whofearsthenight @ whofearsthenight @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

Should I spend the next hour or two soldering something I will always have anxiety over being a fire hazard, or should I spend $3.97 on amazon to have it here the next day. ¯(ツ)/¯

Internal monologue: well I haven't used a parallel cable since '93, I should probably toss this out.

remembers that one time I couldn't find this cable and it screwed me turning in an assignment

sky darkens, eyes become shadowed, teeth become exaggerated, skin goes pallid

Internal monologue: but after all, it's mine. Why shouldn't I keep it? Why shouldn't I keep the precious.

Def the tribbles of the cable world.

The only way any of them still make any sense running is if they assume that Trump is going to be dead or in prison by next year.

In many cases, discontinuing support is in fact breaking it, especially when (as the original post describes) the company deliberately architects things so that they cannot be maintained and arbitrarily cuts support. As the post describes, this is going to turn perfectly functioning equipment into landfill fodder, even though the company and thus their interest, may have gone out of business and gains nothing from the device artificially being forced into a state of obsolescence. Another obvious example, though much lower stakes, would be things like single-player games requiring a server component.

Second, this assumes that this is the only possible model that keeps new R&D happening and better microscopes being made. Many companies with specialized equipment support it through things like support contracts and the like. That they don't support them and design in them in a way that arbitrarily makes it so they can't be self supported does suggest they are driven by profit motive and wish to increase sales not through making a better project thanks to their model support generous R&D, but by forcing more frequent purchases of equipment or in the case of like John Deere, making it significantly more costly to repair and charging exorbitant rates which you now have no choice to pay as all other avenues of repair have been now locked out.

And I make no claims about the moral intent of capitalism as it can't really have any. There are benefits to extremely well-regulated capitalism which is what my post suggests. I'll also toss in that unregulated pure capitalism is a recipe for disaster and that while I do believe it's possible to have an ethical business in capitalism, the reality shows over and over that the best of us aren't likely to prevail and ethics are unlikely to win out. This is why we've regulated so much of capitalism whether through antitrust, labor laws, specific industry standards like food code (and even then we can see quite a lot of negative outcomes for the US compared to other countries which have stricter regulation.) Or, in a few cases simply replaced with socialist endeavors through the government (military, social security, medicare, education, etc.)

Funding for research is extraordinarily difficult under socialism for example. The inherent sink or swim mandate of capitalism ensures productive research.

I'd say evidence is to the contrary. The internet, for example, is essentially a socialist or even communist endeavor depending on which layer we're talking about. Of course, the original invention of the WWW stemming from ARPAnet, which was a non-capitalist endeavor. The development of broadband infrastructure across the country is also the result of heavy regulation and significant taxpayer subsidy. Then we get to the servers, which are about 99% likely to be running on or relying on open-source software. We're having this discussion on a server running an open source OS running open source software. Also worth noting that significant amounts of research happens through publicly funded state universities.

Last, I want to address this in a little more detail:

a socialist approach would also be wasteful because there’s no motivation for efficient research and development.

This is quite simply one of the most pervasive myths of capitalism, that somehow humans need to the fear of starvation or the pull of greed to do anything "productive." Although I am sure there are some that would just as easily turn to full on hedonism, many of us not forced to labor in a capitalist society would find more beneficial things for ourselves and humanity in general because many of us have a driven curiosity. Like those opensource projects I mentioned above - I'd love to contribute, but in my regular capitalist job (which tbh is probably a net-loss for humanity if I'm being honest) means I work 9+ hours a day, am stuck with an additional 1.5 hours of commute each day, and so on, such that I'm not left with the time to pursue projects like this that I'd consider beneficial. But even forgetting me, the whole open source software movement and the millions of person-hours donated to research and development is nearly entirely evidence to contrary of your thesis. What is perhaps wasteful in this case is that under capitalism, those people developing software like the one that's allowing us to have this conversation, can't spend the effort they'd often like to.

Pretty much. SW is a very "hero's journey" story. Somewhere else in this thread, I posted this:

And although I would say that Andor is proof you can do cool things with a Star Wars background, at its heart SW is a conceptually fairly simple. Young person with the help of wise wizard and plucky band must master his powers to face down the evil tyrant. Now, is that the OG trilogy? Prequels? Sequels? LoTR? The Matrix?

That, but in a space samurai/western backdrop. Andor not only respects the canon, it explores it. Sure, it's not telling a hero's journey tale, but it's grabbing a piece of existing canon and enhancing it if anything.

This is where JJ I think fucked up with the Trek canon.

Although I do really like both of those and would probably put them at the top of the current generation of SW, they feel much less like SW properties and a lot more like they're wearing a SW skin. Which, you know, is fine since it's actually good and doesn't destroy the property. Even if you don't like Andor, they're still making a ton of just regular Star Wars shit.

JJ basically derailed Trek for those of us that actually like the type of thing Trek was doing for nearly a decade. Basically took until SNW to get an actual Trek show.

Honestly, just move away from it in the timeline. Legends canon has a a few thousand years to work with, and one of the funny bits about Star Wars is that even though the Old Republic and New Republic exist extremely far apart, the vibes and aesthetics are all fairly similar. And although I would say that Andor is proof you can do cool things with a Star Wars background, at its heart SW is a conceptually fairly simple. Young person with the help of wise wizard and plucky band must master his powers to face down the evil tyrant. Now, is that the OG trilogy? Prequels? Sequels? LoTR? The Matrix?

