thesmokingman @ thesmokingman @programming.dev

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Joined

2 yr. ago

These are great questions! Rather than pull individual citations, I’ll point you at these books

• Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine
• The Pentagon’s Brain by Annie Jacobson
• The Imagineers of War by Sharon Weinberg

Your last point, suggesting that it’s possible to take DARPA money without intentionally developing weapons, is part of the whitewashing we’ve done of computing that’s incredibly wrong. Make no mistake, I am directly saying a majority of computing pioneers in the US are trash people while respecting their achievements. Their work was done explicitly under the knowledge it was for military purposes. Levine has a few great anecdotes about engineers watching protestors and asking for extra security.

Your example of Berners-Lee is an interesting one. He’s trash for modern opinions. I don’t know much about the military history, if any, of CERN, so I don’t know their culpability. Conway took DARPA money and architected DARPA projects. That’s her culpability, unless you’re able to show she was coerced and didn’t know about the widely discussed military connections scientists had to know to write their grants for funding?

Edit: fixed the Weinberger link

Fantastic! She was a huge part of the military-industrial complex in computing and her entire work has to be viewed through that lens. While her contributions to the field are numerous and incredibly meaningful, she also wanted to help the military develop machine intelligence and is every explicit way connected to modern conflicts where military misuses AI to murder children.

He is a nightlife commissioner which is not a title I’d heard before

For more color, check out Raw Dog by Jamie Loftus and her guest Behind the Bastards episode about Major League Eating.

I agree with you. I think the responses to your comment are missing a few key points

• Calling an Apple product something weird with “i” or “Apple” is Jobsian slavish devotion to branding
• Under Tim Cook, innovation has arguably stagnated (see comparisons to Ballmer
• Cook has not leveraged the value of Apple’s innovation successfully eg Apple Silicon being limited to Apple devices vs PowerPC days, the Vision Pro being horrible, the recent hilarious iPad creativity crusher ad.
• A company with Apple’s market cap can do dumb shit and still appear valuable just because they have Apple’s market cap.

I read OP as “names are dumb and this is just Apple trying to be different in the same way everyone else is.” I think all of that is true and I think it’s valid criticism of the product. My last point about Apple’s value is probably the most important. They can do a lot of dumb shit before it matters.

I’d argue it was taken from us several years ago when Raspberry made the decision to prioritize business customers over education and hobby during the chip shortages.

If you were able to buy one at the beginning of the pandemic it was great. If you weren’t, then the 4 was annoying as fuck because it was impossible to purchase at anything less than 3X MSRP.

Link for the lazy

It’s cheaper to use a platform as a service than it is to build your own distributed data centers around the world and hire thousands of engineers worldwide to maintain it. At the federal level, there can be requirements for FedRAMP or a restriction to federal equipment.

In the forty years since its introduction, most of the people that support the broken windows theory are the police and the people that disagree with it are basically everyone else. Not a great foundation for any computing conversations today.

That’s just Mitnick’s over-inflated ego and constant media presence. The punishment he received was not commensurate to his crimes, giving him reasonable support. Everything else is just his hype game.

Do you mind calling out the questions you think are inappropriate or exist for rage clicks? What constitutes a good article for you if this is a shitty one?

Looks like there is now a subscription program. imo that’s much better than it used to be at least for Insta (apologies for the link; not sure when it changed so that’s the best quick search).

It’s P2W. There’s absolutely no way their grind example is actually achievable by a casual player.

Over in the US I’ve been stoked to see the boycott. Also over in the US I’m now really sad that your only option is Walmart because that will fuck you in the end.

Costco is great if you need bulk or very specific but completely random items in the rotating stock. It is not a replacement for a grocery store unless you can reasonably buy a lot of one thing and use it before it’s bad.

You literally spent an entire comment explaining why you should not use scientific notation and now you’re asking why I might prefer precision in byte arithmetic?

Good luck with that.

If I ignore what’s in the search bar, I remember that the prefix “mebi” means 2^20 and use a calculator. Your point doesn’t make sense because you’re asking us to get mad at a tool intended to convert scientific units for using the bog standard scientific notation. Byte math uses powers of 2 ergo we should use a calculator that isn’t explicitly set up for rounding.

When you search “megabytes to bytes” the units are correct and the number is one. If you edit the form, the number might not be one and the units might not be correct. Changing units highlights the unit input.

OP’s ostensible point posting on this community is that searching “megabytes to bytes” gave “mebibytes to bytes” in the calculator but OP’s image shows OP has changed the calculator.

Here is what I get when I complete the search.

And here’s what I get when I intentionally change the units. Notice the color difference?

I feel like there’s a growing understanding that the economy has nothing to do with the majority of our lives. For example, recession indicators, at least in the US, don’t include cost of living and inflation. Low employment doesn’t mean shit to me if the price of groceries grows faster than my salary. Large numbers of open jobs doesn’t mean shit to me if employers can justify lower wages because the market is flooded from layoffs. A high salary across the board doesn’t mean shit to me if I can’t afford a house on the wage, forcing me to dump increasingly larger portions of my pay on renting an asset I can never own.