The entire idea of F/OSS itself is political, and was very radical. We're just accustomed to it now, so it's not "political", in other words, it's not "controversial". Perhaps F/OSS is -more- political than other spaces because we organize around projects? Here, and on Reddit, we see the fallout of drama all the time in various F/OSS communities over disagreeing over policies. That's... politics.
Unless you happen to live alone and interact with no one, basically every single interaction is undergirded by policies determined by humans. Politics. A computer/phone being built that is purchasable for legal tender, charged by electricity being fed into our homes, where we can send packets in the air, underground and across the world, doesn't happen by magic. It's literally the result of politics.
"Detaching oneself" really just means "not paying attention to politics". And it's a free world to do so, especially for mental health reasons. It's definitely not healthy to be tapped into news/current events all the time and I have to take breaks myself. But for some people, they can't really detach when their literal existence is deemed "political". This is what people refer to when they say it's privileged to detach.
Side Note: criticism of "detaching" is not referring to things like detaching for mental health. Internet trolls aside, that's a strawman argument. What it's referring to is the kind of people who say "oh, I'm just apolitical" or "tech is apolitical, it's just code", when really the status quo is in their favor and they have zero need to ever think about political issues. They would certainly not be "apolitical" if they were being banned from entering public bathrooms or being banned from contributing to F/OSS projects on the basis of their skin color!
I've been doing something similar for breakfast, one cup of oatmeal + one cup of water and about two tablespoons of chia seeds, microwave for 2 minutes. Add a banana and some honey, top it with whole roasted almonds and some raspberries. It has been doing wonders for my digestion. I'll have to try to add olive oil as well.
My LDL was 150 last time I checked. I wonder what it is now since I've been doing this meal several times a week.
Grandpa's 30-06 from WW2 from 200 yards will penetrate anything but trauma plates.
If it's a hand-carried firearm of any kind (including crew-served weapons like the M249, M240B, M60), it's not a "heavy weapon."
> The second amendment was written in a time when a firearm was a musket.
At the time the Second Amendment was written, there were entire private navies with actual cannons far more destructive than any man-portable firearm available today. No background checks on those ships or cannons, either, btw.
I maybe get where you’re coming from, but what’s the solution to the issue you’re proposing? Screening everyone’s resume before allowing them to comment? What about people who work at companies that deal with Palantir at completely different departments (Microsoft and Xbox)? It’s obviously untenable
It is true that some users here spew vile ideology while hiding behind HN intellectual rhetoric. Then posts that understandably react strongly to that get flagged, and users get banned. I wish it was different, but I’ve made peace with that being a significant percent of the user base here.
A particular interaction I had comes to mind. A user here boldly and openly proclaimed he discriminated in interviews against people that look different from him, or that are neurodivergent. Actual illegal behaviour that will get you sued in many countries. I reacted strongly and my post got flagged and I received a comment from the moderation team.
I don’t envy the moderation team though, it’s a tough job.
I love posts that peel back the abstraction layer of "images." It really highlights that modern photography is just signal processing with better marketing.
A fun tangent on the "green cast" mentioned in the post: the reason the Bayer pattern is RGGB (50% green) isn't just about color balance, but spatial resolution. The human eye is most sensitive to green light, so that channel effectively carries the majority of the luminance (brightness/detail) data.
In many advanced demosaicing algorithms, the pipeline actually reconstructs the green channel first to get a high-resolution luminance map, and then interpolates the red/blue signals—which act more like "color difference" layers—on top of it. We can get away with this because the human visual system is much more forgiving of low-resolution color data than it is of low-resolution brightness data. It’s the same psycho-visual principle that justifies 4:2:0 chroma subsampling in video compression.
Also, for anyone interested in how deep the rabbit hole goes, looking at the source code for dcraw (or libraw) is a rite of passage. It’s impressive how many edge cases exist just to interpret the "raw" voltages from different sensor manufacturers.
There are better alternatives than consuming the whole cells.
