nfh

It’s not that there wasn’t any political pressure. It’s that the slightest bit of pressure caused them to pull the plug swiftly.

I think the companies who were led by people personally antagonistic to DEI already weren’t doing it. They started it when the political winds were in favor of DEI, found that it did something beneficial for them that was worth the investment (ultimately, increasing profits, probably through PR) and reaped what they could. But the slightest headwinds caused them to drop it, for lack of confidence it would be worth the continued investment. For others, it was beneficial enough this pressure didn’t change their decisions.

None of this is likely coming from company leaders caring about DEI for some sort of principled reason, just companies who care about only one thing, reassessing the value of DEI in terms of that one thing, $ return on spend. This is a group who needs subtler treatment than the anti-DEI crowd, this is fair weather friends who don’t care. What little we can do is reward those who don’t give in to the slightest push.

The way Java is practically written, most of the overhead (read: inefficient slowdown) happens on load time, rather than in the middle of execution. The amount of speedup in hardware since the early 2000s has also definitely made programmers less worried about smaller inefficiencies.

Languages like Python or JavaScript have a lot more overhead while they’re running, and are less well-suited to running a server that needs to respond quickly, but certainly can do the job well enough, if a bit worse compared to something like Java/C++/Rust. I suspect this is basically what they meant by Java being well-suited.

I’ve been using Cinnamon for most of the last decade, but switched to Gnome3 recently, heavily customized to work like Cinnamon. Basically because Wayland is finally stable enough to use.

If Cinnamon gets Wayland support working well, that’s my choice. Otherwise I’ve got some Gnome3 configs that make it work pretty well, and I’d happily run it into the ground too.

two billionaires, unfathomably rich individuals, in the last ten years that having a good public image was overrated, but decided they’d rather use their platform to hurt people, and alienate anyone who liked them, but wasn’t a raging bigot. is the allure of being mean to people on twitter.com that great?

if Musk had shut up just 5 years ago, he’d probably have more money, more respect, but somewhat less power. instead he’s become the guy a lot of people are excited to see have a total breakdown, and hopefully lose everything.

There’s an important distinction here: “is a good idea” is not “is the right way to do it”. You can also keep kids off of dating apps by banning dating apps, banning children from the Internet, or even just banning children. All of those are horrible solutions, but they achieve the goal.

The goal should be to balance protecting kids with minimizing collateral damage. Forcing adults to hand over significant amounts of private data to prove their identity has the same basic fault as the hyperbolic examples, that it disregards the collateral damage side of the equation.

It’s all about the implementation. The Washington bill is treating diet products as similar to alcohol (check ID in-store and on delivery), which seems fine to me.

The NY law seems to be suggesting that dating app services need to collect (and possibly retain) sensitive information on people, like identification, location data. That’s troubling to me.

Am American, please keep it up.

I think I basically agree with you and the author here. People applying technology have a responsibility to apply it in ways that are constructive, not harmful. Technology is a force multiplier, in that it makes it easy to achieve goals, in a value neutral sense.

But way too many people are applying technology in evil ways, extracting value instead of creating it, making things worse rather than better. It’s an epidemic. Tech can make things better, and theoretically it should, but lately, it’s hard to say it has, on the net.

n a normal administration I think you’re right, but this isn’t a normal administration. Officials who take an oath are sworn to uphold the constitution, not to follow orders from the president. Soldiers have a duty to disobey illegal orders, and DOJ attorneys have similar traditions.

If the president and top Justice department officials are knowingly and repeatedly ordering them to take actions that are clearly illegal, and are publicly known to be doing so… they’re not whistleblowers, they’re conscientious objectors to a criminal enterprise being run openly by public officials.

But how many of them do you think put it away within a week of using it to make content? I would bet the ratio of people who possess one to people who will be disappointed is huge, assuming there are in fact disappointed users.

You need to qualify for membership in the UK?

As an American, It’s the cheapest place to get a variety of fruits, veggies, several types of cheese, coffee, and toilet paper, at least on average. The catch is just that you need to buy in large quantities. They definitely have fancy and expensive brands too, but I don’t think they do as well here. They’re also a really popular place to fuel up cars, because they’re usually cheaper than the area around them, but sometimes up to 10% cheaper.

I guess that you need to drive a car there is also a catch, but I just moved to the second place I’ve ever lived that’s within reasonable walking distance of a grocery store, so driving to get groceries is normal to me. I lived near an Aldi for a few years, which was awesome.

Homeopathy convinces people to take a mixture that has no active ingredient instead of one that can affect what they’re sick with. If it’s a cold, eh whatever. If it’s cancer, that’s incredibly dangerous.

It’s just like TikTok, but if you don’t drink milk in your tea, you will be exposed to corrective content as needed

You call it the External Revenue Service despite the fact that American consumers are obviously going to pay for it?

I think you and the person you’re responding to both have a point. They’re totally passing the buck to their users, but their users will probably be better at putting accurate information than they are. It’s a different set of problems to be sure, but I think it’s a preferable one

I like the idea that Fuentes saw a coincidence, decided to play it up, by cosplaying as a dude with a crossbow who was actually in his neighborhood, standing threateningly on his own porch, to play a victim because he didn’t get to be one in real life.

Even if it didn’t transpire that way, it’s funny how it totally fits.

The report exists, but it has so many errors, misinterpreting its own data to bend to the conclusions its authors decided they wanted to find, lots of cherry picking, and ignoring any fact inconvenient to its conclusions.

Imagine a paper that concludes that dowsing or homeopathy is good science. It’s about that accurate.

More of an inverse causation, but the helpfulness of certain autistic traits in scientific fields does mean that in a sense, autism causes vaccines.

I wouldn’t doubt companies would use it any place it’s not enforceable, and at least attempt to collect.

I’m not sure the nuances of it, other than having talked to a couple of people who were in that situation, talked to an attorney, and ended up paying. I would suspect having a valid reason like sexual harassment wouldn’t affect if it’s enforceable per se, but give you a lot of leverage to convince a company it isn’t worth pressing the issue.

No, they’re actually pretty common in certain industries, and definitely enforceable, at least for sure within the state of California. If you sign a contract that says you get a certain amount of money for starting a job, contingent on working for them a certain length of time, that’s typically paid out on day 1, but you have to pay it back if you leave early.