Real back-end requirements: when x, y goes in (in JSON-as-an-XML-CDATA-block because historical reasons), I want you to output x+y+z+æ+the proof to P=NP.

æ will require you yo compile x+y in CSV, email it to Jenny, who will email back the answer. She doesn't quite know how to export excel sheets though so you'd better build a robust validator. No, we don't know what æ is supposed to look like, Rob from Frontend knows but he's on vacation for the next 8 months.

The request must be processed under 100 ms as the frontend team won't be able to prioritize asynchronous loading for another 10 sprints and we don't want the webpage to freeze.

And why does your API return a 400 when I send a picture of my feet? Please fix urgently, these errors are polluting my monitoring dashboard and we have KPIs on monitoring alerts.

That's a Japan thing and a legislative failure.

What normally happens in most countries is the law would say something vague like "digital means or devices such as floppy disks or equivalent".
Then the Executive makes and maintains the rules of application of that law according to the Hierarchy of Norms (things probably are organized differently in Common Law countries so I don't know the English term but the principle is the same), which dictates in more detail how the law is to be applied ("please use a web form, or a USB keys for legacy processes").

Sometimes the executive lags behind a bit but typically it's just a ministry making decisions within the margin of the law, so it's not too bad.

There is almost certainly internal communication that basically reads "hey let's get an actress who sounds as close to ScarJo as possible". There's also the CEO tweeting "her" on the day of release.

Is that legal? IANAL, but OpenAI's reaction of immediately shutting that shit down leads me to believe they realized it is, in fact, illegal.

Your comparison is also incorrect. You're not getting a JEJ soundalike, you're getting a JEJ soundalike to do a Darth Vader impersonation. Meaningfully different semantics. They don't just want "white american woman who vaguely sounds like ScarJo I guess" they have proven beyond doubt that they want "The AI from the 2013 movie Her starring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson".

Also legality aside, it's really fucking weird and ethically wrong. I don't care if it's legal or not, you shouldn't be able to make an AI replicate someone's voice without their consent.

In electricity generation *. Probably not as good once you take all primary production into account, especially transportation.

However coal specifically is amazing. I thought "lowest consumption since 1757" was a typo, but it is not.

I can't recommend reading A Chemical Hunger enough. These scientists are right, obesity isn't a willpower issue, despite common belief to the contrary.

TL;DR: We don't know why obesity is. Yeah sure you eat to much, you get fatter. But why do some people crave so much excess food? Why does their metabolism try so hard to keep the fat in? Why is the obesity epidemic worsening everywhere in the world, despite measurably improved eating habits over the last ~15 years?

The article goes at length to disprove mainstream myths like "not enough exercise", "too much shit in our food", etc. Truth is, we don't know what's happening chemically (same issue as the scientists encounter in the NYT article). However, the thesis of A Chemical Hunger is that there are good reasons to think that everyone has a "lipostat" which dictates how much fat we should have. Too skinny, and you will want to eat more and gain weight faster, and vice-versa. Yet for an increasing number of people, the lipostat is breaking.

The open question is, why? Right now, we don't really know, but we really aren't studying the biochemical causes of obesity hard enough due to this stupid belief that fat people are fat because they're "weak minded" or whatever.

I need to hear what this connector would sound like when connected to an actual Dolby Atmos system. Do the crackles and pops get spatialized and make an impromptu symphony going around your room? The people must know!

"Humanity is a disease" is not the same statement as "humanity is capable of committing atrocities" though. The latter leaves the door open for a "but", while the former makes humanity itself a systemic problem but refuses or "forgets" to pin the blame on anyone or any system.

Such statements devolve the conversation into defeatist pseudo-nihilism, where a "true nihilist" knows that the betterment of humanity will have to come from within.

I do agree that capitalism is not the root of all evil, but it is central to the particular "planet's fucked, housing is unaffordable, and no-one cares" doomer sentiment that is depicted in the meme (at least that is how I read it).

