ShittyBeatlesFCPres @ ShittyBeatlesFCPres @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Thanks. Fixed it. I guess it’s pretty obvious I don’t have kids.

I don’t use the A.I. features on iOS or Android — I have both for developer reasons — but I do like the new Siri animation better than the old one. So, not a total waste of time and money. More of a 99.999% waste of time and money.

Maybe it’s useful for people who work in marketing or whatever. Like you write some copy and you ask it to rewrite it in different tones and send them all to your client to see what vibe they want. But I already include the exact right amount of condescension expected in an email from a developer.

I would use a Fisher-Price Powerwheels logo. No one is going to be fooled either way but Powerwheels were making electric vehicles for people without fully developed brains before Elon Musk even bought Tesla from the real founders. Gotta pay homage to the innovators in the field.

Plus, maybe some would-be vandals will get nostalgia for their childhood toys and decide not to piss on my theoretical cybertruck’s door handles. (Assuming it has door handles. For all I know, you have to pay $1.99/month for an in-app subscription to open the doors.)

To: All Staff

From: Erica Carr (Definitely not DOGE)

Subject: Do crimes

Body: You are ordered to violate the Federal Records Act. Obviously, it’s punishable by 3 years in jail but it’s a federal crime so the president can pardon you. He’s golfing today but I assure you, I’ll put in the good word for you and you won’t serve a full sentence. Failure to commit this federal crime will be interpreted as a resignation.

P.S. I asked Elon if you could just list one bulletpoint for accomplishments this week as I am well aware how paper shredders jam if you try to destroy too many government documents at once. He said, “Sure, whatever.” and put his gaming headset back on.

It’s partially because the ICC doesn’t usually get involved if there’s a domestic prosecution. A lot of war criminal heads of state are put on trial locally after being deposed and the ICC doesn’t get involved in those situations unless there’s a request from the new government.

So, take heart. Lots of world leaders have faced consequences for atrocities. Just not at The Hague. Plus, the Rome Statute that setup the ICC was only signed in 1996 and they only have jurisdiction in the green parts of the map on that page.

This may not be what you’re looking for since you said “modern” but A Short History of Wine was a fun read and covers a ton of world history. It’s obviously through the lens of wine/alcohol but it’s often actually about trade networks, different cultures, and diplomacy.

It’s through a specific lens and doesn’t pretend to cover everything but alcohol pops up in history often enough that it almost mirrors economic history.

If that isn’t your thing, I would recommend regional history books. It’s almost impossible to cover all of human history without some sort of focus. Otherwise, it’s just a textbook and you can download a professor’s syllabus to find those.

Others have pointed out plausible reasons specific to Google but they also laid off a fuckton of people and that never really works out long term unless the company has a good reason to lay people off (like if they lose a huge client or find one or a product line fails).

But the recent tech company layoffs seemed pretty arbitrary, especially the stealth layoffs (like the “return to office” demands that just made people with options go elsewhere). I wouldn’t be shocked if the Google Assistant team lost some talented people who either left, were foolishly laid off, or were shifted to Gemini (which, like all consumer generative A.I., is still in beta and hemorrhaging money).

I just say “consumer” there because it seems like highly focused A.I. projects could be legit businesses. Like the protein folding project at Google and things like that. But the chatbots and image generators might never be useful and profitable.

I’ll go by (very broad) regions:

The United States experiences a brain drain and Trump’s death (all but inevitable in 10 years, whether by natural causes or other means), will cause a major rift in the Republican Party. Democrats will somehow fail to capitalize on it and then blame online leftists, famously the kingmakers of American politics.

Canada will become a de facto part of Europe. Bike lanes will be added.

Europe will experience an economic boom as it’s basically forced to develop new industries, becomes the default destination for scientific research, and the Euro begins to replace the dollar as the currency of choice for international trade contracts. France, especially, will benefit as it isn’t reliant on the U.S. for military support, space launch capabilities, etc. and will become the default NATO weapons supplier.

Russia will have a deep post-war depression even if it takes Kyiv due to brain drain and sending so many young men into a meat grinder.

China will have a medium-sized economic crisis but ultimately (after Xi) enact long needed reforms (kind of like when Mao died and Deng Xiaoping enacted reforms).

India will have a major crisis as Hindu Nationalism goes too far and people begin to revolt.

Central Asia will keep on keeping on. (I don’t know a lot about Central Asia.)

Latin America will increase trade with China and Europe at the expense of the United States. Bolsonaro will go to the hospital 50 more times and be bit by an even more exotic bird. Argentina will benefit most from the decline of the U.S. as a reliable trading partner.

Israel will annex the West Bank and Arab countries will isolate it. Saudi Arabia’s line city will still be in the planning stages. Iran will develop a nuclear deterrent but the power of the Supreme Leader will be weakened and shift to the elected officials because of economic problems.

The Maghreb will benefit from Europe’s rise and increased trade. West Africa will experience an economic and population boom and become an inexpensive manufacturing hub. The Horn of Africa will probably remain a shitshow (but hopefully I’m wrong about that). Central and Southern Africa will also experience significant growth but at a slower pace than West Africa.

