nerdbert

I have been highly active in online technical communities since the usenet days in the 1980s and I have never once found myself in a situation where my opinions on sex or gender were solicited, interrogated, or judged.

This really sounds like people were letting their personal flags fly (in avatars or sigs or whatever) and you could not stand to see that because they were not like you. All you have to do is ignore it and look at the content.

This reminds me of someone I worked with, who asked me "why does [Colleague 2] have to shove his gay lifestyle in everyone's face?" after that Colleague 2 put a framed holiday photo with his husband on his desk.

The person who asked this had a photo with his wife on his desk. He was unable to understand (A) how that is "shoving" his sexual orientation in other people's faces to the exact same degree as Colleague 2's photo was; and (B) that the photo was for Colleague 2's own comfort and solace, and for positive engagement with anyone who wanted to engage in same, and that nobody else was required to dwell on it or give it a second glance.

Doesn't help with how often it is wrong, but if you preface every question with "terse answer please" at least you don't get the superfluous text tsunami and it sticks to the point.

Very similar to my experience. I never managed to either ask or answer a question on there. Everything I did was "bad" for reasons that were never explained to me in a constructive way that made me feel empowered to get a better outcome.

I used it as a reference when someone had a similar question to mine, but over time the bad taste in my mouth caused me to avoid it in google search results.

I fell into using an early — and I would say, far superior — form of ChatGPT, which consisted of carefully and clearly laying out my question, point-by-point, in a blank text file, and then usually having an insight as to what my particular stumbling block actually was and thereby being able to move forward.

What if it is illegal to withhold the data during an investigation? Isn't the executive then committing a crime?

> people, who do not want to pay for the leftist dreamworld

Except that time and time again, it turns out that the "leftist dreamworld" is actually cheaper.

Providing subsidized housing for poor people costs less in the long run than dealing with homelessness.

Providing nationalized or strictly regulated healthcare costs less than fully privatized systems where healthcare operators do as they please.

Facilitating active transport such as bike lanes costs cities less, and moves more people more quickly, than focusing exclusively on cars.

What these people actually want is not to save money, but to carefully ensure that any money spent suits only their preferences and identity groups rather than benefiting society as a whole.

> why is rail treated so differently?

Because there's a huge ecosystem that is substantially dependent on private use of roadways - car manufacturers, sellers, insurers, storage facilities, cleaners, and repairers; petrol extractors, refiners, transporters and sellers; and so on.

Each of these parties has a vested interest in maintaining the perception that driving is the baseline mode of transport and anything else is a deviation from that which requires extra consideration before it should receive any resources.

On the one hand that's also a lot of jobs and profits, but on the other hand if all this activity is in service of a mode of transport that causes considerable short and long-term damage, and is less efficient for many journeys, then it means we're wasting labor and resources that could be put to better use.

I suspect that's peanuts compared to all the subsidies and unaccounted externalities for car use.

Then you've instead created sprawl which has huge ongoing costs in terms of resource and energy use, as well as disconnecting people and communities.

> In particular, I don't understand how their results don't imply that human-level intelligence can't exist.

I don't think that's what it said. It said that it wouldn't happen from "machine learning". There are other ways it could come about.

> why does the JS ecosystem seem to have "more fear" than for example the Python ecosystem?

Perhaps it's because so many JS developers - quite rightfully - suffer from impostor syndrome?

It's the language with the largest proportion of people who didn't set out to be programmers but somehow got mission-crept into becoming one.

> The glass bin we have in Amsterdam isn't one that you can even push broken glass into if you wanted - it's shaped specifically to receive bottles.

It wouldn't take large shards of a plate window but it definitely can accept anything with one dimension that doesn't exceed 10cm or so, which is almost all the broken glass we've wanted to put into it.

So is all this data scraped by creating fake frequent flyer accounts and then making new ones as each one gets banned by the airline? Doesn't seem sustainable in the long term. As soon as it starts to meaningfully impact their ability to do whatever value maximization they have in mind, they are going to clamp down on this activity, right? They could require you to have some actual mileage activity before you can do searches, for example.

How would they have been able to see the content of a request from the router to AWS if it was HTTPS?

If they intercepted it, then one must assume it was truly plaintext. Because if they were able to get access to the private key for Linksys's server certificate, that would be even bigger news.

I have heard that in some markets the only way to get unlimited service from Comcast (with no monthly cap) is to use their hardware.