The manual review though does improve your odds than an algorithm looking for keywords.

I mean… It’s a human looking for keywords…

Not to mention sometimes you got feedback of what your odds were of getting hired. If you gave someone your physical resumé, and they just laid it down in a random spot and we’re dismissive, you at least knew immediately that you should probably not expect a call back.

Ok, I guess you could just drop off your resume in person, but then what would happen is you give it to the person at the counter/reception desk/front office/whatever, and then you’d have no idea if it ever even get to a hiring manager. More often you’d just email your resume to the manager/HR (yes we had email in the 90s), so you’d know it would get to the right people, but then would have no idea if anyone actually ever looked at it unless you got a call back.

I mean, yeah. True. But to push back a little, driving at the actual speed of traffic is often safer than driving the official speed limit.

The real world and written law don’t always line up, the speed limit is one of those areas.

Job applications for one thing. When we were young, recruiters had to physically read the letters and/or places hiring had to physically see you in person.

Now hiring agencies just use automated tools (even before AI) and you get ghosted constantly.

Yeah, job applications haven’t changed that much.

It was still a dismissive black box, it’s just that the process was more manual. Instead of AI tools throwing your application away, someone skimmed it looking for a particular bullet point, if they don’t find it in 10 seconds your resume is tossed in the bin. Whether it was AI or a manager, either way you’re probably not getting a call back to let you know they tossed your application.

Comparing to book burnings is only a false equivalence, as you’re not destroying information, you’re destroying locks that require special keys, unlike FOSS.

I’m totally with you on this. It’s not book burning because this generation doesn’t own anything to burn in the first place. You don’t buy a movie, you “buy” a license to stream that movie for a period of time. Tragic.

I think a lot of us empathize with the protesters. I don’t actually see any posts saying “this is dumb”.

I am still confused though. I mean I understand protesting Trump, ICE, and the government in general. I can’t control that, so protest is one of my only courses of action. But with technology… we can just not use it. I think I haven’t used Facebook in over 15 years, I’ve never used Twitter. And I’m happier for it, they’re right, that works. I use a smartphone, but I limit the kind of apps I want to put on it. If I find that something, a phone, app, website, whatever, is impacting my life, keeping me from dealing with daily responsibilities, I know it’s a problem, so I’ll stop using it. My point is, I do have control over my tech use, so why rally about it? After all, all the protests in the world won’t give you better self control, that’s a skill you need to build.

Fuck yes. Especially printers.

But my IT guy advice on the matter is this: ink jet is a scam, don’t buy one, ever; don’t accept one for free. If you print a lot, get a laser printer for home, if you only print a few times a year, get a laser printer for home.

That was a good read. I did think it was interesting that he decided to solve the randomized alphabet problem with the complex character recognition and image matching system he used. I mean, that was very clever and it clearly worked, so great! But an alternate option would have been the cryptographic method. There’s a lot of software designed to crack replacement cyphers (especially in English) it probably would have been trivial to drop those characters into one of these and have it spit out the results.

Admittedly it would likely struggle with the other three alphabets, the italic, heading and italic heading alphabets, where there may not be enough words to be certain about success.

I mean, some parts of the protocols we use for the Internet need to be in the clear to work, DNS comes to mind. If you want that kept private as well you need to use something like tor.

But regardless, what people generally actually care about keeping secret is the content, not the protocol.

It would be amazing if there were a more open source option.

It’s unfortunate that cars are so big and complex to manufacture. With a just as complex a set of regulatory systems around verifying their safety and roadworthiness. I really don’t see something more open source being a realistic expectation at any foreseeable point going forward.

Well that’s all true, we don’t actually know what the real filters are, are we already past them, or are they still ahead of us? Certainly people have speculated about this for a long time, and I won’t pretend to have any more real answers than anyone else. But honestly, I’d have a hard time believing that the really rare event, that the great filter lays somewhere between the development of the brain and the development of the kind of intelligence humans have. It just seems like a relatively small jump (relative to all the other hurdles) between many of the smarter animals on earth and human beings. For example, many species use tools a whole lot actually. Only a few other species actually make tools or alter them to a large degree, but you know, give it 10 million years and see if that changes. Likewise, many species have languages, some species even give themselves names, so they can intentionally address other individuals in their social group.

If you don’t mind a bit of total speculation on my part, in my opinion, the explanation to the Fermi paradox is actually pretty simple, there really is no paradox. Intelligent life is probably relatively common in the universe, the reason we don’t see aliens all over the place is that intelligent life thrives too well for that. Once a species is capable of traveling other stars, it’s just a matter of time before they settle most of their galaxy, like within a million years (which is very quick on evolutionary scales). We’re just the first intelligent life in this galaxy, we can assume this because if there were others, they’d already have colonies right here on earth, because it’s a great planet.