More like "Germany plz stop occupying Czechoslovakia".

Much of Europe celebrated the Munich Agreement, as they considered it a way to prevent a major war on the continent. Adolf Hitler announced that it was his last territorial claim in Northern Europe. Today, the Munich Agreement is widely regarded as a failed act of appeasement, and the term has become "a byword for the futility of appeasing expansionist totalitarian states."

"Ah, darts. We didn't appease the discourse hard enough. You can keep Czechoslovakia if you pinky-promise not to invade any more countries! If you do, we'll be forced, to, uh, you'll see, and you better believe we'll do it!" (Narrator: They didn't, in fact, do anything when Germany invaded Poland).

Both of those estimates come from Hamas sources (well the 1000 people one IDK where you got that from).

JFC people you can criticize Israel without gobbling up a terrorist organization's fat propaganda dick. For now we just have no way to know how many people died in that hospital. Find another war crime to criticize Israel for, they're not that hard to come by.

Yeah, and the people like me who haven't bought it are pissed. That game had a lot of potential to fix C:S 1's flaws, which was squandered to performance issues.

Buy the game, can't complain because you are a filthy PrE-ORdErEr. Don't buy the game, can't complain because you didn't buy the game. What kind of logic is that?

What does "indigenous" even fucking mean. I'm of European descent living in Europe, motherfucker I'm the indigenous one around here.

This comic pretty directly equates "indigenous" with "brown & too poor to meaningfully impact their own ecosystems" (which isn't true either because poor countries have a pretty good track record of destroying their own ecosystems as well).

Saying "humans are a plague" is some edgelord type shit. Equating it with fascism is just dumb and dilutes the term "fascism", and on top of that they've managed to illustrate it in one of the most racist ways I've had the displeasure to read in a while.

Maybe I can give the author some slack and assume they're being a typical yankee and completely disregarding the rest of the world, and trying to be progressive by supporting the work Native American reserves do. But even then it's inexcusably dumb.

That's a very high fucking horse to be standing on top off when their device is specifically made to be plugged into a television. Y'know, the thing that almost never can display an image with less than 100 ms of latency even in "game mode". Any decent bluetooth codec has less latency than a standard TV so that's a bullshit excuse.

Also there are low latency bouetooth codecs like AptX-LL with less than 40ms of E2E delay. Sony could enable bluetooth for those devices if it can negociate a low latency codec. They could show a warning about how they can't guarantee the user experience. But they won't.

The real reason is that they want to lock their users into a walled garden where they have an effective oligopoly. It's a very old and scummy business tactict. It's that simple and there's no need to regurgitate their pathetic excuses.

1. Like Python, have a large and featureful standard library such that > 80% of NPM packages are redundant. Other languages allow you to make very large projects with only a few tens of dependencies. JavaScript requires THOUSANDS.
2. With this in place, stop with the recursive dependencies, immediately and forever. Every other package manager under the sun installs the dependencies next to each other.

I'd say pip is saner, though not by much as its support for private registries is very bad and seems designed to facilitate supply-chain attacks. I've heard a lot of good things about cargo but haven't used it enough myself to have a strong opinion.

It's obvious from this excerpt that Adams was mostly talking about British Prime Ministers, who are elected by the government and do not wield much (if any) power beyond that of being a figurehead. Of perhaps the Royalty, who aren't elected but hold even less power and are even more of a distraction.

The US president, by contrast, is not elected by the government and has a shit-ton of power, and increasingly so as the US congress is less and less able to govern due to Republican infighting. The US president can start and win a foreign war in less time than it takes congress to even form an opinion on the matter.

Zaphod spent two years in prison for fraud, meanwhile the US president is protected by more military firepower than literal nukes and has a chain of succession longer than most Kings because the US government literally cannot function without a President.