There have been other attempts to use genetically-modified fungi (Trichoderma) for protein production, where they secrete in the cultivation medium a water-soluble animal protein, e.g. a cow whey protein or chicken egg white protein.
Then, through filtration and ultrafiltration, the desired protein is separated from the fungal cells and the cultivation medium, producing a protein powder in the same way how one makes whey protein concentrate or milk protein concentrate.
If done correctly this method produces only healthy protein without contaminants.
However, searching right now online if there has been any progress with this, I see that against a startup company that has already produced such whey protein powder from a fungal culture there is a lawsuit that alleges that they have not separated properly the whey protein and that what they have sold contained more fungal protein of uncertain quality and safety than the good whey protein that they claimed to sell.
Even if that company might be guilty of trying to exploit the technology before being perfected, the principle is sound and there is no doubt that this can be done, producing pure high-quality protein.
I actually use whey protein concentrate to provide a significant fraction of my protein consumption, so I hope that its production from fungi will succeed in a not too distant future.
Trichoderma is among the fungi that secrete enzymes in their environment, so the genetic modification that replaced its enzyme with whey protein or egg albumin is much simpler than the many modifications described in the parent article in order to make the whole cells more palatable, without really achieving this.
For producing a protein powder that can be used as an ingredient in cooking food from vegetable sources, the approach used with Trichoderma is sufficient. The techniques used in the parent article are justified because they do not want to make a healthy food, but they want to make a meat imitation. For myself, enhancing the quality of vegetable food is a much more important goal than attempting to simulate meat, but at least in USA it is likely that the second goal might make more money.
Perhaps someone can help me with this. I was doing some experimentation with lenses and PBTR v4. This was going great, I was able to model the projection of an object through a lens onto a surface quite well. However, now I want to simulate doublets: lenses which consist of two parts so with two materials. I don't know how to model this in PBTR. It seems that it is not possible to have a shape (lens) touch more than one other material.
> PBRT's MediumInterface system can only represent a single "inside" medium and a single "outside" medium per shape. If a shape physically touches multiple different media (for example, a glass sphere sitting at the interface between water and air), PBRT cannot directly represent this configuration.
I think this is kind of odd for a renderer which is otherwise quite capable. Can anyone explain why this is the case, and how I can work around this limitation?
I've built a coding assistant over the last two days. The first 100 lines or so were handwritten. The rest has been written by the assistant itself.
It's written its system prompt. It's written its tools. Its written the code to reload the improved tools into itself.
And it knows it is working on itself - it frequently tries to use the enhanced functionality, and then expresses what in a human would be frustration at not having immediate access.
Once by trying to use ps to find its own pid in an apparent attempt to find a way to reload itself (that's the reason it gå before trying to run ps, anyway)
All its commits are now authored by the tool, including the commit messages. It needs to be good, and convincing, and having run the linter and the test suite for me to let it commit, but I agree a substantial majority of the time. It's only caused regressions once or twice.
A bit more scaffolding to trigger an automatic rollback in the case of failure and giving it access to a model I won't be charged by the token for, and I'd be tempted to let it out of the box, so to speak.
Today it wrote its own plan for what to add next. I then only told it to execute it.
A minor separate goal oriented layer guiding the planning, and it could run in a loop.
Odds are it'd run off the rails pretty quickly, but I kinda want to see how far it gets.
That gives us a model that's 100% open and reproducible with low, legal risk. It would also be a nice test of how much AI's generalize from or repeat behavior in their pretraining data.
Then, a new model using that, The Stack, and FreeLaw's stuff (by paying them to open source it). No Github Issues or anything with questionable licenses or terms of service violations. That could be the next baseline for lawful models with coding ability, too. Research in coding AI's might use it.
Many spaceflight fans struggle to distinguish between F9 and Starship and think success with one guarantees another. Go back and read what Fred Brooks writes about second systems. The super heavy booster is extremely impressive, particularly the raptor engines and control systems. Their engineers need to be commended for that alone. The weight is questionable and it isn't clear how much the performance is compromised but its still a very impressive vehicle and future engine refinements are going to help.
