Better content.

I think this might be the new Turing Test right here: If you can’t shitpost to the level of six-sided ursines, you’re not human.

Realistically, it’s a counterprogramming game. Content farms either want to sell you something, or drive you in endless circles to make ad revenue. That inherently steers towards certain kinds of messaging, which have a distinct smell.

When that’s the competition, the audience burns out. We all have our mental or technical block lists-- this site never actually delivers ehat it promises-- and they’ll grow over time.

The content-farm only works for low stakes scenarios, where people don’t mind scrolling into an endless void. But that’s basically the web equivalent of turning on the TV and listening to the random sitcom noise while doing something else. For anything more important, the bloxklists go up and people still end up looking for real resources.

Next one that comes to the door, I’m telling him he can have $20 if he humanely escorts the Latrodectus Hesperus living in our cupboard out. Let’s see if he has any tricks up his sleeve other than poison.

Chromebooks maybe?

I always figured the browser part mostly falls out of doing the Electron-for-cross-platform thing.

What about Mouser?

Source?

I’m more willing to forgive not getting Baizhu for the promise of unlimited cheap energy…

I’m not there. You might try a forum like Audiokarma.

Don’t toss the Technics reciever either.

Back in the Windows 8 era, I bought a little 8" tablet PC from Dell. It was flaky from basically day 1, and after ~2 weeks it bricked entirely.

I go to RMA and they ask “If we refund you $50, would you be willing to keep the unit? How about $75?”

Admittedly, they did give me a refund, but that was so the wrong branch to follow on the chat script, honey. If I’m going to be out over three hundred dollars for a paperweight it better at least be made of something cool like meteorite.

I guess I was startled when I went for my go-to desktop (fvwm) and it wasn’t in the main repo, but the AUR.

It feels like it means they’re not actually maintaining a lot of their package pool, just tossing it off on third parties.

I started with some UMSDOS-based “full X11 desktop in 5 floppies” distro on a 486, then went through Slackware, RedHat 5 with glibc breakage, actually bought a SuSE boxed set in the 7.x era, mostly stuck with Slackware unril I realized I wanted stuff like Steam and perhaps some degree of dependency resolution is nice. Bounced off of Arch (the AUR is a terrible concept IMO) and ended up on Void, which gives me Slackware-like vibes, but a little more built for broadband instead of CD images. Been trying Debian Sid latrly, just because I put it on my new laptop and I figured I’d go consistent, but I’m not sure I’m sold. Everything works, but even for an “unstable”, the packages are dated and I dislike systemd on principle.

Perhaps a lottery scheme would work, like hunting permits. That seems to manage a constrained resource.

I think 2049 is the 100th anniversary of the current PRC, so a reasonable target for ceremonial goals.

No different than saying an American leader said he wanted a Mars landing for the tricentennial in 2076. It’s good symbolism, not necessarily a technical merric.

I sort of understood the premise for chain-of-custody style use cases, but the other side of the coin is that these usually, or always, have a final arbiter of validity. Typically it’s a court system or an end purchaser who decides if the data is valid.

For example, an obvious use case is “record a will or deed on the blockchain, cryptographically signed and timestamped, to eliminate any disputes about ownership.” Except the same problem is trivially solved by a scheme where I could register my will/deed with the legal system itself, which is already pretty good at storing documents, and no need to cart around a big, heavy blockchain. Most of the problems in that space come from spotty, inconsistent record keeping (why aren’t these documents centrally registered in the US?) and more centralization solves them.

That’s why the fixation on decentralization is often a waste. I suspect the real appeal is fear of human institutions. A banking or legal system subject to laws and social norms might refuse to honour the documents you file, but soulless decentralized code will dance as it’s told to. For example, I could imagine wiring a smart contract triggered to irrevocably pay on the event of someone’s death, while writing “hitman fees” in the memo of a paper cheque probably raises a few eyebrows at the bank.

Silly idea: computer vision for classtoom rollcall. Take a photo and it generates a list of absences.

Is United Express actually United? I thought those tended to be a regional carrier using the name under license.

I’d expect the labour friction to be still worse; I was peripherally involved with such a firm 20 years ago and know they had terrible problems with staff retention, mostly because they wouldn’t pay enough to retain people after they got fed up with the free-standby-flight privileges.

Yes, although I personally prefer “central planning enthusiast”.

I think we’re approaching the point where the word gets taken back by the community it was used to malign, if not there already. "

If I’ve learned anything from GTA… just drive the news van around and hit pedestrians until you make budget.

It originally I saw the mention of repairable “brainds” and it was 2AM here. :)

Okay, this typo needs to become a direct-to-streaming movie.

So we open on the usual cyberpunk future. Worldbuilding scenes establish that Chinese brain implants are favoured because they’re cheap, they work, and they’re repairable. A popular model offers auxillary memory to get everyone’s neopronouns right.

Various Western nations get all panicky and paranoid, waiting for Xi’s-head-in-a-jar-atop-a-500-metre-Gundam to do something with them. Surely the Big Mind Control Button is right next to the Big Communism Button. We see invasive scans at border crossings and forcible internment; a B-plot involves a character dying from mandated removal surgery and exchange. Turns out nobody can afford Western augmentations, and they’re made with General Motors quality anyway.

The main story gets kickstarted by the surprise synchronized mass murder of landlords across Manhattan, now a Nevada Limited Liability Corporation. Joe Biden, serving his 17th term as an AI hosted on a Commofore 128, orders the war machines to spool up, as this was clearly coordinated foreign-brand mass terrorism of doom. Just waiting on a suitable piece of evidence to pull the trigger and start WWIII. Cue frantic law enforcement chewing scenery interspersed with comic terror as the characters start to panic over everyone and everything that wss ever within 3000km of Beijing. After the obligatory dead ends and viloence, the stock white-coat nerd character walks out of the crime lab and technobabbles thst the implants did nothing. The killers developed class consciousness all by themselves.

I wish there was a meaningful civilian corps in my country. The military tends to offer two selling points:

• Employer of last resort that takes most-all comers
• Disciplined, all-inclusive experience

which would be valuable for many young adults, but there’s no reason we can’t get a similar model without the whole “die for hegemony/oil/to impress rightwong voters that you’re tough” factor. Surely we’ve got plenty of Corps of Engineers atyle grunt work thete.