drweevil

19 ms·

271.
by drweevil 2y ago
I would not recommend Player of Games to someone new to novels set in The Culture. Use of Weapons (or later novels) would be a better choice. (It's not essential to read them in publication order.) Possibly my favorite Iain M. Banks sc
272.
by drweevil 2y ago
lol, yeah. 4 years ago it would have been "It's a Block Chain Company Now".
273.
by drweevil 2y ago
Taxing the wealthy is not about raising revenue. It's about preventing oligarchy.
274.
by drweevil 2y ago
>"Over 20 years working in health insurance, I saw the unrelenting pressure investors put on insurers to spend less paying out claims." This is the root of the problem. And not just in this industry. Throughout corporate Americ
275.
by drweevil 2y ago
I agree with this. I've tried replacements. vscode(ium) was closest to giving me what I want, but in the end it really wasn't close. I always keep going back to Emacs, because I can do a lot of the little things that add up to a n
276.
by drweevil 2y ago
I totally get that. I played soccer. The exercise was incidental to my need to play with my friends and team-mates. When Father Time finally forced me to quit I had to go on anti-depressants. Soccer was my drug.
277.
by drweevil 2y ago
deBoer is spot on, as usual. As was Mark Twain, in that quote from "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court". It reminds me of my favorite quote on the matter: "It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are pu
278.
by drweevil 2y ago
"Count De Monet: I have come on the most urgent of business. It is said that the people are revolting! "King Louis: You said it; they stink on ice." As always, Mel Brooks captures the vibe perfectly.
279.
by drweevil 2y ago
"DENNIS Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system. ARTHUR Shut up! DENNIS Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! HELP! HELP! I'm being repressed!"
280.
by drweevil 2y ago
Same. I was in the Army. We started seeing CP/M computers with 8" floppies, Wang word processors, etc. So I bought an Atari 800 and cassette data recorder from the PX to start learning. No Internet then; so magazines like Byte, An
281.
by drweevil 2y ago
This. The cognitive dissonance is jarring. And no "that's different!" is no argument. Like it or not, our government leads by example. And the example is not a good one.
282.
by drweevil 2y ago
>"An appeal means coaxing your doctor and staff to spend hours filling out forms and making repeated phone calls to joust with an insurance company employee." The hospital where I receive my cancer treatments once told me &quot
283.
by drweevil 2y ago
Another good book on this, covering the CIA's part in this history is David Talbot's The Devil's Chessboard. Talbot's coverage of the '54 coup was particularly gripping, and very depressing.
284.
by drweevil 2y ago
(In Dr. Strangelove voice) "Of course, the whole point of a ghost gun is lost if you keep it!" Seriously tho, the fact that he went to the trouble of obtaining one shows that he gave that some thought. But then didn't follow
285.
by drweevil 2y ago
Depends on what you're asking your body to do. I played soccer pretty intensely when I was younger. The timeline went something like this: late teens to mid thirties, top physical form mid thirties, losing the proverbial step (pros ret
286.
by drweevil 2y ago
Even then he might have escaped further notice if he'd ditched all the incriminating stuff. It's one thing to kind'a look like a guy in a low-quality pic; it's quite another to have the cops checking you out find all you
287.
by drweevil 2y ago
Nope. It's the companies. https://www.bitecode.dev/p/there-is-no-eu-cookie-banner-law
288.
by drweevil 2y ago
This is a canonical example of an establishment media outlet steering (misdirecting?) the conversation into more "acceptable" directions. "The killing of a human being is morally repugnant — full stop." Yup. But this ind
289.
by drweevil 2y ago
Not to mention that "the work involved in co-operating and communicating across the interface has to be added", which takes on new meaning and magnitude when one considers the energy requirements of LLMs.
290.
by drweevil 2y ago
>"The sometimes celebratory attitude of such a broad swath of Americans on Wednesday felt like an embrace of that same sort of nihilism." I couldn't disagree more with this facile comparison. The thing is, we all are som
291.
by drweevil 2y ago
Aidan Irwin — AI lol. Not sure the writer twigged that.
292.
by drweevil 2y ago
We'll talk about everything and anything but the elephant in the room, the one thing that makes this society mean: Capitalism. The language of capitalism is the language of competition, of winning and losing, of climbing ladders, of hi
293.
by drweevil 2y ago
Indeed. And even if it was a Scheme, it would be a Lisp. All Schemes are Lisps, not all Lisps are Schemes.
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by drweevil 2y ago
TL;DR people don't understand the dangers. They grossly underestimate the complexity and fragility of our current global supply chain and they especially underestimate their dependence on it. A major world conflict would make it diffic
295.
by drweevil 2y ago
"Stricter rules and punishments over campus protests seem to be working." Working to do what? Enforce group-think? Even when it is in the service of enabling genocide? What interesting times we live in.
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by drweevil 2y ago
On reading the incident report it becomes apparent that the flight display system contributed significantly to this incident, not just in failing, but also by its design. It reminds me a lot of the collision incidents in the Sea of Japan, w
297.
by drweevil 2y ago
I should make clear that corroboration from independent sources seems to be the only foolproof way of validating an image. Today, AIs will give us people with 6 fingers, unnaturally shiny cars, etc. And we can still rely of those cues. But
298.
by drweevil 2y ago
Clicking through to the Social Warming post is well worthwhile. When dealing with AI slop it is important to understand that proclaiming something as Fake without knowing it is just as bad as the other way around. The author of that post ex
299.
by drweevil 2y ago
True enough, but it makes searching (on HN, Google, etc.) a PITA.
300.
by drweevil 2y ago
Or the AI guys could respect the namespace and call it LRA, a la RAG. What's next, WiFI?

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