EVERYONE sees through the bullshit

Group 1 is MAGA and lying is fun to them. Truth is meaningless and the cruelty is the point. Trump could say "sike I lied" tomorrow and they would not care one single bit.

Group 2 is the rest of the GOP, too scared to say anything and with no incentive to do so anyway.

Group 3 is "enlightened centrists" aka "why should I care about the rise of fascism for I am not a Jew".

Group 4 is dems too scared to say literally anything because it might scare away swing voters or rile up Trump's base. I guess focus groups have shown it's more effective to let him dig his own grave and look like a bumbling fool than intervene and fight him on his truthless turf?

Group 5 is us, shouting into the void.

Personal anecdote: I connected my guitar to my shitty sound card a few weeks ago, ran guitarix (because real DAWs are overwhelmingly complicated and I just want an amp, a compressor, and some reverb), and thanks to PipeWire and pipewire-jack everything ran perfectly. Low latency, no crackling, no messing with jackd or ALSA, no restarting audio daemons, I could simultaneously play audio through Firefox and hear my guitar. I dare say that that part of the audio stack is now a solved problem.

I'm not a musician though so I can't comment on hardware support for exotic sound/midi cards or the maturity of FOSS DAWs.

My country of Belgium. Unless by "100 % renewable" you include fossile gas generation "offset" by summer's overproduction (which would be disingenuous).

Middle of January: 100% overcast for weeks on end with only 8 hours of daylight, some days with little to no wind. Geography does not support more hydro or any geothermal generation. Country is way too densely populated for meaningful biomass fuel production (not that it is a climate-friendly practice anyway).

Maaaybe there is a stretch argument to be made about offshore wind/water, but we have relatively little coastline and very busy waterways due to having some of the busiest shipping ports of Europe, so I doubt even in the most optimistic scenarios this can fill the gap during the winter season.

For any meaningful definition of the concept, we can't be 100 % dependent on nationally-sourced renewables until we figure out much much denser and cheaper long term storage solutions. Which is alright - maintaining existing nuclear reactors is an option (barely due to legaislative sabotage pushed by the "greens" but a couple gigawatts is nothing to scoff at) and more importantly we are part of the EU which will hopefully allow us to buy southern European solar/wind via HVDC lines in the future, and we're already very dependent on French nuclear. (Also we don't have to be 100 % independent to push for renewables, perfect mustn't be the enemy of good and all that)

Wikipedia also releases all content for free download under a permissive license, so I don't think it's fair to say that the US government is a meaningful threat to its quality of information, especially over non-English languages that are managed by an independent set of volunteers who could pack up their bags and move everything over wherever they want at any point.

Still a cool project and technological diversity is good though.

I seldom care to manually interact with it, but by god do I hate when it's so narrow, low-contrast, and auto-hiding as to be virtually invisible (and I'm not even visually impaired!).

I want to know where I am, and how long the document is. Why are modern GUIs trying so hard to hide this information from me while pretending they aren't, like a child stubbornly avoiding eye contact when the teacher asks a question?

You're completely missing the point. Even Gitea (much simpler than GitHub, nevermind GitLab) is much more than a git backend. It's viewable in a browser, renders markdown, has integrated CI functionality, and so on.

Even for my meager self-host use-case, being able to view markdown docs in the browser is useful from time to time, even on my phone.

As for the things I use (a self-hosted) GitLab instance at work for... that doesn't even scratch the surface.

Belgium and Northern France have Filet Américain (American Filet). So an American dish right? Well no, it's raw ground beef, basically the last thing most Americans will ever willingly eat. Here it's basically the default sandwich topping.

IIRC that's a house in Zaventem, aka Brussels Airport. So, not a great spot place to build a house.

I don't remember the exact story, but that was supposed to be row housing... but ain't no-one building any more houses there.

I learned the term Information Kessler Syndrome recently.

Now you have too. Together we bear witness to it.

I'm thinking there will be many more parties to that lawsuit... Foremost insurers. And their re-insurers.

