PSA: Lots of public libraries (Idk about college ones) have separate printers that are specifically for books. They can help you with binding and everything.

Everything is open source if you can read assembly.

I think it’s a bad idea in general, currently being produced in unethical ways by people with unethical aims, consistently failing to deliver on a tenth of what was promised and already ruining a lot of stuff despite its frailty.

I think companies that use unethically trained AI (read: basically all gen AI) should be subject to massive litigation, or at least severely damaging boycotts.

Have mentioned it to a lawyer at work, and he was like “I get it, but uh… fat chance, lol”. Would not dare mention it to the AI-hungry folks in leadership.

I never give money to the homeless. They’ll just buy drugs and alcohol.

I keep it for myself. So I can buy drugs and alcohol.

—

For real though, I try to give $5 if I can. Some people will waste it, some will make good use of it, and it’s impossible to tell from the outside looking in. So I might as well swing at every ball. Giving to charities is good too, but they don’t reach everyone (for all sorts of reasons).

If “excellent customer service” means you have to go through three layers of call center to finally cancel your service, then yes.

over the long term–and I’m talking, like 20-30+ years–it could be positive. One of the things that made the US economy strong in the 60s was the fact that we had strong labor, and strong manufacturing

Looks to me like the strong economy of the 1960s coincided with ending 20-30 years of high tariffs… Sooo…

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.

In an emergency, you can also exit widdoutershins.

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

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.

We probably wouldn’t name them until they had reached a certain age