The second stage remains a huge concern. The economics of Starship are predicated on cheap, rapid second stage reuse. That huge multi engine second stage is a lot more expensive than the F9's disposable single engine second stage. Creating a robust, rapidly reusable thermal management system for orbital re-entry is an unsolved problem. I don't believe anyone, including SpaceX has a solution.
With time and huge amounts of money they can iterate through the other problems and likely do a controlled re-entry and recovery with the second stage but the vehicle isn't going to be close to reusable. It is a massive problem and I think it makes a fiction of the entire program and turns it into a money pit.
If you piece the system out though. The engines, the control systems etc, there is a lot of good stuff there for another system. I think the Mars colonisation BS worked well to inspire the troops and raise money and political interest but they seem to be in a corner with this design. It is looking very possible this system will never enter commercial service.
Robert Cialdini is probably the lightest book and covers most of the different blindspots we have, except distorted reflected appraisal in his book on Influence. He provides the principles but leaves most of the structure up to the person's imagination.
The coursework in an introduction to communication class may provide some foundational details (depending on the instructor), Sapir-Whorf has basis in blindspots.
Robert Lifton touches on the detailed case studies of torture from the 1950s (under Mao), in his book "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism", and I've heard in later books he creates a framework that classifies cultures as Protean (self-direction, growth, self-determination/agency), or Totalism (towards control which eventually fails Darwin's fitness).
I haven't actually read his later books yet though his earlier books were quite detailed. I believe the internet archive has a copy of this available for reading as a pdf but be warned this is quite dark.
Joost Meerloo in his, "Rape of the Mind" as an overview touches on how Totalitarianism grows in the setting of WW2 and some Mao, though takes Freudian look at things (dating certain aspects which we know to be untrue now).
From there it branches out depending on your interest. The modern material itself while based on these earlier works often has the origins obscured following a separation of objectionable concerns.
There are congressional reports on COINTELPRO and you may find notice it has modern iterations (touching on protest/activist activity harassment), as well as the history of East German Stasi, and Zersetzung where governments use this to repress the population.
There are aspects in the Octalysis Framework (gamification/game design).
Paulo Freire used some of this material in developing his critical pedagogy which was used in the 70s to replace teaching method from a reduction of first principles (based in rome and the greeks) to what's commonly known as rote-based teaching, and later called "Lying to Children", which takes the reversal of that approach following more closely to gnosticism.
The approach is basically you give a flawed useless model which includes both true and false things. Students learn to competence, then are given a new model that's less flawed, where you have to learn and unlearn things already learned. You never actually unlearn anything and it induces frustration and torture destroying minds in the process. Each step towards gnosis becomes more useful but only the most compliant and blind make it to the end with few exceptions. Structures that burn bridges induce failure in math, and the effect is this acts as a filter to gatekeep the technical fields.
The water pipe analogy of voltage in electronics as an example of the latter instead of the first principled approach using diffusion which is more correct.
Disney and Dreamworks uses distorted reflected appraisal tailored towards destructive interference of identity, which some employees have blown the whistle on (for the latter), aimed at children and sneak things past their adult guardians. There's quite a lot if you look around but its not under any single name but scattered. Hopefully that helps.
All indexed references of it seem to now have been removed from search. I'm glad now that I kept a reference link in a text file.
Update: Dreamworks isn't Pixar, I misremembered,they are owned by Universal Studios, whereas Disney own's Pixar. Pixar and Disney appear to do the same things.
Actually, there is no record of that. None whatsoever.
All top Soviets have refuted this. When the German ZDF channel asked Gorbachev about it in 2014 when Russia used this as a pretext for invading Crimea, he directly called it a myth on camera. So did his minister of defense Yazov and minister of foreign affairs Shevardnadze.