Australia will lose another war with emus as New Zealand wisely allies with the Emus. They will force Australia into a humiliating peace deal that ultimately leads to a third Emu War, much like WWI’s onerous peace terms led to WWII.

Ocean acidification and rising sea levels will begin to fuck everyone and scientists will scream about it but it’ll be the following decades when that sort of thing really wrecks the world economy.

Nintendo will somehow sell me the same games for the 5th time.

I actually emailed my local National Weather Service station awhile back asking if they’d post on Mastodon and even offered them a BlueSky invite and they wrote back saying only Twitter and Facebook were allowed and they’d be everywhere if it was approved by higher ups.

Someone made a BlueSky bot a few months ago for NWS notices and I’m pretty sure they covered every local one. I remember the person who made it asking people to request any missing stations. Not sure if there’s a Mastodon equivalent but you could use a bridge. It won’t help with transit delays or other local government announcements but the weather service stuff is available (via an AtProto <-> ActivityPub bridge if nothing else; it’s not like you interact with the posts so it’d be ideal for a bridge).

There’s always PiHole to block ads at the network level. It takes some setup and a raspberry pi but it can be one of the cheaper ones. And I’m pretty sure the sites aren’t going to do much more than check the User Agent to get the browser so User Agent Switcher will get around 99% of that.

You could, I suppose, block Firefox in other ways (like maybe checking for some random Chromium feature not yet supported in Firefox) but Firefox isn’t usually far behind Chrome so it would almost take an entire new developer to be effective. And there’s probably ways around that too. (I’m a web developer but have never worked on an ad-supported project and never will so I’m not sure but life finds a way.)

Switzerland might really be one of the few countries no one can ever take over. Even if no one else cared — they will — sending troops running up a mountain where everyone has rifle skills and hidden bunkers is definitely not a military strategy I ever heard of.

Switzerland enacted reforms years ago. I doubt they’d go after them when they can go after the Cayman Islands or Jersey or wherever. And I doubt they’d go after any rich person’s money. The Panama Papers were published years ago along with others and nothing happened.

I don’t think many people who pay attention give a shit what the ADL says anymore. Jonathan Greenblatt will happily excuse the far right making “Roman salutes” and then demand upset college kids get deported. It’s not like it’s the Southern Poverty Law Center. His silence against the actual antisemites on the far right in America — the ones who are actually antisemitic — is deafening.

And for the record, I support Israel’s right to exist. It’s been like 80 fucking years. Whole generations have come and gone and it exists. I just don’t support the current coalition leading Israel and especially not the West Bank settlement terrorists. Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir can eat 10,000 bowls of pubes with a side of dicks. They’re corrupt adjudicated war criminals. I look forward to the next election so they can be put in prison.

Why doesn’t Romania want their political system and economy destabilized because of morons?

Early in my career (a long time ago), I was tasked with ordering replacement chargers for some laptops. I ordered several off Amazon and even though they were labeled as being what we wanted, they were apparently bootleg and were not, in fact, the correct charger. Fried a few laptops before I realized Amazon wasn’t the “Amazon” of yore selling first-party parts and I was ordering from random third party sellers. (That was all relatively new at the time. Amazon was a bookstore branching out in my head.)

In fairness, I was a programmer and not an electrical engineer. And chargers back then weren’t exactly USB-C level smart. The barrel charger fit. I just thought “Oh, what a great deal. I’ll order these and get plaudits from my boss for saving money.” It wasn’t even my money.

The other one is that when I was learning to code — I’m self-taught because everyone was back then — I used Vim and invented my own style. All my code was basically unformatted or, at best formatted consistently in a very non-standard way. That’s easy to fix nowadays where I can hit save and my code gets formatted automatically but it wasn’t so simple back then. I still feel bad for the engineer who followed me who had to fix that shit.

I’m not sure what he’s done to get the benefit of the doubt on intelligence. He literally asked if it was possible to cure COVID by injecting bleach or shoving a UV light up your ass. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177

His own staff members have called him a “moron.” And he’s bankrupted 6 companies. If there’s evidence he’s smart, I haven’t seen it.

Because they’re in denial about being conned by an idiot. After all, if you get conned by an idiot, what does that make you? It’s easier for them to pretend he’s got some genius plan.

I know the answer to this but you’d think after almost getting merked twice (and once at his own golf course), he’d play on the secure courses at the Joint Base Andrews for a bit.

Obviously, that ruins the grift of charging the government for accommodations but he’s already or is planning to fire >100k people. Even if 0.01% of those people are unstable, that’s still a double digit number of lone wolves for the secret service to constantly worry about. (Not to mention all the intelligence agencies and terrorist groups currently pissed at him.)

How do you mean? The article doesn’t mention Hamas or an act of violence. The only one who got hurt is him when he cut his foot climbing. It doesn’t seem like it was “literally” anything but a peaceful protest, even if I imagine it’s illegal for lots of other reasons. (I don’t know UK law but I suspect climbing Big Ben isn’t legal.)

That’s why you should bring a bag lunch and water when you climb Big Ben. It’s like hiking a long trail. Well, you can probably skip carrying a paper map but you should always bring snacks and water when you climb up a mountain and/or the world’s most famous clock.