To double back on the great filter though, my best guess about which events might be truly rare, my money is on Eukaryotic life and mitochondria. That feels like a real freak accident, as well as an absolutely vital requirement for complex life.

Well, I’m not sure you’ve considered the time-frames involved in that concern. We have a whole lot of time before the sun goes out on us. It took Earth about 2 billion years to develop multicellular life. It then took another 2.5 b before we got vertebrates. That was the hard part though and it’s done, I don’t think there’s any undoing it. There aren’t many things that could wipe out all forms of vertebrates on earth, so I’m confident that would be as far back as the planet could reasonably be set back by any disaster.

Just 60 million years ago, mammals were not at all a dominant form of life, yet that’s all it took for early rodent-like mammals to evolve into human beings (as well as all the other mammals we know today). So based on that timeline, if all human life on the planet were wiped out tomorrow, I’d estimate (pessimistically) it would take less than another 200 million years before another species gained a similar level of intelligence and began a new era of civilization (and perhaps as little as 10 m years, as some species are already quite intelligent). In fact, if the next species screws up, and gets themselves killed, I expect earth will get another go at it in another 10–200 million years, over and over again.

On the other side of the equation, the sun will expand into a red giant and consume the earth in about 5 billion years. That gives us a whole lot of tries to get it right.

Uh, I think it’s called the World Wide Web.

I mean, I’m joking, but I do remember buying games directly from a developers website, that’s a thing that used to happen.

I would have struggled if I hadn’t gleaned the premise instantly as soon as I saw the logo.

I mean, as it’s made by ubisoft, it would be pretty funny if they leaned heavily into the evil Abstergo storyline as a dig at EA.

I hate to be that guy, but… Is it time to get DSL?

Yeah, I get how that’s their intended use, I’m just saying I have my doubts about that business model. If this is their pitch, I don’t think they’re gonna sell many.

The thing is, they will be expensive. And it’s not an expensive service, it’s an expensive product. A state or a nation will have to buy a bunch of these, likely for hundreds of thousands each. And then just sit on them millions of dollars worth of energy infrastructure just sitting around not generating energy… Then when it’s time for them to be deployed you have a whole bunch of government workers saying “uh, I’ve never set one of these up, where’s the user manual?”

If instead you had them in regular use, when it comes time to deploy them in an emergency, you’d have people who actually know how to use them. Plus you could be generating power with them wherever extra power might be needed.

I did catch that, I was just pointing out there are additional problems with the statement as well. But I’ve edited my statement to make that more clear.

Hmm interesting. I don’t see how it could be economical as an emergency-only power source. To build them and store them for occasional use seems pretty unappealing. Surely if you had them, you’d use them to generate electricity/passive income.

You could think of them as easily mobile power systems, available to respond to emergencies, but used wherever is convenient the rest of the time.

So yeah, they’ll still be a hazard for air traffic, but luckily we do have an established solution for that, the blinking red light. Also, controlled airspace around airfields.

Would it be possible to use heat to get it to float, instead of helium? Heat it up with electricity.

Sure, that would be possible. The generators themselves will produce some amount of heat. It’s also going to have a fair amount of passive lift, as it’s essentially a kite. So simply being able to maintain a rigid shape and effective airfoil could do a lot to produce the desired lift. If it were redesigned with that in mind, shaped more like a glider/kite/parasail, something to maximize lift, it’s possible that it could be done without a light gas, though it would also be more reliant on favorable winds.

I have to wonder though, how much the power transmission lines weigh, that seems like a serious limiting factor on maximum attainable altitude.

The transmission line question is interesting though, there’s a complex optimization problem there. Traditionally with wind, larger turbines are more efficient. As you increase the turbine blade size, the area that the blades cover (and thus power generation potential) increases more than the mass of the blades do. So the result is (generally speaking) a larger wind turbine is more efficient than a smaller one. But now factor in the transmission line… The larger the turbine the more power it generates AND the thicker (and heavier) the transmission line has to be for its entire length. To complicate things more, higher altitudes mean stronger and more reliable wind. So now how do you optimize for turbine size/cable gauge, and cable length/altitude?

It seems tricky, but like perhaps there’s just a right answer, an optimal size.

So that “10,000 meters” didn’t scale right, clearly. But you also can’t possibly call those “high altitudes”. Small planes like cessnas fly at low altitudes, like 2,000 - 5000 ft, a 747 flys at a high altitude, 40,000 ft; 1600 ft is nothing, that’s lower than some buildings.

I think I agree with Cory Doctorow’s opinion

I’d say that’s always a good position. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him come out on the wrong side of a topic.