Gorbachev even explained that claims of such promise make no sense. Elected leaders of democracies cannot promise what their successors will or will not do. Voters set the direction. Trump is not bound by what Biden, Obama, Bush or Clinton allegedly promised someone in private decades ago. "Had we had an agreement, we would have written it down", he summed it up.
Shevardnadze went further and explained how this myth misrepresents the actual talks they held in 1990 regarding German reunification. The talks were about placement of foreign troops in East Germany before the Soviet forces had left East Germany. They agreed that only West German Bundeswehr would enter East Germany and take command alone to avoid getting multinational foreign NATO forces intermixed with Soviet forces. This was to prevent any potential misunderstandings that could spiral out of control during the handover. Germans upheld their part and everything went as they had agreed.
Shevardnadze said that during his tenure (1985-1991), the question of Eastern Europe joining NATO was not discussed even once with Western representatives, Warsaw Pact countries, or in the communist party circles in Moscow. Why would they discuss it if they didn't expect Warsaw Pact to dissolve? It came as a surprise. Nobody expected that the USSR itself would disintegrate, and parts of it would declare independence and join NATO.
Gorbachev, Yazov and Shevardnadze have passed away, but Shevardnadze's successor who was in charge of Russian foreign affairs from 1990 to 1996 is still around and active on social media. If you're not convinced, you can contact him directly and let him explain this myth personally: https://x.com/andreivkozyrev/ Putin's senior advisor from 2000 to 2005, who departed over disagreements with Putin's increasingly authoritarian style, is also active and recently published a video where he tears the myth apart (in Russian, sadly): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFCNwGjko54
This myth is rather unique because three different generations of officials have refuted it: the Soviet representatives (late 1980s / early 1990s), people from Yeltsin's tenure (1990s), and people from early Putin's admin (early 2000s). Rarely do myths get so strongly refuted. No paper trail exist either. Western countries make a huge military commitment, but it doesn't get mentioned anywhere in internal Soviet meeting notes, private diaries, or other sources? That's hard to believe.
I find this myth a very good subject for a case study of a hoax. It is internally coherent and derived from an actual fact (the talks about German reunification), but doesn't connect to anything else. It floats around in isolation.
The real issue is people are still treating this reactionary buffoonery as if it's a trade policy that warrants critique. It isn't. Trump is a fucking idiot and he has surrounded himself with other fucking idiots and they and the reactionary base of fucking idiots they've created are cheering him on for doing fucking idiot things.
A journalist successfully reverse-engineered the likely formula used to arrive at the figures for each nation, and it's not only implemented stupidly, it's also wrong from first principles. It's the same thing an actual school child might come up with if you asked them to. This is the same kind of "economic policy" cooked up by dumbasses on reddit who sincerely believe they are qualified to "fix US trade."
If our congress wasn't also packed full of ineffectual liberals and other fucking idiots, he'd be impeached by now for sheer incompetence.
It's the same issue we had in the last Trump admin. This nonsense is elevated to undue credibility by serious people discussing it seriously. It shouldn't be debated, it should be mocked, relentlessly, mercilessly, cruelly. As should Trump himself, as should his supporters, as should his sycophantic followers. Mock, belittle, make fun of, bully, parody, just continuously until every single one of these people refuses to approach a microphone.
I've been working on an essay since last week that lays out my own personal take on things:
We're (the US) are done. We're cooked. We have destroyed critical institutions and burned through all remaining international goodwill we had in less than a hundred days. No amount of judicial reversals can undo the harm done. It would take years of concentrated, uninterruptible effort to mend that damage, and that's assuming we start today.
This is just one more sign of things to come as the world (finally? belatedly? regrettably?) reorients into a multi-pole system again, and migrate away from American Hegemony. The ball has already started rolling abroad in terms of divesting away from US Clouds, and that'll just keep snowballing as time goes on; after all, once orgs realize how easy it is to leave AWS or Azure for something more local, they'll also reconsider the value of Oracle/Salesforce/IBM/Dell/etc.
