vortic

Thank you for providing the extra context. That’s very helpful.

Google and Meta have absolutely had this capability for ages.

I aliased cd to a custom funtion in my bashrc to do this at one point, but cd ../../../.. is too engrained so I never rembered to use it.

I used fakespot a lot. It used huristics to attempt to determine how authentic a product’s reviews are. It analyzed the reviews for things like repeated phrases, odd review activity like bragading, and other things. It then gave a letter grade to the veracity of the reviews and an “adjusted” aggregate review score after removing any reviews that it considered to be suspicious.

I’m going to miss fakespot. I don’t know how accurate it was but it definitely informed my decisions.

How slow would that windows box be with the minimum specs? That seems like it would be a nightmare.

Linux on the other hand will run on anything and it’s glorious!

If true, this is a huge step! Congrats to China!

“Strategic stamina” is something that the US used to have but which has disappeared as the country just tries to catch its breath.

It seems like displaying an ad at a stop light would be a safety issue since it makes it so you can onky look at the screen while moving.

You know, I was annoyed by that when I had to pay for an out-of-warranty update but now I’m pretty happy that my car is one year too old for automatic updates.

Do you want the entire article in the headline or something? Go read the article and the journal article that it cites. They expand upon all of those terms.

Also, I’m genuinely curious, what do you mean when you say that there is “No such thing AS “AI””?

The ability of AI to write things with lots of boilerplate like Kubernetes manifests is astounding. It gets me 90-95% of the way there and saves me about 50% of my development time. I still have to understand the result before deployment because I’m not going to blindly deploy something that AI wrote and it rarely works without modifications, but it definitely cuts my development time significantly.

100% this. I generally use AI to help with edge cases in software or languages that I already know well or for situations where I really don’t care to learn the material because I’m never going to touch it again. In my case, for python or golang, I’ll use AI to get me started in the right direction on a problem, then go read the docs to develop my solution. For some weird ugly regex that I just need to fix and never touch again I just ask AI, test the answer it gices, then play with it until it works because I’m never going to remember how to properly use a negative look-behind in regex when I need it again in five years.

I do think AI could be used to help the learning process, too, if used correctly. That said, it requires the student to be proactive in asking the AI questions about why something works or doesn’t, then going to read additional information on the topic.

Honestly, this thing was cool but enshitification had already made it worse. I had this one as well as one that I inherited from a cousin that was about a decade older. This one was flimsy cardboard and the activities were okay, but the older one was made of metal and the activities were much cooler and it gave ideas for how to expand beyond the provided board.

Agreed. It takes more than Trump, his cabinet, and MAGA to get here, though. It requires complicity and complacency from a ton of other people.

I need to get back to listening to podcasts. I’ve taken a break since the election because many of my favorites were political and I’m currently burying my head in the sand and screaming “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”.

Maybe I’ll dive back in with BTB. That seems mostly safe…

I agree that governments should be careful about what medical treatments they make mandatory. I think the US government has been pretty judicious with their decisions, though. The vaccines that are mandated for school attendance are wildly effective and have been shown to be safe, both via scientific studies and decades of dispensing many of them.

I 100% agree.

I think that is true for some of the people involved, but I think it is much more complicated than that. There are many people who think vaccines do more harm than good because they believe conspiracy theories and junk science. Not everyone against vaccines is malicious. Some must be, though, for such bullshit to keep propagating the way that it does.

If you want to know more, go read the lawsuit he is associated with to remove FDA approval of the polo vaccine. Essentially, he believes fraudulent research that indicates that vaccines cause autism.

Then, before you take what he says at face value, go read a history of polio.

If you give the materials an honest read, you’ll find that polio is horrific, that the vaccine was one of the greatest medical achievements of the 20th century, and that the evidence indicating that the vaccine causes autism is all junk.

It is amazing to me how short our memories are as a species. There are people who are still in congress who had polio. There are an estimated 300,000 people still alive in the US who survived polio. Even with that, the nominated head of Health and Human Services wants to do away with the polio vaccine.

I don’t know what the problem is. Is it a lack of empathy? Is it willingness to swallow the bait surrounding conspiracy theories? Is it just a lack of education? How did we get to the point where it is even remotely okay for the future head of Heath and Human Services to be against the polio vaccine?

If being pro-polio isn’t disqualifying for being the head of HHS, and if he gets confirmed, the U.S. will have very clearly shown that it is in rapid decline. It will have shown that the government is corrupt to its core and is irredeemable.

Do you have recommendations for tutorials on this?

For raster imagery (and probably vector) I recommend imagemagick.