However right now it looks like this ship suffered a mechanical failure, so if I had a business in ship building/maintenance you bet I'd be calling everyone in the company to get confirmation that that ship was not on our customer list. And if it was I'd already be in an all-hands meeting with engineering and legal.

If I was in charge of whichever government entity is in charge of maritime traffic, I'd be discretely asking why the fuck boats big enough to bring a bridge down by slowly booping into it were allowed to be boating under the bridge. I would refute responsibility of course... but some maritime traffic rule changes might happen down the line.

The kind of farming that makes any money isn't slow work.

It is, however, tangible work with tangible results. Unlike spending months changing the polarity of nanoscopic silicon structure for the non-appreciation of an utterly clueless salesperson whose braindead ideas will have left the world in a worse state than you found it despite anyone's best efforts.

I should seriously get into woodworking. Kidding. Sorta.

Semantics.

Another to look at it is that if Valve properly managed their VCS, you could do git ls-files HEAD^10000 and see Quake/goldsrc code building the foundation for everything that came after. Every subsequent rewrite and refactor was shaped and constrained by what came before and what hadn't been rewritten yet. If they had started with another engine, they wouldn't have ended up here.

Beyond semantics, Source 2's lineage is still very apparent. While the engine is very good at what it does, it's without question much better suited to a rather specific class of semi-realistic 3D games. It has a look, a feel, strengths and weaknesses. It can't be Unity or Unreal Engine, and it would have been a ridiculous mistake to use it as a base for Elite Dangerous or Assassin's Creed Valhalla or Terraria.

Which free websites? The modern web is just:

• (Quasi-)monopolistic platforms (meta, google, xitter, etc.)
• Newspapers
• SEO filler
• Webshops
• Free sites already operating out of the goodwill of some random admin and making single-digit ad revenue anyway <-- you are here
• Porn aggregators
• SEO filler
• SEO filler
• Wikipedia
• End of list

The only ones whose business model would truly be threatened and whose loss would be problematic are newspapers.
OTOH newspapers accidentally cornering themselves in a "freemium" business model has fucked journalism over so bad I'm not sure how it could even be worse.

Free websites like the ones we are on barely exist anymore anyway, because how the fuck do you "compete" in the "free marketplace of search indexing" when some russian troll is burying you to page 5 of google's search results and you can't reach anyone via facebook or twitter without paying thousands?

There are several problems there:

• Stereotypically, the Americans doing this are way further removed from their ancestry than the second-generation immigrants you describe (in fact it's completely normal and accepted for second-gen immigrants to identify as their parent's nationality as well in Europe);
• "I'm Italian" and "I have Italian ancestry" are NOT the same sentence. You seem to realize that, but many Americans don't, and the comment you replied to complained about the former, and the difference is fundamental;
• Europeans are generally not on board with the whole "ethnic identity" stuff that Americans do, for a variety of reasons that one could simplify down to "last time we did that, nazism happened". The mainstream progressive view is humanist and intentionally colorblind, and it is therefore profoundly shocking to see Americans derive a sense of self-worth from their blood, because these are the talking points we normally only hear in documentaries about Mussolini...
  Now I have spent enough time reading about how American view their complicated relationship to race, ethnicity, and ancestry, to understand where you're coming from, but this is fundamentally at odds to the humanist approach of "we're all the same and who your great-grandparents were does not define who you are in any way". (Which is obviously idealist, and does tend to "whitewash" some struggles, but it is nonetheless the prevailing approach).

"Lofi" as it is understood nowadays is more about background music that aims not to be distracting when working/studying. Basically lofi == "lofi (to study to)".

Trip-hop like Portishead does it, while it is "low fidelity" (as in it uses warm tones, crackling, record scratching, etc), it is not lofi, in the same way that Sabaton is Rock but not Rock&Roll.

