Not to mention, even if you can accurately measure calories in a specific serving, companies produce thousands and thousands of servings per day. They can’t accurately measure all of them. And ironically, the more ‘natural’ the food is, the less accurately they can measure the nutritional value: protein paste is going to be a lot more predictable than pasture-raised chickens.

Nice, you avoided having to think on a self-imposed technicality. Real intellectual rigor there.

Makes it easy to dismiss my argument without bothering to think about it, you mean. Just take abortion, then. Or “tax is theft”, or right to bear arms, or any of a thousand other beliefs you probably don’t agree with.

So like, if you were in a restaurant and ordered food, but it never came because a couple of the servers were blocking food from being served because the company wasn’t taking a strong stance against abortion, you’d think “these good people are taking a moral stand, good for them! The company better not take any action against them to make sure I get my food!”

Or for that matter, if Google stopped all cooperation with the IDF, the company’s Jewish employees could (in fact should) disrupt business because Google was supporting terrorism?

It seems to me that you can only support forms of protest you’d be willing to accept when the other side uses them against you. Basically the golden rule.

I remember, towards the end of the last millennium, marveling with some friends about an article estimating the current size of all the data on the internet. IIRC, it was in the neighborhood of a couple hundred terabytes. Wouldn’t fit on your phone, but there’s plenty of data hoarder types who have that kinda storage on the server in their spare room.

And when that future comes, Apple will still manage to fill 50% of your space up with god-knows-what.

I think the fans & press deserve equal blame for the initial hype. At some point I saw a supercut of things Sean Murray said, then the resulting headlines and Reddit posts.

In an interview, the journalist asks: “Will you be able to play with your friends in a shared universe?” The answer: “Well…we hope that eventually there will be at least some multiplayer functionality, though maybe not on day one…like maybe you could explore one another’s planets or share pictures or something.”

Headline: “NO MANS SKY WILL LAUNCH WITH MULTIPLAYER!”

Reddit comments: “I’m already forming a guild, we’re going to play as bounty hunters chasing down other players who are pirates in glorious multiplayer space battles!!”

There were tons of examples of that. Journalists would poke and prod for a soundbite, take it out of context and exaggerate it, and the community would just go batshit with their expectations.

As a software dev and open source contributor: stay the course, then! I’ll take open source software over a union 10 times out of 10. I get paid so well for what I do that it’s silly, and I love spending my time doing the stuff I like. I’ve been a union member in other fields, it’s not an experience I’d like to repeat.

I seriously doubt anybody is contributing to open source for status & seniority. Respect, maybe. The status & seniority people become managers; as the old joke goes, that’s the best way to get them out of the workforce.

A while back, one of the image generation AIs (midjourney?) caught flack because the majority of the images it generated only contained white people. Like…over 90% of all images. And worse, if you asked for a “pretty girl” it generated uniformly white girls, but if you asked for an “ugly girl” you got a more racially-diverse sample. Wince.

But then there reaction was to just literally tack “…but diverse!” on the end of prompts or something. They literally just inserted stuff into the text of the prompt. This solved the immediate problem, and the resulting images were definitely more diverse…but it led straight to the sort of problems that Google is running into now.

Aww, why didn’t he stay the course? Things have been going so well!

I’ve installed Linux on at least 20 laptops & desktops in the past decade, many for first-time users. I generally go with Mint or ElementaryOS for newbies. I can’t remember ever having a compatibility issue. I’m sure they still happen sometimes, but when people talk about it they act like it’s still 2005.

They’ve never released proper open-source drivers for Linux, or helped external developers make any, or made it easy to use their closed driver with Linux. They’re just hostile to open source, basically. That used to be pretty common in the old days, but most companies have given up and joined in, which is why installing Linux is usually a smooth experience these days.

If you’re using Linux: get an AMD card. They just work out of the box, no failures to boot to GUI or anything. It just works…like everything else. Which, having spent 20 years fighting with graphics drivers on Linux, is sheer bliss to me.

Oh, but the defacto standard for anything AI-related is NVidia. So if you ever wanna mess with LLMs, object detection, speech recognition, etc…you’re likely stuck with NVidia, and the old routine: Got a problem? Of course you do. Try reinstalling the drivers three times, then uninstall some random other packages, then burn some incense, say 10 Hail Marys, and make an offering to the GPU gods before restarting the computer. Didn’t work? Well, repeat all those steps in a different order. Fifth time’s the charm!

That was true in 2000. The situation had improved a lot by, like, 2005, but it was still pretty rough. You were still likely to have to drop to a console at some point even in 2010.

These days there’s 20 distributions that are easier to install, use, and maintain than Windows, and you don’t even have to know ls to use it.

I mean, there’s not a lot of incentive for them to change the way they operate…

You can label your devices. When formatting, do mkfs.ext4 -l my-descriptive-name /dev/whatever. Now, refer to it exclusively by /dev/disk/by-label/my-descriptive-name. Much harder to mix up home and swap than sdc2 and sdc3 (or, for that matter, two UUIDs).

Nope, you’re not corrected. The expansion tracks are $25, the game itself is still $60.

I’ve played Skyrim and Fallout 3 & 4 on Linux, and Uncharted. They worked just fine.

You need to enable Proton for all ‘unsupported’ titles in Steam (literally two clicks). After that…the only games I’ve found that don’t work are down to anti-cheat. I used to occasionally have to change the Proton version for some games, but it’s been a while since I had to do that.

It’s nothing like gaming on Linux was 10 years ago. It’s much more like gaming on Windows, the last time I did it: you occasionally find a game that needs tweaking, but 95% work flawlessly.

Life expectancy of football players is 59 years. Life expectancy for average, fast food-eating, healthcare-using Americans is 79 years.

I’ll take the latter, thanks.

Just so it’s clear for everybody: Nix is a programming language, build system, and package manager. NixOS is a Linux distro built with (and upon) Nix. Home Manager is a dotfile and home management tool using Nix, allowing control of dotfiles, but also per-user software, systemd services, and more. You can use Home Manager in any distro, not just NixOS (but you do need to install Nix).