4

Pretty wild to watch London Breed get so excited about APEC as if it's some boon to the local economy. Local businesses are screwed, there's no upside like a normal conference. Residents in and around the area are hugely negatively impacted by the security arrangements, and I'm sure the added policing will respect everyone's civil liberties...

[-] the_sisko@startrek.website 19 points 1 year ago

I appreciate the recognition, finally!

[-] the_sisko@startrek.website 20 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I get dinged if I return a gas vehicle with less than 3/4 tank, and yet Hertz is handing out EVs with under half a charge?? That's some major bullshit.

[-] the_sisko@startrek.website 42 points 1 year ago

People aren't misunderstanding the issue. Third party cookie support is being dropped by all browsers. Chrome is also dropping them, but replacing them with topics. Sure, topics is less invasive than third party cookies, but it is still more invasive than the obvious user friendly approach of not having an invasive tracker built into your browser. No other major browser vendor is considering supporting topics. So they're doing an objectively user unfriendly thing here. This is the shit that happens when the world's largest internet advertising company also controls the browser.

28

So glad to see this horror show finally failed as it should. Hopefully the space gets used for a restaurant more accessible to the general public, and not related to dying tech fads like blockchain.

[-] the_sisko@startrek.website 21 points 1 year ago

In other news, emacs still didn't ship my init.el as part of the default configuration! Lol

[-] the_sisko@startrek.website 47 points 1 year ago

The real assholes are the Bajorans, they never even erected a statue of Dukat!

[-] the_sisko@startrek.website 28 points 1 year ago

I literally watched cops driving while on their phone everyday after it was made illegal. Nothing was done, Nothing changed, they hand out tickets while breaking the same rules.

I mean yeah, fuck the police :) Seems like we're in agreement here.

Might kill someone is a precrime, a issue with these tickets in this case is that without the AI camera nothing would have been seen (literally victimless). If someone crashes into anything while on their phone the chances it will be used in prosecution is low.

Using your fucking phone while driving is the crime. This isn't some "thought police" situation. Put the phone away, and you won't get the ticket. It's that simple. We don't need to wait for a person to mow down a pedestrian in order to punish them for driving irresponsibly.

In the same spirit, if a person gets drunk and drives home, and they don't kill somebody -- well that's a crime and they should be punished for it.

And if you can't handle driving responsibly, then the privilege of driving on public roads should be revoked.

I don’t think texting while driving is a good idea, like not wearing a seatbelt. However this is offloading a lot to AI, distracted driving is not well defined and considering the nuances I don’t want to leave any part to AI. Here is an example: eating a bowl of soup while operating a vehicle would be distracted right? What if the soup was in a cup? What if the soup was made of coffee beans?

This is such a weird ad absurdum argument. Nobody is telling some ML system "make a judgment call on whether the coffee bean soup is a distraction." The system is identifying people violating a cut-and-dried law: using their phone while driving, or not wearing a seatbelt. Assuming it can do it in an unbiased way (which is a huge if, to be fair), then there's no slippery slope here.

For what it's worth, I do worry about ML system bias, and I do think the seatbelt enforcement is a bit silly: I personally don't mind if a person makes a decision that will only impact their own safety. I care about the irresponsible decisions that people make affecting my safety, and I'd be glad for some unbiased enforcement of the traffic rules that protect us all.

[-] the_sisko@startrek.website 81 points 1 year ago

Ah yes, the famously victimless crime of using your phone while driving. Honestly screw anybody who does that, they deserve to be ticketed each time, cause each time they might kill somebody.

[-] the_sisko@startrek.website 15 points 1 year ago

I mean you still get served the ads that provide them revenue. But it's not like I'm assigning you personal responsibility for keeping them in business, or saying you're wrong or bad for staying. Just sharing why I want people to get off the platform quicker.

[-] the_sisko@startrek.website 27 points 1 year ago

It seems obvious to me. Twitter has historically been used by public figures, and especially public institutions like local governments, transit agencies, etc, to make official announcements & statements. Of course having that on a centrally owned social media site was never good, but now with Space Karen making it actively hostile to users (and trying to prevent logged out users from seeing that info), it's very bad. The sooner Twitter completes its inevitable collapse, the sooner those public figures & institutions will move to a better way to deliver those - Mastodon, RSS, webpages, whatever.

