Just like BLM, it’s convenient to the authors of the propaganda if you believe the entire city is a Thunderdome style madhouse. In fact, it’s convenient for them if you paint entire states or even whole regions with a broad brush, so you can dehumanize millions of your countrymen. Actually, consider any type of unity with your fellow humans to be sketchy, except for going to the same church, buying the same brand, and working for the same company (no unions though!)

I’ve moved a lot and over the years I’ve lived in basically every part of the USA excluding New England. It’s crazy the provincial opinions people have about the other regions and people, when in many cases you could make it a weekend trip to visit and see that no, you won’t die immediately and yes, most people are just living their lives.

Yep, there’s a term for this actually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-band_signaling

It looks horrific to me. Like a film prop from Cronenberg or Lynch. I think it’s the mix of mechanical motion, a material that reminds me of Jean Jacket’s stomach from Nope, and a structure like a severely prolapsed rectum. No way could I get off in this thing.

I can’t see the pics, but in my house the condensate drain comes out of the pan into a T. The T is vertical. The top branch is the clean-out and is capped off (but not glued). The bottom branch goes to a trap, and then the rest of the drain. So the trap is at the top.

Is this PVC? It really can’t be snaked? Compressed air? Personally before I replumbed the whole thing I would cut a straight section, clean it out, then put a coupler back to fix the cut.

If people want to fart around with ffmpeg filters this site is great: https://ffmpeg.lav.io/

It would be hilarious if incompetence leads to a bunch of this being stolen, so they fork the blockchain into FreedomBurgerCoin. Maybe it happens a few times. I can’t wait to bribe my way through checkpoints by sending the cops a couple FreedomBurgerCoin5_final_final. Using X of course.

Fwiw I’ve done contract work and I didn’t need to be a sole proprietor or an LLC or a passthrough or anything, they just 1099’d me and I paid my own quarterly estimated taxes to the federal govt and my state of residence. I have seen places where you need to be an LLC and submit bids and all that, but that was company policy not a tax law.

Maya and Motionbuilder run on Linux, but that happened before they were hoovered up by the monster. Autodesk just ignores that part of their portfolio. I know a few people who work/have worked on the Maya team and they’re talented, passionate devs, but management just doesn’t give a fuck about Media & Entertainment when Autocad and Revit are making so much money.

This is probably just because it’s DC. The rules get really muddy there. For a long time the highest elected position in DC was head of the school board, and even though ostensibly there’s “home rule” now, Congress still loves to punish the local populace by overriding anything they think scores points with their base back in Idaho. If you get convicted of a felony in DC you actually get transferred to federal prison.

Was also on Trump’s legal team for the classified documents scandal and defended the war criminal Navy seal. All these guys are like shits that won’t flush.

Let’s make sure we give it to billions of livestock that we a cram into dank and filthy oubliettes. Then we can make then danker and crammier.

It would be nice if our jobs programs were like the CCC instead of security theater like the TSA, “Homeland Security”, or whatever this is. At least then, at the end of it, we would have a bunch of roads, railways, bridges, housing, canals, etc instead of trillions of dollars in circuit boards and machined aluminum rotting in a missile silo.

If you can find it, I keep a small bag of straight-up wheat gluten and I add a spoonful or two when I want to make stronger flour. A small bag lasts forever and a little goes a long way.

It’s not just tech. Gardening, DIY, cooking, and similar popular subjects have been completely destroyed by this crap. If I see an AI generated header image or thumbnail I immediately backpedal now because I assume that means the text is bullshit too.

The example stuck in my memory now is when I was trying to read about watermelon growing times and the article said they flower a week after germination.There’s now frequently this, “oh GOD DAMN IT *close tab*” moment when you realize it’s actually total slop. Like, “oh so this article is BULLSHIT bullshit.”

I see it as the continuation of a very old problem. Old school engineering didn’t have any standards until a bunch of people died over and over and the public demanded change. The railroads, construction tycoons, factory owners, mine operators etc all bitterly fought, and still fight, engineering safety requirements. Computer industries have continued this. They all oppose public action, hide negative information, and try to pin blame for conspicuous failures on individuals rather than systemic rot.