Stocks = certificate of ownership in a fraction of a company. The basic principle is sound and goes back at least to the Renaissance, it's everything else around it that sucks and creates a plethora of perverse incentives that benefit the capital owners.

Company stocks are not unique there, it's the most common example but the principle extends to every commodity. You can buy virtual coal or gold right now if you want and sell later, without actually having coal delivered to your doorstep. This is actually a very important market mechanism when it works right because it allows the market to internalize external forces, reducing risk. European energy providers learned this the hard way when prices shot through the roof in 2022 and they were buying gas at "current prices", leading to funds drying up unexpectedly sometimes to the point of bankruptcy, rather than buying gas at "future prices", guaranteeing deliveries that were paid for months in advance. When it works well, speculation is actually an inescapable tool of complex modern economies. Without it you cannot maintain supply chains fit for the modern world, as speculation (when not abused) is the market's way of accounting and preparing for the expected future.

Even in a communist society, you'd need stocks: the disagreement then becomes whether the state should own (part of) the stocks, or if the workers should own all the stocks (legally equivalent to the means of production).

There is without a doubt a connection to ScarJo. They asked her to voice the AI, they asked her again right before release, and the CEO tweeted "her" on release.

The only question is whether, backlash aside, they could technically get away with it (which does not make it right).

I don't worry about Chinese manufacturing capabilities... they're doing great.

I do worry greatly about the Chinese political system causing preventable (nuclear) accidents through lack of transparency and accountability.
If their reaction to the COVID breakout is symptomatic of systemic issues (I firmly believe it is), then I don't see how anyone can trust the Chinese government to act in the interest of safety.

Those micro-cracks and corrosion issues that caused months of downtime on Belgian and French reactors respectively, that would have caused rolling blackouts in both instances if those winters had been cold? Pretty sure in China that'd be "carry on comrade".

EDIT: Oh and I forgot about the 3 gorges dam. In case anyone still doubts that the Chinese government does not factor in safety, at all.

Every US president is a War Criminal.

However, most sane people would agree that Obama was, as far as U.S. presidents go, very uncontroversial. Well spoken, very few scandals, centrist policies, didn't make a fool of himself every time he met a head of state, etc.

So the conservatives latched onto the WEIRDEST shit. Made him up as a Kenyan citizen (???), actually made a big deal about his choices of condiments or suit colors, etc. These were all real things that made the mainstream news cycles, because Obama wasn't livetweeting his every thought or being indicted every day, but US conservatives had to complain about something.

This is to be contrasted to the mainstream Republican figureheads, who are unbelievably crass&corrupt traitors yet receive nothing but praise from the same media/pundits that thrashed Obama for his choice of mustard.

Absurdist contrast like this is, indeed, comedic. I rest my case.

(Also Natalie has talked in-depth about how shitty this faux-leftist "the democrat candidate is actually center-right and imperfect, therefore I shall not vote for them even if it gives the win to the literal rapist who will absolutely jail me for my political beliefs, gender expression, or sexual orientation if given the chance" in her videos, most notably the 2020 campaign video, but of course none of that fits in 240 characters, also comedy doesn't tend to work when overexplained, thank you for coming to my TED talk)

Eeeeeeeh. There's nuance.

IIRC there were only a handful of verified CSAM videos on the entire website. It's inevitable, it happens everywhere with UGC, including on here. Anecdotally, in the years leading up to the purge PH had already cleaned up its act and from what I saw pirated content was rather well moderated. However this time the media made a huge stink about the alleged CSAM, payment processors threatened to pull out (they are notoriously very puritan, it's caused a lot of trouble to lemmynsfw's admins for instance) and so regardless of the validity of the initial claims PH had to do something to gain back the trust of payment processors, so they basically nuked every video that did not have a government ID attached.

