Yellow Mountain Imports is great.

Humanity is so fickle, it’s impossible to tell.

In the US, we went from overwhelming opposition to gay marriage to overwhelming support in less than a decade.

On the other hand, we went from aggressively eradicating CFCs and fixing the ozone hole to dragging our feet on renewable energy for several decades.

Even further back, we went from back-to-back world wars and economic collapse to a tentative global peace and prosperity.

Monarchy seemed inevitable for ages, and then multiple democratic revolutions all sprang up in quick succession.

Equality was fundamental to the Constitution, but we still haven’t healed the wounds of slavery.

There seems to be no telling. Some problems languish for a long time, but then see massive improvements in the blink of an eye. Some obvious fixes lay dormant for an offensively long time.

When I think about this stuff, I get a weird mix of hope and despair and guilt and frustration and impatience.

It seems unfair that we got stuck with these particular crises, with no guarantee that we’re actually prepared to handle them. (Maybe that’s the entire story of humanity.)

And then I remember what Tolkien had to say about such things:

“Done is better than perfect.”

The only thing I hate about Winter is not Winter’s fault, and it’s basically what you said:

Work is somehow perfectly scheduled so that you’re inside, staring at a brick wall for 90-100% of the daylight hours for 5 out of every 7 days.

Winter is beautiful in ways that are completely unlike the other seasons, but unless you’re very fortunate you only get a few glimpses of it.

I feel like if you were designing a society to make people suffer, that’s how you would do it.

Extraneous apostrophe’s

A more recent example comes from the med-tech giant Abbott Labs, which used DMCA 1201 to suppress a tool that allowed people with diabetes to link their glucose monitors to their insulin pumps, in order to automatically calculate and administer doses of insulin in an “artificial pancreas.” -eff.org

We joke about someday having to jailbreak our own organs, but we’re basically already there.

An exoskeleton let a paralyzed man walk. Then its maker refused repairs.

Doctors Remove Woman’s Brain Implant Against Her Will

Recently had to cancel Xfinity. Had to wait for a text chat so I could schedule a cancellation appointment. They didn’t call at the requested time. I called instead to make an appointment for them to call me back.

30 minutes of waiting and questions about what it would take to retain me as a customer or who could take over my account. I told them up front that Xfinity isn’t available at my new address but they had to ask all the questions anyway.

All of this nonsense meant I was 6 days into the billing cycle, so they had already charged me for a full month and held onto the remainder until the next month.

Ugh.

I fully expect that, just like the rest of the account management parts of Xfinity’s site, the page that serves the “cancel” button will be horribly slow to load, frequently broken, and borderline unusable, while the upselling pages remain lightning fast and reliable.

I did not think there was that much to tightening. I read the whole damn thing.

And those configs are clearly the result of someone else stitching together three different examples from different versions, with some settings that are silently ignored in the latest version or only exist when compiled with special flags.

Here is a basic way to configure the service:

…

But this method has significant drawbacks and probably won’t work for most use cases, so do what works for you.

In an emergency, you can also exit widdoutershins.

Surprising number of people taking this seriously.

As it was with standardized testing, so shall it be with personal behavior: the goal is not to inform the student why, but to enforce compliance.

I haven’t tried it yet, but GrayJay purports to be an aggregator along those lines: https://grayjay.app/

Aren’t MP3s just a statistical correlation?

Besides, you really don’t need to zoom in on “but muh license agreement” to roast these AI turds.

They’re very clear: We’re gonna put creatives out of work, we’re gonna sell a unified product to replace them, and we’re gonna use their own labor to build their replacements.

That’s anticompetitive.

Nail em on that instead of trying to thread the needle on reining in the tech lords without damaging e.g. linguistic analysis researchers.

Crash reporting, probably.

They did issue a fix: “Buy a new CPU please!”

That’s why they don’t mind the reputation hit. If 1 person swears allegiance to Intel as a result but 2 people buy new AMD chips, they’re still ahead. And people will forget eventually. But AMD won’t forget the Q3 2024 sales figures.

But how does this happen?

It’s destined to happen, according to Normal Accident Theory.

Aren’t there programming teams and check their code or pass it to a quality assurance staff to see if it bricked their own machines?

Yes, there are probably a gigantic number of tests, reviews, validation processes, checkpoints, sign-offs, approvals, and release processes. The dizzying number of technical components and byzantine web of organizational processes was probably a major factor in how this came to pass.

Their solution will surely be to add more stage-gates, roles, teams, and processes.

As Tim Harford puts it at the end of this episode about “normal accidents”… “I’m not sure Galileo would agree.”

First show was probably Voltron. First film was probably Vampire Hunter D.

Toonami became a big part of my life, and there was a small theater downtown that did showings of Miyazaki and such. I remember seeing Metropolis there, too.

I owe a lot to those scrappy little enterprises, taking a gamble that there would be an audience for this stuff.