Meta should probably never be blamed for innovating when all they do is steal ideas from potential competitors and crudely duct tape them onto existing products. Instagram was once a useful, good app and now it’s 80% features from Snapchat and TikTok and you maybe see a friend’s post a week late.

I think it should be 16 or so. If you can wreck my car, you should be able to vote.

Multiple electronics stores caught on fire. I doubt Mossad found a specific box that said “To: terrorists” on it and only rigged those pagers. They just don’t care about killing civilians.

It’s because they don’t use the same wireless networks as phones and have like a 96h battery life. That’s why hospitals give them to doctors. And plenty of people still use walkie-talkies because they work (within a certain range) even when nothing else does.

Also, the pager companies are still in business mostly because of the pucks you get at a restaurant that buzz when your table or food is ready. “Obsolete” tech that’s dirt cheap can sometimes hang around for niche use cases.

Because the U.S. government gave them $6.6 billion to do it under the CHIPS Act: https://www.reuters.com/technology/tsmc-wins-66-bln-us-subsidy-arizona-chip-production-2024-04-08/

With TSMC, it’s insurance against China invading Taiwan but Intel (and probably everyone else) got a load of subsidies too. After the chip shortage during the pandemic and Russia invading Ukraine, chip production became a national security issue.

I know that sentence seems absurdly light but it’s important to remember that in England, there’s a lot of precedent for rich perverts being treated differently. It’s a major part of their history, second only to paying those perverts rent with eels.

We lived in a house where the previous owners had it exorcised and I’ve never slept better. I’d take living in a cursed/haunted house over a shitty roommate any day.

I had my suspicions before but the moment I realized for certain Elon Musk couldn’t run a software company was when he judged people by lines of code written.

You make a good point about using it for documentation and learning. That’s a pretty good use case. I just wouldn’t want young developers to use it for code completion any more than I’d want college sophomores to use it for writing essays. Professors don’t have you write essays because they like reading essays. Sometimes, doing a task manually is the point of the assignment.

If I was still in a senior dev position, I’d ban AI code assistants for anyone with less than around 10 years experience. It’s a time saver if you can read code almost as fluently as you can read your own native language but even besides the A.I. code introducing bugs, it’s often not the most efficient way. It’s only useful if you can tell that at a glance and reject its suggestions as much as you accept them.

Which, honestly, is how I was when I was first starting out as a developer. I thought I was hot shit and contributing and I was taking half a day to do tasks an experienced developer could do in minutes. Generative AI is a new developer: irrationally confident, not actually saving time, and rarely doing things the best way.

As there’s no responses, I’ll offer that my friends’ kids in dense parts of NYC, LA, SF, DC, etc. do all those activities. (Maybe the ones in LA don’t go sit by the LA “river.”) There’s usually loads of neighborhood parks and less formal places in cities where kids play (like playing soccer in an alley). And I know my friends in urban centers have their kids in just as many organized sports leagues as my friends who live in the suburbs. (It might actually be easier on the parents in the cities because my suburban friends are like youth sports taxi services every weekend whereas the ones in NYC have enough population density where the league is in the neighborhood.)

So, my impression (from the parents’ childless friend’s side) is that kids, like Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs, find a way. They’ll play hide and seek in a desert and try to hide behind tumbleweeds.

Again, sorry if I’m talking out of turn but this is Lemmy and there were no responses yet so I thought I’d toss in what I’ve seen as an adult. Gotta feed the content maw until the Fediverse grows up to be an uncontrollable beast.

Is there a UK Lawyers group for every place the UK’s colonial legacy has resulted in seemingly endless conflicts or just Israel?

Anything Elon Musk can track is probably a security risk until he stops being the most divorced person to ever exist.

Laziness is the number one skill anyone innovative should have. Whoever invented the wheel definitely didn’t do it because they liked work. It was because they hated it knew there had to be a better way.

So, what we really need is lazier inventors. Only then will we get lazier robots.

Dude, I love China and its people and have been there several times. I obviously don’t approve of everything but some of the funniest, most kindhearted people on Earth are in China. I’m not sure there’s a place on Earth I’d rather have a meal with some regular citizens.

But just follow The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Taipei can be wrong too. But those laws took like centuries of stupid wars and, ultimately, diplomacy, to establish. Even if you want to change them, it’ll require diplomacy and cooperation, not hosing down some Filipino fishermen.

This is ancient history and will probably make me sound older than dirt but when Ubuntu first came out, it felt so easy to install and use. I don’t know that any of the innovations were wholly theirs as other distros were trying the same stuff. But it was the first distro I used that really tried to make it all easy and it felt like a complete OS.

Fedora Core was doing the same stuff and now, we have tons of tools but whether you like it today or not, the early Ubuntu releases were like, “Holy shit. I can partition from the Live CD? What is this witchcraft?” Debian obviously was the core project but little niceties were rare on Linux back then. I did want to install multimedia codecs when I was a teen. I did need guidance and documentation.

Not defending Snaps or whatever here but early Ubuntu was user-friendly and made it easy to transition off Windows ME or whatever was dominant and shitty back then.

A separate shoutout to Chrunchbang for customization and minimalism. That was probably the distro that got me hardcore hooked on Linux. I had enough experience at that point to not need hand holding but it was cool out of the box.

I don’t care what his background is, if a guy who looks like Boris Johnson tried to sell me uranium, I’d call security and ask how he got into the building.

Maybe add a spoiler alert next time. Jeez.

I’ll never forget during COVID when I learned Denmark had more mink than people and had to do a cull and it went very poorly. I assumed Denmark was a pretty normal place and then one day, they were like, “OK, so we have 17 million mink.” Like, what the fuck?

It was like finding out your seemingly most normal friend runs a Pokémon card funded crime syndicate that smuggles mini ponies or something where you’re like, “I’m not mad yet. I’m confused. But I reserve the right to be mad. What were you doing with 17 million mink?”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Danish_mink_cull

Yep. Thanks for catching that. I meant NIH, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and accidentally combined it with HHS (the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services that NIH is an agency within) and that was apparently too many acronyms.