Willfully blind. Eastman Kodak invented the first digital camera in 1975, but decided to focus on their existing, profitable product lines. Clayton Christensen describes the process in The Innovator’s Dilemma.

So get to it.

I love how people seem to think that “the economy” or “politics” is the same type of thing as sports— a recreational activity with no actual bearing on anything that other people pay attention to as a diversion. It explains so much about how we ended up here.

What’s insane is expecting every individual to be person to know enough about financial asset classes to know how to balance risks in their portfolio, when we used to have pension plans with subject-matter experts whose job it was to do that. Getting rid of them was like throwing everybody overboard from the cruise ship (pension), but giving them a life jacket (401k).

I mean, it makes sense when you know that the decision was made by the sharks.

Where is the left complaining about shrinking 401k accounts? Do you mean Democrats? They’re a center-right party.

I have a couple of suggestions to add:

I was considering leaving the other site before the API fiasco because it felt like so many users approach engagement as rhetorical combat, that is, the point of discussion is to defeat the other person. Instead, think one of Covey’s habits of highly-effective people: “Win-win, or no deal.” Approach discussion on the Fediverse as a collaborative act, in which you’re exchanging ideas with another person. Even if you disagree, you can both win by respectfully hearing out the other person. And if the other person won’t collaborate? No deal! Just disengage.

Just like in intimate relationship, use “I” statements instead of “you” statements. Telling people who they are and what they believe is not only disrespectful, but probably wrong, often exaggerated or distorted for rhetorical combat purposes. People get angry when their identity gets poked at. One exception, of course, is when giving advice, like, stick to what you know, and share your thoughts and your reactions to a topic.

It’s time to move past the salt. For one, it’s not helpful now, and it’s also not even true. There weren’t enough protest voters to affect the outcome. Worse, the latest information I’ve heard from Democratic Party analysts is that his margin of victory would’ve been higher if more people had voted.

One that Linux should’ve had 30 years ago is a standard, fully-featured dynamic library system. Its shared libraries are more akin to static libraries, just linked at runtime by ld.so instead of ld. That means that executables are tied to particular versions of shared libraries, and all of them must be present for the executable to load, leading to the dependecy hell that package managers were developed, in part, to address. The dynamically-loaded libraries that exist are generally non-standard plug-in systems.

A proper dynamic library system (like in Darwin) would allow libraries to declare what API level they’re backwards-compatible with, so new versions don’t necessarily break old executables. (It would ensure ABI compatibility, of course.) It would also allow processes to start running even if libraries declared by the program as optional weren’t present, allowing programs to drop certain features gracefully, so we wouldn’t need different executable versions of the same programs with different library support compiled in. If it were standard, compilers could more easily provide integrated language support for the system, too.

Dependency hell was one of the main obstacles to packaging Linux applications for years, until Flatpak, Snap, etc. came along to brute-force away the issue by just piling everything the application needs into a giant blob.

Believe as you wish, but if a person works for a boss that they know to be a sex trafficker, doing things sex-trafficking-adjacent, or at least illegal, for him, that’s good enough for me to declare that person a sex-trafficking POS.

Also, I don’t think for a microsecond that goons given this kind of power and impunity over detainees are going to refrain from sexual assault. We just haven’t heard about it yet (this time).

But, well, pick your lane.

It’s the same principle as what you call 9 people at a table with a Nazi. These agents deserve no nuance.

Well, President Musk has been accused of helping Epstein’s trafficking, we know for sure that his Oval Office puppet was involved.

Well, you did out yourself.

Assuming they’re federal agents, then yes.

We got a Nazi here.

In about 2018, I think, a team of researchers put together a mathematical model of how markets work. What they found is that wealth just naturally accumulates to a few people. It’s inherent to how markets work, and it’s more or less at random; in their simulation runs, every person started out in an equal position.

It’s all luck. It doesn’t even take being in the right place at the right time, although that helps. Since us humans operate on narratives and just-world fallacies, it’s really easy for us to construct a post hoc story about why a certain billionaire succeeded. But it’s all luck.

(I remember that I read about this research in Scientific American, but I don’t have the link handy.)

What I know from publicly-confirmed information: Tesla (hence Musk) have access to the camera feeds, GPS location, remote unlock, remote control of the driving at least sufficient to back the car out of a parking stall to facilitate repossession, and, of course, remote software update. The latter could provide full remote access to everything through new software.

Is there anybody who’s done the analysis on his bad it will be? California’s online tracker shows right now that nearly every major reservoir in the state is above the historical average level for March 15th. The system as a whole is at over 78% of capacity. The news stories that I found put the releases at of 2.2 billion gallons, which is not much. (The lake near me contains about 133 billion gallons.) They were from Lake Kaweah and Lake Success, both reservoirs which primarily serve flood-control functions.

I love the critical mass metaphor for Lemmy. Posts and comments are the neutrons that knock free other posts and comments after reaching other people. If we spread out our fissile material into hundreds of tiny pails, then the neutrons just fly away into the air without having any effect.

Yesterday was the first day that Lemmy activity tipped over the threshold, and there were too many overnight posts for me to read all of them over breakfast.

If only they weren’t making it so easy.