azertyfun

Oh they definitely exist. At a high level the bullshit is driven by malicious greed, but there are also people who are naive and ignorant and hopeful enough to hear that drivel and truly believe in it.

Like when Microsoft shoves GPT4 into notepad.exe. Obviously a terrible terrible product from a UX/CX perspective. But also, extremely expensive for Microsoft right? They don't gain anything by stuffing their products with useless annoying features that eat expensive cloud compute like a kid eats candy. That only happens because their management people truly believe, honest to god, that this is a sound business strategy, which would only be the case if they are completely misunderstanding what GPT4 is and could be and actually think that future improvements would be so great that there is a path to mass monetization somehow.

My cheap scale will not work with my freshly recharged amazon basics AAAs. Apparently those do not hold up well enough under load. And of course any set of batteries that does work, discharges over a few months.

So I just bought a cheap mechanical scale (not from Amazon) and I eyeball it for weights under 50g. Good enough and dead reliable.

Is that a regional thing? In my part of Europe virtually 60-70+ year old house comes standard with it. But the fact that English lacks a word for "soupirail" (or that Wikipedia only has a page in French and Dutch) leads me to believe it might not be a very widespread practice outside of Western Europe.

It often gets repurposed as an air vent, for general ventilation and/or as a clothes dryer exhaust. I rarely see them permanently blocked out.

Or just :set mouse=a if your terminal emulator was updated in the past decade. gVim has nothing to offer anymore, except that it bundles its own weird terminal emulator that doesn't inherit any of the fonts, themes, settings or shortcuts of one's default terminal. Blegh.

Also if you're not going to leverage Vim's main feature and just want to click around on stuff, just install VSCod(e|ium), which is genuinely amazingly good.

He was really popular on twitter, and if he says mastodon's worse despite having a smaller audience there, I trust his judgement. Literally his pinned toot.

"First replies shown are the ones the author replied to and/or liked" seems like an obvious, simple, and transparent algorithm. Like youtube comments. Give lazy reply guys an opportunity to see without scrolling down that they aren't as original as they think they are. The fact that this isn't implemented in even a basic form is absolutely insane and shows a very fundamental ideological disconnect between people who want "open twitter with decent moderation" and whatever the fuck it is that the mastodon OGs/devs are trying to achieve.

Just factually wrong. Russian maintainers were removed from their positions. They are still allowed to contribute, but they'll have to get a non-Russian maintainer to sign off on it. This removes "FSB coerces Russian maintainer into signing off on malware" as an attack vector, while having the minimum possible impact on Russian contributors whose code will be checked for correctness like anyone else's.

Some people don't want a suggestion algorithm but do want full reply federation.

Alec from Technology Connections stopped using mastodon because of this, every post he made would get nitpicked on by 20 different people from instances who did not federate the replies with each other so each reply guy thought they were the first.

I have a single user instance and I use a relay, but most replies are still missing if I click on a post unless I go to the original webpage.

Lazy-federating replies when a post is viewed sounds like an obvious solution but AFAIK the mastodon devs are very opposed to this.

These are the pitfalls with the "amazon reviews/yelp" model.

A decent implementation of the Wikipedia/FOSS model sidesteps this because it theoretically is run by opinionated curators. No amount of bots/shills can break the article soft-lock ounce foul play is spotted.

That's not to say these systems haven't been occasionally broken through more sophisticated attacks, but empirically it seems clear that the model generally works well enough given enough community engagement (which would be the biggest challenge IMO, because maintainers can't be expected to buy every product, and reliable primary sources may be hard to come by).

I wasn't very old then but the main thing was RAM. Fuckers in Microsoft sales/marketing made 1 GB the minimum requirement for OEMs to install Vista.

So guess what? Every OEM installed Vista with 1 GB of RAM and a 5200 RPM hard drive (the "standard" config for XP which is what most of those SKUs were meant to target). That hard drive would inevitably spend its short life thrashing because if you opened IE it would immediately start swapping. Even worse with OEM bloat, but even a clean Vista install would swap real bad under light web browsing.

It was utterly unusable. Like, everything would be unbearably slow and all you could do was (slowly) open task manager and say "yep, literally nothing running, all nonessential programs killed, only got two tabs open, still swapping like it's the sex party of the century".

"Fixing" those hellspawns by adding a spare DDR2 stick is a big part of how I learned to fix computer hardware. All ya had to do was chuck 30 € of RAM in there and suddenly Vista went from actually unusable to buttery smooth.

By the time the OEMs wised up to Microsoft's bullshit, Seven was around the corner so everyone thought Seven "fixed" the performance issues. It didn't, it's just that 2 GB of RAM had become the bare minimum standard by then.

EDIT: Just installed a Vista VM because I ain't got nothing better to do at 2 am apparently. Not connected to the internet, didn't install a thing, got all of 12 processes listed by task manager, and it already uses 500 MB of RAM. Aero didn't even enable as I didn't configure graphics acceleration.

The studios! Think of the studios! Their execs couldn't live off merch sales and shitty reboots anymore! They might even have to - gasp - develop original IP if they want to milk an exclusive license. Some other execs would make money off some of last century's licenses! The horror! The tragedy!

That can't be. Clearly the best thing about Indiana Jones and Jurrasic Park is the death grip the studios have on those IPs. Ever since Steamboat Willie fell into the public domain I've been unable to enjoy the Disney Classics. All joy has been snuffed out from my life.

Bro I wouldn't trust most companies not to store their only copy of super_duper_important_financial_data_2024.xlsx on an old AliExpress thumb drive attached to the CFO's laptop in a coffee shop while he's taking a shit.

If your company has an actual DRP for if your datacenter catches fire or your cloud provider disappears, you are already doing better than 98 % of your competitors, and these aren't far-fetched disaster scenarios. Maintaining an entire separate pen-and-paper shadow process, training people for it? That's orders of magnitude more expensive than the simplest of DRPs most companies already don't have.

Friendly wave to all the companies currently paying millions a year extra to Broadcom/VMWare because their tools and processes are too rigid to use with literally any other hypervisor when realistically all their needs could be covered by the free tier of ProxMox and/or OpenStack.

Congrats. So you think that since you can do it (as a clearly very tech-literate person) the government shouldn't do anything? Do you think it's because they all researched the issues with these companies and decided to actively support them, or is it because their apathy should be considered an encouragement to continue?

You are so haughty you've circled back around to being libertarian. This is genuinely a terrible but unfortunately common take that is honestly entirely indistinguishable from the kind of shit you'd hear coming from a FAANG lobby group.