It's going to be a painful decade ahead of the USA. The real winners will be the governments and companies abroad who seize upon this opportunity to grab US talent and help them immigrate to safer countries, especially LGBTQ+ and minority groups who are already being victimized (similar to how the US benefited from immigrants fleeing Nazi Germany in/before WW2).
This is correct, at present about 2% of people support taking over Canada by military force.
But the thing is there's a playbook. Even in Russia they didn't start by saying "We are going to start a formal war against international law, who is with me?"
1. They called Ukraine not a country.
2. They said Ukranians in certain regions wanted to be Russian, or should be Russian.
3. They cultivated politicians and figures of influence in Ukraine to join them.
4. They sent unmarked troops into limited regions and started a purported separatist movement. These were the little green men, actually Russian soldiers in generic fatigues.
5. They formally joined the fight once the separatists were losing.
6. They agreed to a ceasefire and kept violating it.
7. In 2022 they started a "special military operation" (still not a war!) on a pretext.
8. Now it's a war
The process took a decade. Currently the US has done steps 1 through 3. On a nearly daily basis the president and multiple admin officials call the border artificial, say Canada isn't a country, say we must be annexed (the word means taken against our will).
The US admin has cultivated the separatist leader of Alberta, who has made multiple visits to Washington and who has admitted to asking Trump to pause tariffs in order to help a pro US far right politician win the upcoming elections.
A journalist who is a fellow traveller of the movement has asked Trump about the practicality of starting by taking Alberta and Saskatechewan and then the rest of the country and Trump said taking Canada had to happen.
We also saw that after the Zelensky oval office visit US public opinion shifted about 20-30% against Zelensky in lockstep with the president making clear his opinion.
So I agree, right now the idea seems ludicrous. But the US admin is at the beginning phases of preparing the info environment to accept escalations. And any discussion of this online now has bot accounts parroting the same lines.
Frankly in Canada we're very glad at the domestic resistance to war. I'm not sure they can actually pull off getting support for invasion. They might think they need not go that far. But what's clear is that for whatever reason they do seem serious about taking us over; Canadian official have expressed as much.
Prewar, polls showed about 18% of the Donbas were interested in joining Russia. About the same percent of Alberta is interested in joining the US. It's enough to work with, if their narrative isn't actively resisted every step of the way.
> I just don't understand these statements that "this or that should be free".
Because you're focusing on the accumulation of a finite resource (currency, land, etc) as the sole barometer for success, and then conflating "freedom for use" with "freedom from cost". Obviously salaries have to be paid, buildings maintained, and improvements paid for. Obviously this all costs money, which is a finite resource. Obviously that money has to come from somewhere. Taxation enables everyone to contribute a fraction of the cost regardless of use, and an effective social program (like free education) distributes that cost effectively over time since there's zero chance 100% of the population will consume that resource at the same time, or even in the same year.
It's basic societal maths. If we accept forgoing a profit on the consumption of the resource (healthcare, roads, mail service, education, defense), we can lower the cost substantially and concentrate on its effective utilization. If we do that, we can carve up the cost across the widest possible demographic (taxpayers), and assign a percentage of it as taxation relative to income and wealth. It's how governments work.
> Do you not subscribe to the saying "You get what you pay for?"
Does anyone subscribe to this in the current economy? Everything has record high prices, yet still bombards you with advertisements, sells your data, and requires replacement in a matter of years instead of being repairable indefinitely. University education has boiled down to little more than gargantuan debt loads to acquire a credential for potential employment, a credential that often has no relevancy to the field you actually find work in.
So no, I don't subscribe to that, and I haven't for a decade. My $15,000 used beater car is literally more reliable than a six-figure SUV, and it doesn't keep mugging me for more value to the manufacturer through surveillance technology and forced-advertising.
> Ever wonder what would happen if you make the next 4 years "free"?