JJ at least got this part, the problem is you have to add enough flavor to the story that it doesn't feel like a complete rehash, which JJ failed at with TFA even if that was the closest the sequels got. No idea how Rian made it out of the pitch meeting, pretty clear he had no interest in making a SW movie, and basically just went "never mind all that" to TFA. And then JJ has to land the plane that was basically rebuilt into a railcar midair, and it went about as well as could be expected.

Home Assistant allows you to select the source, so I tend towards using that. There are other remote specific apps that allow similar.

This perspective is the one that is brought to you by late stage capitalism, and is pretty obviously unethical. The microscope didn't break, your company broke it. The hardware still works, it's still functional, your company breaking it because part of your business plan is planned obsolescence isn't even close to something we should tolerate, and especially in a climate conscience environment should be working really hard to do away with. This is also a relatively new phenomenon, right to repair didn't become a movement until companies started not only not supporting their products, but actively blocking attempts at support the products because of planned obsolescence and overpriced support contracts.

Which brings me to the other big problem with this comment. Everyone replying saying "no I wouldn't do that," including me, would probably absolutely do what you're saying in a lot of cases. This is again, just part of capitalism. Profit must always go up, we must always feed the beast. Cultural norms now dictate this, and you can find someone justifying even the worst shit in just about every thread because our brains are so broken by this.

Our laws should take account for this. No business model should trump basic ethics. People generally fall into this behavior. If you're outright designing it this way, please board the next rocket for the sun.

I don't know how we can't legislate this into existence eventually if nothing else just based on climate change and the amount of working material we just... throw away. Especially as more and more things integrate software, I imagine that it's going to feel absolutely insane to people in a few decades (after the water wars and the great migrations) that they had technology like the microscope in the post but the company decided no more software updates so now it's just garbage.

I think I found this in the Home Assistant forums, which are generally a great resource. I'd also warn that you might want to be careful going this route. It wasn't quite as straightforward as just popping the SSD in and installing an OS. IIRC, and I know I don't recall why, I had to DD a disk image to it. That said, there are lots of these thin clients all over ebay where it is literally that easy.

I have a feeling you "aged in to conservatism" because that's when you finally had money and humans are generally shit when it comes to "fuck you I got mine" but speaking as a millennial, that's just not happening. My generation's retirement plan is to die at our desks hopefully in a way that creates a lot of work for our bosses. Although on the less cynical side of things, I also tend to think that generally people are becoming more tolerant over time.

Slipping, but in the wise words of someone much smarter, "you all aren't ready for that, but your kids are going to love it."

I think it's already a disservice that we're allowing this to be the narrative. Biden is certainly no spring chicken, but he's nowhere close to "sun-downing" or "old man screaming at clouds" and this narrative only works because republicans are better at messaging by a mile, and Biden has and has had a stutter his entire life.

And though he's no where near progressive enough for my tastes, he's probably got the most progressive record of just about any modern president.

Tbh if we want to get somewhere, we'd stop letting Republican talking points turn into the framing for everyone else. The topic of Biden's age now dominates any discussion about him on either side, as if Trump isn't basically the same age, and actually frequently showing more and more real signs of senility, never mind the whole "criminal, rapist, insurrectionist, traitor using state secrets to curry favor."

Hiliary's loss can be chalked up to similar reasons, of course tossing in a hefty, heft dose of misogyny. We let RBF and "but her emails" turn into this mess.

Like, why are we doing far right republican's messaging for them?

Weed for sure, prostitution I think you underestimate just how puritanical this country is.

If you have money, I would recommend AppleTV, especially if you have an iPhone. It's by far the best platform in terms of not being solely an advertising vessel and sucking up your data, and integration with the iPhone even just out of the box is pretty great. That said, they're the most expensive by 2-3x.

Runner up is def Roku, which is much worse, but still pretty good.

And then there's me with a Fire TV, mostly because I buy them when they're $25 for the max fire stick config, and you can automate through the android debug mode. So when I want to use the device, I rarely use the main interface, which is extremely garbage.

Yeah, I explained this poorly. I do have a led strip on motion sensors that turns on with varying brightness depending on whether it's dark outside. The dimmer in this case is more for me and my wife to get ready in the morning. She's got makeup to do, so she needs to the light all the way up, I'm extremely not a morning person so I barely turn on the dimmer.

From me? Of course not. Unfortunately, I do live in society and do have to share my contact info with others, and I'm guessing the vast majority of people just spam the "okay" button as Facebook asks for contact access, mic access, camera access, access to your colon, etc.

Indeed. I've DIY'd all of that and then some, and especially in the age of YouTube in which you can find a hundred videos from electricians that have been around as long the light bulb, it's some of the simplest home repair/upgrade you can do. And although you do need to respect the inherent danger of working on currents like this, electrical is actually pretty easy to understand for the types of home upgrade/repair like this you might attempt.

Just be mindful of what you can and cannot do based on local regulations. You definitely don't want to have your house burn down and your home insurance tell you to kick rocks because there was a code violation somewhere, even if it didn't cause the fire.