I was ready to hear something like a story from someone who had signed onto a medical trial and was upset the trial was ending. Nope, instead an absurdly short support period that seemingly is fed by the same culture of replacement over repair that has infected our economy.
The latter. The US only has a veto in the Security Council. Though even that isn’t entirely unconditional. Recently it abstained on a vote about a cease fire resolution, leading to much entitled complaining from Israel.
We’ve also managed to wedge ourselves into a situation where Congress can’t handle anything controversial. The closest we came in recent years was the (relatively timid) ACA, and that barely passed after an unpopular war and the 2008 economic crash.
Don’t worry, they’ll pass another strongly worded resolution.
YOU CAN HAVE MY COBOL ON COGS WHEN YOU PRY IT FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS.
I’m gay. Personally, I’ve just never had trouble in situations with non-sexual nudity. I’ve been to nude beaches, about ten of my city’s World Naked Bike Ride, and of course locker rooms. Plenty of hot guys around, it’s hard not to notice, but never had the smallest issue with anything being evident. It feels like it’s largely based on the setting.
On the other hand, I’m gay and breasts just don’t do anything for me. Now a guy with a decent set of pecs (but not ridiculously oversized), now we’re talking.
What? All you have to do is edit a few files with ed, run some simple commands in the terminal, and you have a working system
Definitely start with a nice beginner friendly distro, like Gentoo, NixOS, or LFS.
I’m doing a series of conversations/interviews with my parents’ generation to keep a voice record of their stories. As part of that, I’m doing transcripts that start with the transcript feature of Google’s Recorder. It can do some nifty things like assign speakers to individual voices. I have to clean up the transcripts some, but it’s far less laborious than dealing with a 15-20 minute conversation. I can fix up a transcript in maybe 5 minutes.
I just gave the chat bot that was put in place at the IT department where I work at a poke. It answered my question perfectly: “How do I print from my laptop to the library?” And it’s not like the chat bot is the only route for support, but it does divert a lot of routine questions from our help desk so they can focus on questions that require a human touch. That could be people where a chat bot is not a good format or it could be a non-routine question.
Fortunately, I have a Charge 4. And there has been some enshittification since Google bought them up.
Fitbit for fitness trackers. I had one of their smartwatches and never found it useful. The trackers are stripped down versions that do everything I need and have a week of battery life.
I work at a university IT department. It’s been a struggle with our auditors to loosen up the password expiration requirements. At least with the students they let anyone with 2FA to go without password expiration, which acts as a nice little carrot-and-stick. But for staff it’s two years (2FA always required), regardless of password quality. I’d rather be able to base password expiration on password quality, personality.
LessPass and similar software has some problems. Things like you can’t simply change your master password, you must then recompute and change every site. It’s also not strictly stateless, since you need to know which password iteration you’re on and the user name. Full fledged password managers also typically provide other secret management features, like API keys, SSH keys, credit/debit cards, and identity cards.
What does that even look like as a business model, though? There’s an expectation now that you don’t pay for web browsers. What would a standalone Chrome, Inc. look like?
You get a lèse-majesté and you get a lèse-majesté!
On the plus side, they don’t send people to prison over having walkie-talkies like in Myanmar, so… win?
First, the definition of appeal to authority, since it’s one of the most misunderstood fallacies. Citing someone based on their area of expertise is not appeal to authority. The problem is when you cite the stated opinion of someone, but their area of expertise is not directly relevant to that opinion. I’m a software developer, I could give you an expert opinion on various topics in that area. But outside of topics I am an export on, appeal to authority.
I didn’t say he’s necessarily wrong. But at the same time, he got his Nobel prize by being an economist who made a substantial contribution to economics. He is not an expert on fascism. His expert opinions in economics often run counter to many other credible expert economists, so you should consider those other expert opinions as well and not just listen to the person who tells you want you want to hear. That’s certainly not anti-intellectual.
Experts and intellectuals should absolutely be considered to better understand a subject, but they’re not some infallible oracle of truth. They contradict each other, are often limited by an ivory tower environment, and operating in the same societal context as everyone else.
All politicians meet with lobbyists. It’s hard to get a handle on the needs of the nation (or state, or so on), and lobbying is how people inform their representatives of that need. Now whether those lobbyists are scumbags or saints, that’s a different question.