Yes. I imagine much of the populace would be better educated and informed about how modern, complex systems work. More people would be fiercely resistant to the low-wage, high-labor jobs that flood the market, forcing a reconciliation of societal priorities. I figure we'd have more engineers, and artists, and accountants, and tradespersons. We'd have more perspectives to existing problems from a broader swath of the economic strata, instead of the same old nepobabies from a lineage of college graduates making the same short-sighted mistakes.
The question is, have you considered what might happen if we made a four-year degree more economically accessible?
> If you don't have the motivation to prevent your own cognitive decline by taking advantage of a plethora of already free (high quality) education (e.g. https://ocw.mit.edu), then taxing the rest of us so you can be spoon-fed all the free "formal education" you want for life isn't the answer either.
Now you're just insulting people because they lack means, and conflating it with lack of motivation. I've lived with people whose sole education was reading books in Public Libraries because they never had public education, with Section 8 housing recipients hammering online learning courses from shared computers to try and find a way upward and out of poverty. None of that gets them a foot in the door, because they don't have the physical piece of paper that says "University Graduate" and the social networks you build from physically attending school - which adults cannot do without money or taking on substantial debt, that in turn jeopardizes their ability to survive.
If you want a society where only those of monied means have the ability to succeed, well present-day America is certainly an excellent demonstration of that. I'd rather build a society where all of us contribute a part of the proceeds of our labor to build a more equitable society for all, so everyone has an opportunity to found that new business, make those social connections, or try new ideas, without worrying about losing their home or paying for healthcare treatments.
> Part of NATO's charter is literally "spend minimum 2% GDP on military" and it was just ignored for much of the time.
No, it is literally not. The charter is here[1], read it yourself.
To my knowledge it was first mentioned in 2006, the press briefing [2] states
Finally, I should add that Allies through the comprehensive political guidance have committed to endeavour, to meet the 2% target of GDP devoted to defence spending. Let me be clear, this is not a hard commitment that they will do it. But it is a commitment to work towards it. And that will be a first within the Alliance.
It comes back again in 2014 [3], where they agree to:
aim to move towards the 2% guideline within a decade
A decade after 2014 is 2024, and most, but not all, countries managed.
AI is death for people whose primary skillset was being proficient in modern western hemisphere English grammar, because now you can input a few messy sentences and have it output grammatically perfect, if not stylistically perfect, English.
Agree. In the US in particular congress is by far the worst of the three federal branches. Most long term, strategic problems are due to their inaction whether taxes, current account deficits, operationally effective border control, gun laws. Even abortion: it was undone in the judicial branch but the same coterire of supporters know bans will never succeed as as an amendment .. so that's left in the air too without even the attempt to count votes publicly ... that's how chicken they are now that they've caught the bus.
Like a floundering company, the US congress spends most of its time in these modalities:
- trying to convince you they're not part of the DC establishment
- Fund raising off cultural divisions, and exasperation of same for the same goal
- blaming the other side
- blaming congress' culture as polarized hence can't get anything done
- US electorate laboring under the delusion that changing the president is a solution -- maybe helpful at the margins -- but fundamentally unable to permanently circumvent law.
- the far left and right are equally culpable in culture fights while the right is more criminally culpable in how it uses its agency.
And that's exactly right: we're sick of it.
In a floundering company with no product, poor quality control, cost overruns, disdain from existing customers, and non existent cross functional coordination
the first thing upper management must do is fire the people unwilling to stop whining, blaming, and take responsibility.
The focus must emphasize customer satisfaction through quality of service/product. In short the BS had to stop. Second focus must emphasize cross functional coordination. In-fighting is a fireable offense. No complicated product is made by one team. It takes coordination.
(I can name any number of examples from books to personal experience where this was done in US corporate history to get people to understand the old way is out).
Right now the US congress far left and right like the BS; it serves their goals. The middle 4 std deviations over the center stand around with their head down, hands in pockets, hoping nobody notices them. It's institutional incompetence.
In the world of belief systems untied to natural law and empiricism, even the Bible reminds: faith (beliefs) without works is nothing but cheap symbolism.