Now if I may speculate a little, one of the reasons it happened this way is probably that due to its industry position PH is way better moderated than most (if not all) websites of their size and already had verified a bunch of its creators. At the same time the rise of OnlyFans and similar websites means that real amateur content has all but disappeared so there was less and less reason to allow random UGC anyway. So the high moderation costs probably didn't make much sense anymore anyway.

Induction is cheap as shit nowadays, and faster, so no-one should install new gas stoves. When renovating I ripped out my gas line.

HOWEVER I completely disagree with Alec on resistive electric stoves being "fine". They're terrible. They have ENORMOUS thermal inertia. He says "just move the pan off the heater", but that doesn't take into account that just getting a pan to the correct temperature is much harder on resistive electric. It takes forever to heat up an empty pan, but if you wait until the food is cooking to turn down the heat, it's already too late and your food will be overcooked. Frying an egg is the worst, by the time that the pan is hot you gotta kill the heat entirely or the egg will be burnt so there is no margin for adjustment. Ugh. With induction it's so much easier, you can just adjust the heat based on how the egg is frying and the pan will actually cool down or heat up enough that the egg will come out alright.

I mean sure depending on ventilation and personal opinions on air quality then resistive may be favorable over gas, but if I'm honest, if induction didn't exist I'd probably take my chances with cancer.

They announced the discontinuation of CentOS in 2020. That's when it started for me. This is just more of the same crusade against people "using RHEL for free" (which I'm sure none of the suits at IBM even begin to understand the value of, the real wonder is that RH managed to resist this move for so long).

Does that mean you're attracted to them being feminine? Or are you attracted because they're men?

yes

More seriously, in my experience androgynous/GNC features are widely considered attractive in bisexual circles because they combine attractive features of multiple genders, which is at least twice as many attractive things.

However someone discovering themselves as "not straight" might not have enough understanding of the relationship between gender and attraction to answer your question.
In my case as I hit puberty I realized I was attracted to girls, so I thought "ok I'm straight". Years and many ignored signs later I realized I found feminine men hot, so I thought "I'm straight so it's because they're feminine". Then like a year or two later I caught myself thinking a definitely-not-effeminate actor was hot (not for the first time) and the other shoe dropped. Yeah, I'm a dumbass, but point is that it's much easier to put a label on oneself and go from there, than to deconstruct something as complex as gender and attraction.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

This has been a known attack vector for years, and I wonder how no livestreamer has been (publicly) attacked in this way.

I guess in large part this can be attributed to 2FA, passwords just aren't worth much by themselves anymore (well I guess if someone is quick enough they can snipe the OTP as well, but streamers are rarely entering their 2FA while streaming since they're on a trusted device).

In fact the biggest attack vector I'd worry about is the infamous SMS 2FA, which is actually 1FA for password resets, which is actually 0FA "yes dear phone operator I am indeed Mister Beast please move my phone number to this new SIM".

no but seriously tho

I'm a cis dude, overall quite masc, but it drives me up the wall how peak acceptable fun in male gender expression is wearing a Hawaiian shirt.

Anything beyond that (e.g. painting nails) is automatically queer. Which is fine, I am queer, but why would my cis gender expression be classified as queer?? Or put another way, why don't cishet men paint their nails, wear earrings, or skirts or crop tops? Do they hate fun?

Wearing a crop-top in public sounds super fun if it wasn't for the fact that a bland black crop top would earn me even more attention than if I was Margot Robbie herself. My introverted ass can't handle that. But also I really wanna. God fucking damnit we truly do love in a society.

Sorry about the rant I guess I had more on my mind than I thought.

HSTS + HTTPS redirect is the answer. It's industry standard for a reason: it's just as safe as pure HTTPS since you can't get anything other than a redirect over HTTP, and HSTS protects your users from future attempted MITM attacks. The MDN page for HSTS explains it all very clearly.

Any other implementation is an immediate audit fail in my experience.

There's no tangible security benefit to fully disabling port 80, and if anything depending on the service it may just drive users away to shadier alternatives.