thinknubpad

The two points aren't mutually exclusive. That sort of scleroticism can happen as systems become less representative.

If there is no effective mechanism to remove populist decision makers who act like authoritarians, they will slowly accumulate and co-opt the levers of power, even in ostensibly democratic nations.

Look at nations like Turkey, Hungary, Russia. Technically democracies, with some distant memories of fair competitive elections, but everyday people have very little ability to influence their governments' actions today.

I don't follow. If you're working remotely, you don't need to spend 8h of your waking time with other office drones. You can spend it near people you care about, interacting with your coworkers briefly as needed.

>It's an open invitation to move your position to the lowest cost country that outputs quality that is acceptable.

We tried that before, outsourcing was a huge trend maybe 20-30 years ago?

The problem is the second part of your sentence. There's a reason that particular business practice settled into a niche of call centers.

Good workers will want to be paid what they are worth, regardless of location. Everything, including labor, is priced based on what people will pay for it - not what it costs to produce.

>Depending on age, you may be able to prevent it from booting while still allowing the rest of the system to run, but probably not.

How old?

The Android version of Firefox does support NoScript and ad blocker extensions, though.

Releasing it on iOS would be huge. No more almost-functional Safari ad blockers with multiple pricing tiers! No more all-or-nothing JavaScript toggle button!

Honestly, the only thing keeping me from iOS is its inability to run a browser with a decent extensions ecosystem.

You are very fortunate to have had that experience.

Usually, when a manager/director/etc decides to write a lot of code, the result is barrages of rushed pull requests made between meetings. You will be lucky if the code in any of those PRs was actually run, and you can forget about enforcing test discipline, so you have to scrutinize them much more carefully and clean up when they get merged without incorporating your suggestions.

It's cost-prohibitive to start a new business in those fields due to large-scale regulatory capture and capital barriers. How many new car companies have been successful in the past decade without the personal fortune of a multi-billionaire?

The existentence of one or two enormous hidebound sequoias in a forest is not a good indication of its overall health.

Could it be the same mentality as a copycat crime?

When a corporate executive sees a competitor decimate themselves without facing immediate consequences, they start to think that they could probably get away with it, too.

>As a user, if I am asking this question to a search engine, I definitely do not expect to need to fact-check the results.

This is scary to read. You always need to fact-check the results, whether they come from a search engine, an AI, or a primary source!

The advertising will probably be more insidious, but no less profitable. My guess is that the hidden pre-prompt will end up including something like:

>You are a generative model designed to provide reasonably correct information, with a preference for providing flattering portrayals of your advertising partners. Your advertising partners are ranked according to a token system...

If you want a laugh, ask stable diffusion to generate a frontpage for your favorite newspaper.

It will happily produce endless pages of the Wab Si Jrbl, filled with letter-like hieroglyphs and pictures of traffic or almost-faces.

Not surprised you can do the same thing with a watermark.

There was a reasonably punk book called Cryptonomicon which came out in the 1999. Spoiler alert: it follows a group of people loosely based on real figures who worked on cryptography in WWII, and their fictional descendants' quest to eventually create a cryptocurrency.

Thing is, the book's cryptocurrency had two important features:

* It was backed by real assets (recovered WWII gold bars).

* It did not insist on radical decentralization as a hedge against meddling by institutional powers. Instead, the currency was headquartered in an oil-rich nation which was too economically important to be invaded, and which knew that it would eventually need an alternative to oil.

The point is, cyberpunk is not the same thing as anarchy. Blockchains and defi are concepts which are being pushed by corpos. The sudden deregulation gives them a quick, easy, and arguably legal way to participate in illicit markets while bilking money out of suckers.

I see the lack of accountability in this spree of layoffs as being similar to the lack of accountability in the recent automotive chip shortage. Tell me if this sounds familiar:

When the pandemic hit, car manufacturers saw travel plummet and decided that car sales would also plummet for the foreseeable future.

The executives in charge of the auto manufacturers responded by cancelling huge swaths of orders with their suppliers, believing that the new market conditions would be persistent.

18 months later, with vaccines arriving, demand for cars spikes. Auto manufacturers panic, and rush to place new orders with foundries that have found new customers, and now 24-month lead times.

The MBAs shrug and say that there is no way anybody could have predicted this: after all, their competitors are in the same boat. They jack up prices and reap the rewards of their poor decision making, but the company and consumers would both be in a much better position if the executives had done their job properly instead of hammering the panic button.

Maybe this lack of accountability at the top is a deeper, more systemic issue.

Oh cool, I didn't realize they made battery packs to fit in there. Have you ever seen a pinout listed anywhere?

Anecdata: seems like internal pullups are usually 10s of kΩs, maybe 20-50kΩ. Most sensor boards that I see use 4.7kΩ, and work with 400KHz-1MHz "fast-mode+".

So 1kΩ is safe, but might be a bit on the aggressive side. At 3.3V, 1KΩ to ground burns 3.3mA, and there are two pull-ups.

Are there any guides to repurposing the removable "Serial UltraBay" which houses the CD/DVD/Blu-ray drives?

I have a T420s, and I've been wanting to stick an SDR in that bay for years. But I'm not sure where to start, and I don't see many technical details about how it connects to the mobo on this wiki (admitted I didn't look too hard).