IMO it's in the public's best interest for all the holdouts to get out now so we can move on.

31
DS9 S2 "Second Sight" (startrek.website)

So I'm partly posting this because I like DS9 and wouldn't mind chatting about its episodes once in a while, so I'd love to hear people's opinions in general about the episode.

My main reason though is to voice a complaint. In this episode, some self-obsessed genius terraformer guy comes to DS9 for his latest project. Sisko starts meeting this woman Fenna, who keeps disappearing. Despite this he falls for her. It turns out that this woman is a psychic projection created by Nidell, the unhappy wife of the terraformer. She can't leave him because her species mates for life. At the end, the self-obsessed terraformer makes an uncharacteristic sacrifice, killing himself as part of his final crowning achievement, so that Fenna can be free from their unhappy marriage. At the end, Nidell cannot remember the "relationship" she had with Sisko, and she goes to talk to him. She asks what Fenna was like, and Sisko says "she was just like you."

And to me, this was such a record scratching moment. Like, let's set aside the fact that Sisko has had all of three conversations with either of them, so he barely knows either of them. Fenna dressed in bright colors with elaborate hairstyles, she talked about the excitement/anticipation of the promenade at night, she suggested impromptu picnics. As far as we can tell, she's spontaneous, outgoing, curious, and wants to explore. Compare that to Nidell, who dresses in muted colors, with a more reserved hairstyle. She tells Sisko that she plans to return to her home planet for the rest of her life (and she seems quite young). All that suggests a less spontaneous and curious personality, the sort of person who is happy to live in their hometown their whole life. Which is fine, but it seems to me that these two people are nothing alike, except that they look the same.

I get that Fenna is supposed to be a manifestation of Nidell's subconscious or something. So maybe she secretly wishes to be like Fenna. But that doesn't make the line work for me. I'm not certain if we're expected to agree with Sisko, or if we're supposed to understand that Sisko is only saying this to be nice, since he still has feelings for Fenna and doesn't want to hurt Nidell. Either way is weird.

Anyway, that's my complaint. This episode doesn't go down in the history books as an exciting one, but I sure did enjoy everyone's exasperated reactions to the terraformer dude.

Would love to hear other people's thoughts :)

[-] the_sisko@startrek.website 21 points 1 year ago

It's a cathartic, but not particularly productive vent.

Yes, there are stupid lines of time.sleep(1) written in some tests and codebases. But also, there are test setUp() methods which do expensive work per-test, so that the runtime grew too fast with the number of tests. There are situations where there was a smarter algorithm and the original author said "fuck it" and did the N^2 one. There are container-oriented workflows that take a long time to spin up in order to run the same tests. There are stupid DNS resolution timeouts because you didn't realize that the third-party library you used would try to connect to an API which is not reachable in your test environment... And the list goes on...

I feel like it's the "easy way out" to create some boogeyman, the stupid engineer who writes slow, shitty code. I think it's far more likely that these issues come about because a capable person wrote software under one set of assumptions, and then the assumptions changed, and now the code is slow because the assumptions were violated. There's no bad guy here, just people doing their best.

[-] the_sisko@startrek.website 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah, having watched in release order (ish) and just recently finished Discovery & Picard, I feel this sentiment in my bones! For sure, I don't want the actors and writers to have to be worked to the bone churning out 26-episode seasons each year.

But it's also really frustrating how they insist that every 10 episode season, their characters must save the entire galaxy. There's no actual space to get to know the characters who aren't the main ones.

The Dominion war brewed for 3 seasons and then played out over 2 more. I think. That's a time scale that allows for amazing character development.

[-] the_sisko@startrek.website 17 points 1 year ago

Cron may be old but I don't think it's "legacy" or invalid. There's plenty of perfectly good, modern implementations. The interface is well established, and it's quite simple to schedule something and check it. What's more, Cron works on new Linux systems, older non-systemd ones, and BSD and others. If all you need is a command run on a schedule, then Cron is a great tool for the job.

Systemd services and timers require you to read quite a bit more documentation to understand what you're doing. But of course you get more power and flexibility as a result.

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the_sisko

joined 1 year ago