JoeCoT

Maybe instead of trying to train an AI powered car to deal with the insane chaos that is the road system, what if we designed something to remove that chaos? Maybe like a path that's just for these self driving cars. There's a network of paths to get you to your final destination.

But if we did that, there'd still be our current problems of running out of fuel, or battery power. Which could be solved by electrifying those paths.

But it'd be very difficult to have each of those individual cars switch between paths. Maybe it would be easier if instead of the cars switching paths, the people switched paths. Maybe we just make really long cars, and numerous people can get in them, and then switch cars as needed. People would need to know where to switch between these long cars. So we'd want to set schedules of when they're running to where, and then have an app or something that just told you where to get on and off.

And if they're really long, maybe we could kickstart this before we have self-driving abilities anyway. We could just have one person in the front driving it.

And maybe to reduce the need for rubber, instead of regular wheels on a road, they could just be metal wheels on metal tracks.

Just throwing some ideas out there.

sure, but not having POPCNT means way older than not having TPM

They're so insistent on getting people to do their Subscribe & Save stuff, with lots of discounts for making a subscription. And I take the discount and cancel the subscription as soon as it shows up. The entire point seems to be to get people to subscribe at the low price, and then jack the price up, sometimes double, when it starts recurring.

I've been using Kagi for 2 months and swear by it. It might feel silly paying for a search engine, but I'm now the customer instead of the product, and I can customize my searches the way I want.

So the premise of the Dune series is the Butlerian Jihad, where humans destroyed all "thinking machines" and declared that no machine would ever be made in the likeness of a human mind again. That's why everything's analogue, humans that can do computing in their head, etc.

But unlike what one might think, they didn't destroy thinking machines because AI robots had taken over (though his son Brian Herbert missed that memo). They destroyed thinking machines because, after humans had created AI, they were happy to offload any and all responsibilities and decisions. Humans turned to AI to make any decision, and at a certain point AI ran the galaxy, not because it had taken over, but because humans couldn't be bothered. They stopped learning, they stopped innovating, they stopped doing the things core to being humans.

So as I watch humans hand over more and more tasks and control to AI, apparently including teaching their children, I expect we're heading to the same crossroads at some point.

Beta blockers are usually prescribed for heart problems, but what they actually do is block boosts of adrenaline. That can help people with anxiety, because anxiety manifests as an adrenaline boost when trying to do certain things, leaving them shaky and nervous. If someone is anxious about speaking in public, or talking to new people, etc, beta blockers help with that a lot. They're a game changer for people with social anxiety.

• Large files I don't care if I lose (perhaps videos of popular things): NAS. Hard drives are cheap, not worry about losing it, I can download it again if needed
• Storage with frequent access and security compliance: Wasabi. $6.99 per TB per month, free egress. Compatible with S3. SOC2 and PCI compliance. I use this for work as a backup to S3 for website images.
• Files I need to store cheaply, redundantly, and access often: Backblaze B2. $6 per TB per month for storage. You can download 3x the amount of storage you have per month for free, or connect Backblaze to a CDN partner like Cloudflare for free egress through them. It's also AWS S3 compatible, so you can just the AWS SDK/CLI or tools that work with AWS S3. I use this for hosting image files for my Mastodon server. Note that Backblaze B2 also has SOC2 compliance and US region available now, so it should be as secure as Wasabi at slightly lower cost if you don't have a ton of egress.
• Cheap long term backup storage: AWS S3 Glacier. $0.0036 per GB per month (so $3.6 per TB). Upload your files to S3, and add a lifecycle rule to migrate them to glacier. Glacier is cold storage, extremely cheap and great for a redundant backup. I use this for backing up photos and other files I'm going to want to store forever.

For anything I'm hosting, multiple backups. Home NAS is usually the first backup, followed by cloud storage. So if I need something now, I can get it from my NAS. If there's a problem with my NAS, I can get it from cloud (though with a delay for Glacier)

On the other side, Free and Open Source Software leveled the playing field for software development by quite a lot. Before FOSS you had proprietary databases, proprietary OSes, proprietary web servers, etc, at every level of the chain. Without FOSS Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office would rule the roost. Without FOSS smart phones might've taken years longer, and have far less choices. Without FOSS the web would be drastically different. Without FOSS development would be harder to break into, and anything you tried to produce would involve 15 different licensing fees.

I also played games off floppies, sure. And there were anti-piracy measures there too. I remember playing a pirated copy of Leisure Suit Larry as a kid, and you had to answer questions about pop culture kids wouldn't know, followed by specific questions about wording in the manual. Before CDs, manuals were the anti-piracy measure.

Do people forget that games used to require you to have the CD-ROM in the drive before they would run? Even though most of the time the entire game was installed on your hard drive? It was an anti-piracy measure, but incredibly annoying. Even for games I owned, I would find patched no cd exes to avoid it.

Before I figured that out, if you lost or damaged your CD, you were just screwed. Buy the game again. My dad had a lot of character flaws, but at least when I was a kid he would take the time to call game companies and get a new CD for a few dollars if the disk stopped working.

Using Steam is incredibly more useful than what came before. Almost every game I owned in the era before Steam is just plain lost. There's only one set of games I still have easy access to -- Half Life, because you could register your CD key in Steam. I have a bin full of old game CDs, and I'm sure none of them work. But any game I've bought through Steam, in the last 20 years, I can click to download and play right now.

Add on to that that, no, lots of games did not actually work well out of the box, and needed updates to work. And you had to hunt down those updates. And a lot of those update sites do not exist anymore. Any game I install from Steam is the latest version of the game, and will auto-update if there's a new one.

My point is that, if someone really leverages the power of AWS, it is entwined into their software stack to such an extent that it is not just a service anymore. It's a platform. It's the glue that keeps everything together. The lines between service and proprietary software blur real quick. It's one of the reasons for the AGPL.

Everything in development involves risk, and products will move real slow if you don't depend on someone for some services. But developers aren't very good at risk management, not being reliant on a single service to butter your bread. It is very quick to bring a minimum value product to market on AWS, but the followup to that MVP needs to be moving to a more sustainable, less risky infrastructure.