One could argue that reduced maintenance costs are a value from the cloud providers. E.g. when my AWS VM dies I can get a new one back in <10m (faster with automation). When my self-hosted server dies I need to have planned for that with a warm spare and someone needs to physically be connecting new hardware. AWS allows you to pay more but have a predictable constant cost.

But I think that you’re right that it’s lack of vision. Everyone’s following the VC-backed company path, where it doesn’t make sense to save money for next year because we’ll be selling some entirely new company then.

This is like voting for US Republicans like, “what, Trump already controls the country and this dude disagrees with him.”

Rowling has said that (1) she will spend all HP profits on hurting trans people and (2) she registers all HP support as support for her agenda.

She absolutely is profiting from it.

When a game is “free” the publisher isn’t just donating it for funzies. Either Epic pays them (Epic is spending money to get people to its platform) or the publisher is using the game to advertise other games, which has value to them.

Tor is a pretty cool thing that came from the Navy.

I’d be curious to hear how you end up liking it.

As someone who spends a lot of time on the command-line, I’ve generally preferred MacOS over Windows as my not-Linux OS. But my impression is that for people who like the Windows or Linux GUI, MacOS is a bigger (and less pleasant) change.

And even on the command-line, MacOS is a different *nix distro and makes seme pretty weird choices (launchd, plists, /etc is actually /private/etc, …) whereas you could have vanilla Ubuntu inside WSL2.

Conservapedia was comically stupid. Like, there was a lengthy diatribe against the Theory of Relativity that seemed largely based off Andrew Schlafly confusing the Physics term “relativity” with “moral relativity” and being against the latter. This was especially weird because Schlafly personally had a background in applied physics and so ought to know that GPS satellites serve as a proof of some of Relativity.

As embarrassing as basically every page of Conservapedia was, at least it represented some stupid man’s beliefs and effort. Grokipedia can’t even do that.

oh no I suck at lemmy :( (thanks for letting me know it’s broken)

Yeesh. What’s the girlfriend getting out of all of this? Seems like a lot of work to run someone else’s life in addition to your own.

To be fair to New Hampsire: it was the libertarians across the USA who wanted to take over the state (then had to scale back their plans and took over one tiny town). The state government and the majority of state residents were not enthused by the Free State Project. However, the state’s politically-conservative roots meant that they didn’t have the cultural or administrative tools to stop that train-wreck.

Well-earned by Mamdani, but also I hope it’s the last anyone has to see of Cuomo.

Though I’ve now had someone check Google and try to tell me that they’re right because of the AI summary agreeing with them.

I definitely wouldn’t expect people to have heard of Kirk at all. Even within the US he was a bit of a niche asshole. But I would expect that before posting “RIP <somedude> he was a good guy” they would do some quick web searches and get an idea of what somedude was about and then only post if they agreed that that’s their notion of a good guy.

People always imagine this as “I will pay you $100 to kick the puppy” and of course they would never.

But what actually happens is that you have a long-term donor. You rely on their help (they’re paying for you to be able to hire a nice college intern who’s really smart and has been fun to have on the project). They never tell you what to do so you see them as more of a friend than anything else. It’s perfectly normal to get some lunch with friends and talk. You’re stuck on some problems and they have some good connections that help you out. That might even be worth more than $100k, but it’s not money at all so it’s OK that they’re helping you like this. They also talk you up, which is like free advertising except you didn’t ask for it so that also doesn’t count. Anyway, at some of the lunches they’re telling you about what’s going on with them and there’s some problems they’re dealing with that you could help with. They don’t ask for help, of course, because they know you’re independent. But being independent means it’s OK for you to do what you want. Even help a friend out who didn’t ask for help so they’re not influencing you…

In the novel Snow Crash, the residents of the white-supremacist micro-state franchises visit other places because they have no non-whites to attack at home.

If that settles the tariff negotiations

I agree that if there was a magic “fix this shit for good” button but you had to crawl around and call Trump “sir” a lot that would be worth it. But what’s actually going to happen is that he’ll hear a loud noise and forget who any of these people are and he’ll be like, “two million percent tariff on the uk!!”

The theory is that the new hire gets better over time

It always amazes me how few people get this. Have they only ever made terrible hires?

The way that a company makes big profits is by hiring fresh graduates and giving them a cushy life while they grow into good SWEs. By the time you’re paying $200k for a senior software engineer, they’re generating far more than that in value. And you only had to invest a couple years and some chump change.

But now businesses only think in the short-term and so paying $10k for a month of giving Anthropic access to our code base sounds like a bargain.

Executives are mostly irrelevant as long as they’re not forcing the whole company into the bullshit.

I’m seeing a lot of this, though. Like, I’m not technically required to use AI, but the VP will send me a message noting that I’ve only used 2k tokens this month and maybe I could get more done if I was using more…?

More as an alternative to a search engine.

In my ideal world, StackOverflow would be a public good with a lot of funding and no ads/sponsorship.

Since that’s not the case, and everything is hopelessly polluted with ads and SEO, LLMs are momentarily a useful tool for getting results. Their info might be only 3/4 correct, but my search results are also trash. Who knows what people will do in a year when the LLMs have been eating each others slop and are also being stuffed with ads by their owners.

Coding junkie is where you sneak away from your friends and code a few lines in the bathroom

We’re talking here about garbage code that we don’t want. If the choice is “let me commit bad code that causes problems or else I will quit using computers”… is this a dilemma for you?