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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Also codecs… even with the right repositories enabled, you’ll tend to install a media application that manages to be utterly incapable of actually processing most media.

    They’ve made strides on this front but it’s still messed up.

    Also sometimes they are too aggressive on one front. Some of the applications you can install from their repository that have some python based features are broken because they can’t handle python 3.13. There’s some ability to install python 3.12 but without much beyond the core making it less useful.


  • Partly it’s survivorship bias.

    20 years back my family got a new house.

    The wisdom then was same as now, they don’t build em like they used to. Within 5 years the stove stopped working and a year later the air conditioning went out. However the rest of the original stuff is still going and the replacements have lasted fine too and now are the prime examples of what people will point to to say things lasted longer back then.





  • To reinforce this, just had a meeting with a software executive who has no coding experience but is nearly certain he’s going to lay off nearly all his employees because the value is all in the requirements he manages and he can feed those to a prompt just as well as any human can.

    He does tutorial fodder introductory applications and assumes all the work is that way. So he is confident that he will save the company a lot of money by laying off these obsolete computer guys and focus on his “irreplaceable” insight. He’s convinced that all the negative feedback is just people trying to protect their jobs or people stubbornly not with new technology.






  • Both things can be true.

    A good campaign can get people into the voting booth.

    A demographic that fails to show up when you think you’ve done everything that makes sense to get them out can cause them to give up on the demographic. They may be woefully misinformed about what they should be doing, but since they don’t know any better, they are likely to just give it up as a lost cause.

    Show up in the primaries for the candidate you want, it’s the only realistic way to break the chicken and egg of the establishment ignoring the voters that don’t show up and the voters not showing up for the establishment that ignores them. If the establishment is surprised by the primary outcome, that’s the strongest wakeup call for them.


  • It at least holds true for a lot of people, and is even enforced in some forms of leadership training. Some folks believe the worst thing is to be perceived as ever being wrong and will push hard against that outcome no matter what.

    If you weakly hold an opinion, it’s more malleable, but you are also unlikely to express that opinion strongly.


  • If someone is proactively expressing an opinion or responding, they are frequently pretty attached to the position they take if it is vaguely important.

    It’s not universal, but it’s probable that if you make a strong statement towards the Internet, your view is kind of set and certainly some text from some anonymous guy on the Internet is supremely low on the list of things that are going to change your mind.


  • On the scientific discoveries, we have gotten the low hanging fruit. The twentieth century was remarkable, but the limitations of physics are harsh. A lot of excitement as we went from barely pulling off heavier than air flight to a moon landing in under 50 years. Media naturally imagined space exploration to be just a matter of time. Alas everything is exponentially harder and any further loopholes are supremely elusive.

    Probably the one area with a great deal of unrealized potential would be biology, because the ethical easy forward is slow.


  • The thing is that while people struggle harder and harder for a smaller chunk of scraps, they still have a lot of quality of life improvements over the standard of living back in the 70s.

    You almost certainly have decent access to passable air conditioning, which was far from a given back then. Even if you can’t afford decent health care, the sporadic health care you can get is still better than the standard of care then. You can have a 60 inch television and more content provided to it than you could imagine… You can instantly engage with people all over the world.


  • Sea steading, BioShock here we come…

    But seriously the fact that anyone ever mentions Mars colonization as a realistic strategy to do better than earth shows how stupid they are. Imagine the least habitable biome on earth where no one wants to live, imagine it even worse by unchecked climate change and realize it’s still just ashtoningly easier to live there than the most optimistic expectations of Mars.


  • If it’s one to one communication, it’s probably not going to be productive, but worth a shot, just don’t waste too much time.

    In a public forum, it’s more about giving the lurkers something to process, those that might not have gotten emotionally attached to one side or another, or just need to see there’s a diversity of thought to avoid getting too sucked into one thing or another.