Granted this was 1999 but I wish I could unsee the shit I saw one day when I did a SELECT password FROM user

And what is a private key? How exactly do you “keep” it across multiple devices? It’s all still black magic to me.

It reminds me a little of Game of Thrones, where all the major players, the royals etc all have spy networks. This is a world where very poor peasants and servants are everywhere and many of them, including children, end up in the employ of this person or that person, watching who is coming and going and reporting back, such that one’s movements and meetings are trackable to a minute degree. The better your spy network, the more power you have.

Of course Varys, spymaster to the crown, is famed for the effectiveness of his network, which spans the continent and even across the sea to other major cities.

He himself is a master of disguise. This was left out of the show entirely but he frequently appears by surprise, whipping off the guise of an old woman and later leaving the scene dressed as a priest, etc. He grew up with actors and uses makeup and costume changes to hide his tracks. He can change his voice and gait at will and routinely shocks people by his ability to blend in and appear or disappear at will. He knows how to leave a place by a different entrance than he came in, and knows all the secrets passageways of the castle.

Basically, in a world with no privacy, the world’s foremost surveillance master is a model for all of us in these times. If you want to move freely in public but do so without a trace, be prepared to pull your hood up and when you leave a restaurant, take off the hoodie you were wearing when you went in. Practice different postures to throw off gait tracking.

You don’t have to like it, but this is the world we live in.

Find a $2 scam you can pull hundreds of times a day and you’re a third world billionaire.

We’d need to know exactly how far back because NewEgg has for years been just like Amazon: a listing service for junky third party sellers.

I think this is just panic from the higher ups at Mozilla who have no idea what in the fuck the company should be doing or is about, even.

There’s another possibility I don’t see anyone talking about. It could just be the higher ups at Mozilla doing the old performative “we’re doing AI” dance for their shareholders and the investment community. Everyone assumes they are 100% sincere about embracing AI but this could simply be them paying the AI tax that all companies seem required to pay right now.

If this is plausible, then we should just wait for it to manifest as actual feature changes and then judge. Right now this is just high level messaging and PR.

This is pretty much the only metric that matters. There is absolutely plenty of room to improve on human drivers! One crash per 500k miles sounds extremely low to me. But if the cars are not better than humans, they should not be on the road.

They say it’s not a DEI initiative; they just want to get this talent onboard for their business.

Ironically, that’s exactly what DEI initiatives were all about: recognizing that if we let white bros excluded all others from the workplace, like they have in prior decades, we will shut out the majority of the world’s talent, and we should do whatever it takes to make sure everyone can join, work, and truly focus without watching their back all the time.

Yeah converting waste heat into useful energy sounds very very much like “making entropy go down.” We know we can make entropy go down in one spot by increasing it even more in others. But for them to do that here… they’d be turning high entropy into low entropy PLUS more high entropy, which sounds circularly self-fueling or essentially a perpetual motion machine.

Most of our electrical generation capabilities use heat at some point to boil water, but what makes that work is water’s phase change behavior, accessible temperature for that phase exchange, and water’s ubiquity. If he can find another water that does something equally useful but at lower temperatures, without exotic materials… I mean John Galt can fuck right off.

If they can pull this off: amazing. But it sounds very much like a quixotic adventure for a legendary inventor’s final days. Someone call me when they have something applicable.

Anyone who has knowledge of or works in any areas adjacent to any of these could provide some kind of insight. Fuck me for wanting some grownup conversation about why businesses do the things they do, instead of a circle jerk of hating on mustache-twirling villains.

As predicted, a one-dimensional answer.

Let’s say they want more money: they do have a healthy software subscriptions business. How can they get more by becoming the world’s tiniest streaming service? And won’t that cannibalize their subscriptions business as the experience gets shittier and shittier?

Some actual “whys” within this would be things like (made up, but for example)

1. the subscriptions business is dying - less than 1% of users ever buy a pass and efforts to increase that failed for (another reason here)

2. streaming services are dumping cash into viewer acquisition because a war is on for dominance in that space and Pled is capitalizing on that

3. Plex has high overlap with gamers and are making good money on midroll gaming ads during these streams

4. Plex has legal concerns about facilitating piracy - this is the real reason why sync is shit and they killed watch together. They are desperately trying to pivot out of their old business before they get sued - OR all this streaming nonsense gives them a kind of fig leaf over that somehow

See, issues can be complex and interesting. Just calling them greedy is neither. How is this the greedy play, even?

I hate headlines like this. I’d love to hear the REASONS WHY Plex are doing all of this. But no, it’s just “4 ways in which Plex now sucks” which we all know already.

Before someone says “the reason is money” we need to ask: do the developers of Jellyfin not use money? Why won’t the same thing just happen to them too?

Before someone says “enshittification,” we need to ask: does this mean Jellyfin will soon have the same problems?

We all seem to love Jellyfin so I think we need to understand the actual reason why, or this will just continue happening.

Someone should write a Reddit client that automatically hides the top two comments and all their children, because they’re inevitably stupid jokes that add nothing.

Oh right. No one can make new Reddit clients anymore.

I’ve managed entirely on Google Sheets for years now. And I was a really big fan of Excel. It was never viable for me to rely on Windows to be everywhere I need to be, and the functionality gap closed steadily over the years to the point where the benefits of it being on the web now overwhelm the feature gap. Being free helps too, especially as Excel has gone through various pricing and bundling contortions over the years. Someone might tell me here that it’s now completely free but can I really be blamed for tuning out Microsoft years ago?

Trillions of dollars worth of compute mining dogecoin

I wish i knew more about the guts of LLMs because I keep thinking it must be easier to optimize them than to put data centers into space.

It will come with an optional $400 fork that does nothing.

The concept of a global language is compatible with linguistic diversity. The Elves, Orcs, and Dwarves all have their own languages, but they also speak the same Common Tongue.

Our world just doesn’t have a common tongue. It has a handful of very colonially dominant languages.

That’s the utilitarian point of view. Even though I often take this POV on many subjects, it would be totalitarian to apply it to cultural matters. Should we adopt one world cuisine that is the easiest to work with? Should we settle everyone on one musical scale and religion, too? It would be a lot more efficient and would facilitate global interaction better.

Only problem: it would erase who we are.

I’m just guessing what they meant but I took it as the difference between:

1. saving = getting enough people to keep speaking it that it remains a living language

2. preserving = documenting it for posterity so that it is not utterly forgotten for all time