LinuxAmbulance

Modern architecture ideology is hilarious from an outsider's perspective.

But modern architecture being bland and non-decorative? You can lay the majority of the blame for that on building owners.

My partner works for a building engineering firm that is hired by architects and building owners, and we both are not fond of modern architectural trends and have discussed it at length.

In short, buildings have two scenarios - one, the person or company paying for the building plans on keeping it over the next decade plus, or two, the buyer plans on flipping the building as soon as possible.

In the first case, and extremely so in the second, buyers are entirely without taste and despise spending any money that they don't absolutely have to. The desire to min/max buildings has led to function over form to the point of nearly ignoring form.

"Cheap" is the top priority, followed closely by "inoffensive to the people we want to rent this to / flip this to". This results in cheap, low effort facades and an absolute minimum of permanent decorative elements.

Buildings are seen as short term (10 years or less) consumable items, and nothing endures long enough to make it seem worthwhile to buyers to put any money towards design excellence.

That's very helpful, thanks! The KOreader UI is... Rough.

Love all the options, especially the ability to use folders on the device storage as the primary way to organize my books, but trying to figure out where a setting is and change it has been frustrating from the first day I installed it.

Will give the Zen UI plugin a go. Does it still support the on-device folders as the main way to navigate through your books?

The irony is not lost on me!

Is there a particular structure to it, or just whatever is at the top of your mind?

> I found it interesting that not even this article thinks about it that the US mainland ever can be attacked

It can be, but it would be very, very difficult for anything short of lobbing ICBMs around. You'd have to have a fleet of ships that would be detected as soon as they set sail, and then protect that fleet for the entire voyage, which would also be extremely difficult for any adversary.

Getting boots on US soil would be even tougher.

Drones are an option, but cross-ocean ones are not an easy problem to solve.

What are the odds of this passing successfully?

A grim day for 3D printing if so.

Was not expecting anything terribly useful from this with such a generic title, was pleasantly surprised.

We abrogated getting traffic to our websites to Google long ago. Mostly because Google was so good at it that the alternatives became significantly less useful.

Now that Google is focusing on becoming 'self contained', so to speak, we should find a better way to drive traffic to websites. Ideally one that's not under the control of a single corporation.

Anyone miss StumbleUpon?

That is a pretty strong argument for Go!

> Need to lay off 10% of staff because you think the workers are getting too good of a deal? AI.

I think we're seeing a ton of that right now, and it's not slowing down any time soon it seems.

AI has made my work about 5-8x quicker, just because I'm able to have it cover a lot of the grunt work (update 42 if statements in 32 different files) that took time, but no particular skill.

I think the use cases where AI makes an economic improvement to the status quo for a business are rare, but they do exist, and they can be a significant improvement.

It's like the early days of the dotcom boom and bust - people thought the internet was good for every use case under the sun, including shipping people a single candy bar at a loss. After the dotcom bust, a lot of that went by the wayside, but there was a tremendous economic advantage to the businesses that were more useful when available on the internet.

The problem is running a SaaS product costs a lot of money.

Mega corps can fund that, but even large numbers of devs on small budgets don't have the money to do the same.

So any commercial project will inevitably trend towards supporting the interests of mega corps over the average person.

I think that's incredibly optimistic to the point of unrealism.

Github, outages and all, is a known commodity with a reputation they can make money off of.

Any replacement would have to offer not just compelling feature improvements and uptime, but to have a history long enough to make it trustworthy to migrate to.

And uptime? Easy when you have a small number of customers. Much, much more difficult at a million+ customers (although Microsoft has really dropped the ball).

Github is an ecosystem and its biggest moat is the number of people that use it.

To make a replacement, not only do you have to improve on support for every major use case at a technical level (no easy task, to put it mildly), you also have to make it so compelling to use that Github users will abandon Github en masse.

Someone with an LLM assisted IDE has the theoretical potential to improve on all major Github features. But to make their replacement compelling enough to get folks to leave Github? Not a chance.