The only way to turn it into a real market, is some kind of collaboration software tools for renters or non-intimate partnerships to gang up.
We need tools that arent making choices based on profit increase but humanitarian necessity (which is probably impossible)
Tools such as :
- finding people to share mortgages with, negotiating problems encountered with roomates, ways to re-shuffle roomates around to find better compatibility, incentives for being less of a dick and contributing to happier roomatism
- collective action in an area such as purchasing cheap out of town space with lots of living area and "roughing it" for a while to put downward pressure on rent prices, maybe even negotiating particular prices to trigger a large number of renter signups ( no way this is legal, but it will get bad enough we are going to have to break some rules)
- shared mortgage investment that is based upon agreed lower reasonable profit, or even money parking, instead of maximizing real estate profit (there has to be some philanthropes who would put there money into this?)
- I hate to have to mention negative landlord tracking, but the worst of the worst gets away with so much shit, we need to come up as close to vigilantism we can get while not breaking laws. I foresee the need for tools where we can track exact letter of law harassment limits etc for the worst offenders who are getting away with too much uncaught illegal and immoral landlording
The key legal and economic goal of a privately owned health insurance company, is to become entrenched as a legally required intermediary between patients and the “medical cartel.” So functionally the optimal approach for an insurance org is to ensure that they are only required to reimburse for expenses that are mandated by law. Then the trick is to reduce the number of mandatory payments through regulatory capture and obfuscation. See: Medical Biller role at each hospital and lack of consistency transparency etc…
Therapists are not considered part of the medical cartel because they are not required to go to medical school or pass the licensing process for “Doctors.” They can’t increase the service costs unilaterally into longer term revenue. This is why it’s trivial to find a covered psychiatrist - because they legally prescribe medicine which is the best possible outcome for an insurance carrier - their equivalent to SaaS margins.
So therapists aren’t legally “Doctors” and as a result they do not have the legal avenues to create an invoice that a health insurance company would accept as mandatory to pay by law. So there’s only downside to an insurance provider for this.
Reddit was my favorite website growing up. I'd discover new interesting subs, read random posts and comments. The frontpage was somewhat interesting too, but now it feels like a bot fest and propaganda machine.
I still use Reddit but way less than I used to before, and I no longer use it for fun but just to read niche tech subs.
I refuse to use the official mobile app. I've always used Baconreader and then Relay on Android. Relay survived the API changes and adopted a subscription model.
But thanks to Revanced I was able to patch an old version of Relay to use my own API key for free.
Hopefully you would get some resolution but I think everyone should ask: “could this game be publishes as a web page?” because if it is at possible to do what an app can do with a web page you can completely avoid app store bullshit.
It is exactly “the things an app can do that a web page can’t do” that are (1) frequently user hostile (a reason the user is usually better off using a web site instead of an app if it possible) and (2) heavily regulated to manage but not mitigate this harm.
You'd be amazed how bad hospitals can be at keeping track of fairly critical things.
I had a cousin who voluntarily checked himself into the hospital related to severe withdrawal symptoms (and had bouts of psychosis related to said with withdrawal - meth addictions are nasty). His mother stayed for awhile but had to leave for work. She was repeatedly guaranteed by multiple doctors and nurses that he could not check himself out and would be there for several days at least. They told her to come back the next morning.
Late that night, he was discharged. Not even "he checked himself out". The hospital discharged him (and that's over an hour ride away from home, btw - no hospitals in rural areas these days).
He had no phone and no wallet. According to staff, he tried to call his mother to pick him up, but couldn't remember her cell phone number (it had changed recently). He called his sister and left a message, but she was traveling and didn't get it until much later. According to the hospital, he tried to call several different numbers trying to get a ride home and they made him stop and made him leave. In a quite rough downtown area he was not familiar with. While clearly not in his right mind. At 2am. With no wallet, no phone, no nothing.
The hospital had his mother's contact info. They did not give it to him even when he requested it. They did not attempt to contact her in any way.
