TheOperator

Joined 7 years ago

Karma
1,061
Submissions
454
Member since
Jan 11
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Recent submissions

Comment · 5 years ago
Buying Microsoft for it's OS and Apple for it's hardware? What is this opposite day?
Comment · 5 years ago
Silicon Valley is infamous at this point for running loss leaders to lock people into their ecosystem with the expectation of being able to milk people dry later. The fact that the services are "worth the money" doesn't mean it's economically in China's interests to allow for easy access to them.
Comment · 5 years ago
An IP based economy just on its face seems like such a laughable house of cards. So your economy is based on government enforced imaginary rights to ideas? The proliferation of tax havens should be a sign that the system is bullshit - it exposes how little is actually keeping the profits of IP endeavors within a nation.

There is incredibly little respect for the society owning the means of production in a tangible real sense, instead we have economies that run on intangibles, where the intangibles allow 600lb gorillas like Oracle to engage in much rent seeking while simultaneously avoiding paying dues to the precise body that granted them their imaginary rights. The entire status quo feels like something some rich tycoons dreamed up to sell to the public the merits of systematically weakening their negotiating position on the promise that one day a Bernie Sanders type would descend from the heavens and deliver universal basic income fueled by the efficiency of private industry through nothing but incorruptability and force of personality.

China seems to be successful in part because they have no qualms with flexing dictatorial power to increase the leverage of the state itself. This may be less economically efficient but it means they actually get to harvest the fruits of any efficiency. Intellectual property law? They just ignore it and don't get punished, since punishing them would be anti-trade.

Comment · 5 years ago
The point wouldn't be to sell laptops.
Comment · 5 years ago
This article was eye rollingly heavy on moralizing ultimately to only eventually hit on the point that what the algorithms are measuring is the odds somebody will be convicted and not the odds somebody does illegal things. Appearance is known to dramatically affect your chances at trial.
Comment · 5 years ago
I know exactly what he's talking about as somebody who ran a win7 and Linux VM on a 4gb MBA. I had to be incredibly choosy about what I kept open at any given time or my system would keel over. It enforced discipline that I just didn't have normally which helped keep me organized.
Comment · 5 years ago
I have made one complaint about signal in my entire life after the outage hit 9 hours. They did fail. It's just an inconvenient truth thus the character assassination and apologism.
Comment · 5 years ago
Yup they're already under 99.9% reliability for the year. Never mind WhatsApp this makes them a questionable replacement for SMS. Not only "was" it a disaster for signal the disaster isn't over.

Reliability is more important than privacy for messaging most of the time. Some major balls are being dropped here.

Comment · 5 years ago
Go back to WhatsApp. Signal is crashing because it appearantly went up 5x in userbase. I can't guarantee any other service would cope with such a rapid expansion of their userbase other than WhatsApp.

Or stick it out a little and sms people.

Comment · 5 years ago
For me what made me give in was realising how useful the features would be in regards to ADHD, allowing for a new input modality that just straight up reduces the friction it takes for me to set a reminder.

It's routine that I will just leave an item and forget where it is several times a day that I take it almost for granted up until it causes me to be late going out the door. Now I can yell "Find my phone" (or wallet, keys, etc) and my phone is there. Yes I could go to my computer, go to the find my phone page, but there's just more friction and these issues happen to me all the time. The more things I link up to voice control, the more options I have in regards to accomplish a task, and sometimes voice is the most efficient means of going about it.

I can get entertainment like a podcast or music without a single screen being involved, which given that I inherently have low impulse control, is a nice separation of things. Or I can again, find my stuff without looking at any screens. Voice input can act as a lesser evil to screens.

Saying to just use FOSS and air gaps, because of how immature such solutions are, is effectively saying you shouldn't use these systems at all. The benefits of using the systems that exist today makes it so that the average person, like yourself, judge me less because I appear more punctual and less forgetful and more productive and better rested and so on. Being human, you are likely to disrespect me for being late and disorganized no matter what my excuse is, whereas you'll only disrespect me for using voice assistants if you know I'm using them, so it's a winning tradeoff. Just like how some will judge me for taking medication but only if they know I'm using it.

Comment · 5 years ago
I just think that rating the interpretation of what Trump meant, as equally valid to the literal truth of what Trump said, is veering right into the territory of "Alternative facts". How we felt about what Trump said has become just as important as what Trump actually said. His supporters can overlook that what he says is BS and can just focus on "What he meant", and his opponents can ignore that he didn't say something and condemn him for "what he meant".

It all feels very post-truth to me and seeing a fact checker endorse this sort of view is absolutely depressing in a way. These are institutions of which there is broad support for making the arbiters of truth on social media for whom truth is subject to subjective interpretation. In which case what's the point of fact checking at all?

Comment · 5 years ago
I don't read his post as pointing the finger at all Republicans. I see it more targeted at people like Cruz who refused to even Certify Biden for President. I doubt he's saying Pence who was notably outspoken in his support of certifying Biden and had violent threats against him as a result is who he's talking about just because he's a Republican.
Comment · 5 years ago
How would one prove that Trump knew they would do this? The vast majority of "reasonable persons" sure didn't expect this to happen despite hearing Trumps rhetoric around this. Most people were completely shocked.

I think there is plenty of room for Trump to get blamed here even if we give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he didn't expect this to happen. He was droning on about how the election was stolen from him on twitter as people were dying. He riled people up over his horsecrap sore loser claims and people died as a result.

Comment · 5 years ago
Not really. They said it was sort of yes and no because he said “you have to show strength” and “demand that Congress do the right thing”. No those are not telling people to storm congress, in the context of what he was saying before, this clearly refers to showing strength and making demands in the form of a protest. The answer is just No. He did not say this. They didn't even give this a "Mostly false" and give a spiel about how "He encouraged people to protest at the capital + his supporters may have interpreted his words that way", they said it was half-true, it was mixture, that claim is no more false than it is true. Rating scale: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check-ratings/

He sure as hell riled people up and he set the seeds for what happened and has a degree of culpability for what happened. However in regards to the specific question "Did Trump Tell Supporters to Storm US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021?" the answer is No. Intermediate ratings on fact checkers are what are used to slip bias into what are not very ambiguous situations, because you can say "Yes, but..." or "No, but..."

The good thing about fact checkers, and the reason I generally support them even if I don't see them quite as neutral, is at least they write down the facts so you can come to your own judgement. I just ignore the ratings they give at this point, the articles are much better.

Comment · 5 years ago
Anything that touches the GPU is notably flaky over parallels (or any hypervisor for that matter), otherwise it's more or less seamless. I always had Windows open on my Mac before I abandoned them during the 2016-2020 dark ages.

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