This is legit the movie I shit on most. I hate it so very much. It’s not the plot exactly, it’s two things:

• The tech accuracy is so bad. I won’t go into everything but they go out of their way to say shit that doesn’t make sense. My favorite example is that the AI is just a big floating orb and they feed it data through infrared, the slowest communication method available. Like they didn’t have to say infrared, they chose that.

• The product placement. Again, a lot of examples but my favorite is how at the end he shows up with Guitar Hero and the kids are like “Yay Guitar Hero that’s the best game ever.”

I think of it exactly in terms of the trolley problem. The whole premise is that if you do nothing (don’t vote) more people die. By flipping the lever, fewer people die but you’ve taken an action that leads directly to their deaths. The philosophical question isn’t just “is it better for fewer people to die” but “in pulling the lever, are you directly responsible for those deaths?”

My answer would be that inaction is itself an action. In this scenario, you have found yourself responsible either way. Suppose you pull the lever, though, to save as many lives as you can… Wouldn’t the ones who die as a result of this have loved ones that absolutely do blame you?

This all interests me very much. In the analogy of the game developer, they are still bound by the rules of the computer system and the universe it runs in and potentially the programming language it is written in. Also, skill.

Taking that into the analogy, a God who is omniscient by our standards but limited by the capabilities of something outside of our understanding is honestly a more reasonable explanation to me than most conceptions about free will or whatever.

People are constantly underestinating Germany. Like half the food is fried in butter and is delicious.

You are correct that a reboot will trigger a full rescan. I’m always on the lookout for better sync. I just don’t think it’s out there right now for easy bidirectional sync.

Basically, if you want to set and forget, Syncthing is the best option. If you want more control, you’ll need to look into setting up rsync scripts or similar, which will at least better let you control how often to sync.

Alright, best is an exaggeration. But $5/print assumes it breaks before I print anymore. The actual value is still unknown.

I got a Lexmark business laser printer from a place that was going out of business for like $50. Best investment I ever made. It just sits there quietly, not doing anything, until I print something like twice a year. Five years in and it still works fine, I haven’t even replaced the toner.

RatGDO is a local ESP device you can hook into a LiftMaster to connect it to WiFi in a better way. Highly recommend.

The idea of being able to make tunnels faster and cheaper is super exciting, though there’s some serious doubt that is actually what was accomplished. Still, maybe if it works out a better company can mimic it more efficiently.

I think a lot about this sci-fi race in an Anne McCaffrey book that put most of their infrastructure underground to preserve the natural beauty of their planet. I want that for us so bad. I mean, we can still have buildings and such above ground but imagine if transport was almost exclusively underground, the amount of space we’d save for building things we actually use and the amount of wildlife we’d preserve.

I like async but dislike await. I spend entirely too much time on everything I build trying to maximize how much I can do in parallel because I find it tremendously satisfying.

Nah, this one has a margin of error. It’s just that “take down a large percentage of all computers in the world simultaneously” is quite a bit outside of that margin for a security software.

Everyone’s like, “It’s not that impressive. It’s not general AI.” Yeah, that’s the scary part to me. A general AI could be told, “btw don’t kill humans” and it would understand those instructions and understand what a human is.

The current way of doing things is just digital guided evolution, in a nutshell. Way more likely to create the equivalent of a bacteria than the equivalent of a human. And it’s not being treated with the proper care because, after all, it’s just a language model and not general AI.

He’s always been a contrarian. It was harmless and even enjoyable in the 90s and early 2000s when, to him, that meant eating vegetarian and believing in some Hippie woowoo bullshit while being firmly against organized religion and generally distrustful of corporations.

I miss hippie Scott Adams. Weird right-wing Scott Adams is not enjoyable.

Outright bans are because government bodies are scared of nuance. You can also see this in “zero-tolerance” policies that do things like punish the victim because they were “involved” in a fight, or punish a kid who nibbles a chicken nugget into the shape of a gun.

To be fair to schools, nuance is hard. Suppose that the rule is “phones may not interrupt class.” Now, what counts as an interruption may vary between classes, between teachers, and based on what’s happening in class. A student may use it during a quiet period in the class when they’ve already completed their work, and that’s acceptable. A different student will then use their phone ten minutes later, when they’re supposed to be doing something. The second student will get in trouble, but then complain that the first student didn’t get in trouble. The parent will hear, “Brayden was using his phone and he didn’t get in trouble but the second I used mine, I got in trouble. The teacher has it out for me.”

If you’ve talked to any teachers in the past few decades, a common theme is parents siding with their kids against all logic, reason, and evidence. They’ll assume that teachers are petty goblins, just looking for an excuse to pick on their kid. And parents can be outright hostile and unreasonable. When my wife was a teacher, she received more than one actual death threat from parents because she enforced rules that did NOT have any nuance or discretion. Imagine if enforcing the rule was up to the teacher’s discretion versus an outright ban.

tl;dr I agree that a ban is silly, but I totally get why schools are doing it.

It’s basically the only type of jobs program that both sides of our broken government can agree on: petty nonsense that looks like it might do something useful, but really doesn’t, and only inconveniences the poors.

Are we so bad we need corporate sponsorship of our lanes?

So in 16 years, they produced two games and a remaster. Am I missing something? Of course you can’t keep a business alive when it doesn’t actually make anything.

On the plus side for them, they can probably use Gemini to write their apology blog about how they missed the mark with that ad.

It is legitimately useful for getting started with using a new programming library or tool. Documentation is not always easy to understand or easy to search, so having an LLM generate a baseline (even if it’s got mistakes) or answer a few questions can save a lot of time.

For me, the worst part of setting up some new distro or service is when it’s done and everything works. Then it just… Sits there. Working. Usually at some task I don’t need very often. Very anticlimactic and boring. Then I have to find some other new thing to try, which is why my HTPC has been through like 4 distros in the past year.