I think also because of the relatively less visceral nature of software catastrophes we don’t have a culture of safety. That’s not to say software errors can’t cause horrific accidents but the power grid going down and causing a dozen people in the service area to die is less traumatic than a bridge collapsing and sending a dozen people into an icy river. That’s an extreme example but my point is that humans undervalue harms that are seen as less acutely, physically brutal and software just seems more abstract.

Most of us aren’t working on power grid either, so when you start trying to quantify our software’s risks you have to speak to “harms” rather than just crimes like negligence, and then you expose this huge contradiction about how responsibility is allocated socially. Like, not only should engineers, pilots, and doctors have higher responsibility to prevent harm, but so should cops, journalists, politicians, billionaires, etc.

So the risks are undervalued and both intentionally and unconsciously minimized. The result is most of us who’ve seen the inside are quietly horrified and that’s the end of it.

I don’t know what the answer is except unignorable tragedies because that seems to be the only thing powerful enough to build regulations which are constantly being eroded.

I’m not really into audiobooks, but my mom is, and she’s lent/given me a couple. I think, for her, having a good voice actor is at least half of the experience, at least when she describes her favorite books half of her praise is for the actor.

Having listened to her favorites I can confirm the actors are really good. They are true professionals, far beyond what AI can do. AI can do commercial voiceovers, where there is purposely a single-note, unevocative tone. How can it do a shift in emotion across a line of dialogue as a character has a revelation? Or a slow change in personality as a character goes insane? Or slightly modify their voice as an angry, drunk father finally realizes he is pushing his daughter away, or his voice cracks when he knows the treatment is hopeless, or drops his guard when he remembers his old friend he didn’t recognize? Etc. Even the pauses can communicate volumes.

This is the emotional landscape actors excel at navigating but tech bros aren’t even aware of because of their terrible media literacy. So even if some “prompt engineer” was babysitting the AI it wouldn’t be nearly as good. Basically, just saying the words is only half the actors skill, they are great at analysis also.

Seems like basically every company is covering up crimes that happen on their properties, and lots of those are sex crimes. I have no data, just anecdotally it’s been almost every company I’ve ever worked for and the experience of virtually every woman I’ve known well enough to talk candidly about this shit. I’m not talking about “nice ass” comments either, I’m talking like, “blow me or you’re fired” type shit.

Not an excuse for Ubisoft, but it’s kind of like how Covid is now endemic so we’re like “oh well”. This disease is so common we apparently don’t give a shit. There was a brief window of hope with “Me Too” but then reactionaries shut that down.

I found the original blog post more educational.

Looks like these may be typosquats, or at least “namespace obfuscation”, imitating more popular packages. So hopefully not too widespread. I think it’s easy to just search for a package name and copy/paste the first .git files, but it’s important to look at forks/stars/issue numbers too. Maybe I’m just paranoid but I always creep on the owners of git repos a little before I include their stuff, but I can’t say I do that for their includes and those includes etc. Like if this was included in hugo or something huge I would just be fucked.

The baby boom in the USA was a real demographic phenomenon but every “generation” after that gets fuzzier to the point where its now just rage bait nonsense or just a proxy term for complaining about changing fashions. Even within the Boomer cohort people had wildly different experiences growing up across such a large span. That said, every game studio I ever worked for was run by Gen X and Boomer aged people.

When they started in the industry it was small teams, tight budgets, a new frontier with a low bar to entry. Now it is highly corporate, capitalized, shareholder driven behemoth (like everything else). This transform happened when the millennial cohort was in our 20s, we had no influence on this, and it mirrored similar larger-scale transformations in the rest of society.

I’m fortunate in that I basically retired early, although I wouldn’t mind going back to work with a good group of people, even for cheap. Like the old days again. I still like the work I just hate the business. But it doesn’t matter, the whole industry is in ruins now.

I worked in a place where you dialed in to the PA system, and NOT using your finger to hang up was a rookie move, since the rattling of the receiver was deafening over the speakers. Definitely worse to use a sensor.