones I've bought, and plan to continue with them until they inevitably get worse.