We still don't know what happened afterwards. His body was found four days later in the river and it had been there for awhile.
Forcibly discharging someone under those circumstances and refusing to even contact their emergency contacts is beyond belief. I'm furious about it. Apparently it's common and not even something there's any recourse for.
My hypothesis of civilization is that even the smallest child with a blade may with sufficient luck grievously wound the mightiest warrior.
So there is a natural mechanism that tends people towards some level of civility when they're in meat space with each other.
Incivility towards the other not present is then about fitting in via tribalism. After all, those others could be dangerous so we had better make sure our tribe is all on the right page about mistrusting them.
Incivility towards the other who is present is then about an attempt at social dominance. "Don't mess with me because there are others like me who will avenge me." Perhaps.
Online there is only reputational harm and emotional harm. And when anonymous there is only emotional harm.
When the fear of an unexpected stabbing is truly removed we see the true heart of our fellows. Alas, not the most aesthetically pleasing view.
They killed my Play Store account even after I had fulfilled the eligibility of not getting the account killed in time and never refunded the $25 (had no apps yet). I know this was nothing compared to losses others might have faced but they literally took/stole that $25 from me. They never responded to anything after the last email where they said "it is final.. something policy…" and all that. Nothing, no response at all. They had asked me to add a bank account while I was appealing this so they could refund and I could not add a bank account, there was no way, there was no documentation. They did not reply for 17-18 days and that was also denied and they just closed it saying "since I had not added an account in time… final.. no further response.." etc.
> It's almost like Google is suicidal and these are calls for help.
No no. They are fine.
Companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon etc could they all this because they know the game is rigged in their favour in this world where everything is "legal" and not "justice" and with their resources they can legally take on many countries put together, let alone individuals. That's why they do what they do and they don't do what they don't do.
Let's expand that. Let's name your hypothetical person, Bob. He's living on the edge financially, and decides to go without insurance.
Let's bring in another person, Alice. Alice is also not in great financial shape. But Alice is able to pay for insurance and follows all the rules. Alice has a small amount of savings, go Alice!
One day, Bob hits Alice. It causes medical issues for Alice. Alice might have insurance, but it's potentially still expensive for Alice. Because of her injuries she can't work for a few weeks. She works hourly, so now loses wages. Luckily with FMLA she won't necessarily lose her job, but she needed every paycheck. But it doesn't really matter, because her car is now gone. She can't drive to work anymore. She can't drive to groceries. She can't afford a car, as a huge chunk her savings went to cover those medical bills and missed paychecks. She's pretty SOL huh.
Sounds like we need to let Bob off the hook for inflicting all this on Alice. After all, he needed to drive without insurance.
No. We should just make it possible so Bob didn't need to drive in the first place instead of excusing his choice to still drive when he couldn't really afford it. We should structure the incentives so Bob doesn't want to drive if he can't afford it.
People driving without insurance ruin lives like Alice's all the time.
Unless you happen to live alone and interact with no one, basically every single interaction is undergirded by policies determined by humans. Politics. A computer/phone being built that is purchasable for legal tender, charged by electricity being fed into our homes, where we can send packets in the air, underground and across the world, doesn't happen by magic. It's literally the result of politics.
"Detaching oneself" really just means "not paying attention to politics". And it's a free world to do so, especially for mental health reasons. It's definitely not healthy to be tapped into news/current events all the time and I have to take breaks myself. But for some people, they can't really detach when their literal existence is deemed "political". This is what people refer to when they say it's privileged to detach.
Side Note: criticism of "detaching" is not referring to things like detaching for mental health. Internet trolls aside, that's a strawman argument. What it's referring to is the kind of people who say "oh, I'm just apolitical" or "tech is apolitical, it's just code", when really the status quo is in their favor and they have zero need to ever think about political issues. They would certainly not be "apolitical" if they were being banned from entering public bathrooms or being banned from contributing to F/OSS projects on the basis of their skin color!