Not only that, but the US Military runs on state-of-the-art logistics. This means that military equipment can, and often is, incredibly high maintenance because you’re never far from a base that always has everything you need to keep it operational. In this environment, there’s no need to make anything super robust and reliable, so… they don’t.
How state-of-the-art are we talking? Well, let me introduce you to forward-deployed Burger King.
I’m no fan of this man, but is this the actual moment? If so, I don’t think we should be posting snuff content.
I try to look at it from the standpoint of critical mass. We’re well past the observation that a bunch of people are working overtime battling dissonance, juggling an ever-growing schedule of contradictory information. It’s frustrating that the dam doesn’t break sooner, but eventually, it will break. If not for this shred of news, then for the next one, or the one after that. Eventually.
Not to long ago, I was mourning the loss of the Conversatron 3000. It was a forum site that was nothing but comedy writers, using the medium to tell a flavor of joke and observational humor that could only work on that medium. A lot of it had this formula of “dumb question/observation”, “dumber retort”, “setup”, and finally “witty punchline.” Sometimes, that would just thread on for multiple rounds. Rarely, threads were open to user comments too.
Now I understand why that hasn’t come back. We don’t need it anymore.
I’m with you on “slam” and any other pseudo-violent verb to make an otherwise milquetoast headline more attention-grabbing.
What really gets me is when it is applied to the mildest of vocal objections by some politician. Like, it’s not even clever wordplay, just dissent. None of this is worthy of the same vocabulary one would use to describe a WWE match, but here we are.
Sometimes, the news is kind of dull, and that’s okay.
I’m on this bandwagon, more or less. 12 months ago I was certainly fearing some kind of gestapo, only in the form of the proud boys and other terrorist groups that were breaking bread with trump the first time around. What I couldn’t puzzle together was how those assholes would mange to mimic legit police and military, in order to have the optics to operate freely.
What I didn’t expect was the whitehouse weaponizing the lowest-empathy-with-guns facet of the executive branch, all the while mimicking terrorist thugs in order to operate with maximum friction instead.
Oh man. I was having a good day and everything.
taking the best parts from other nations.
To be fair, it’s what we do best. There’s simply nothing more American.
Fack.
I want off Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride already.
Parents of children affected by the ban shared a spectrum of views on the policy. One parent told the Guardian their 15-year-old daughter was “very distressed” because “all her 14 to 15-year-old friends have been age verified as 18 by Snapchat”. Since she had been identified as under 16, they feared “her friends will keep using Snapchat to talk and organise social events and she will be left out”.
Okay, that’s really bad. On the one hand, this is like “they don’t even card me at the bar”, which is opening up a whole can of worms. Either they’re passing for older, or they’re faking it. As for the kids left behind, it’s also “you look too much like a kid to hang” or they simply get left out for not breaking the rules. All this kind of shit used to happen before, only now it’s technologically accelerated.
And here I was naively thinking this was going to make everyone stampede back to SMS instead.
I’m almost certain Musk has 120mil in loose change, hiding in his couch.
I’m going to call it like I saw it, a very long time ago.
<rant>
You have a product that is basically purpose built to make data hoarding and piracy practical, yet it requires a login with a central service. I don’t care what justification anyone thinks makes that worthwhile or even a good compromise. Signaling to any corporate entity that you’re in possession of such a thing is a bad idea to begin with. They shouldn’t even know you exist. That information, along with anything else you do with the product is compromising to you and can be sold for money if aggregated with everyone else’s data.
If you find this rant out of place in our modern world, I’d like to point to the concept of shifting baselines. This didn’t used to be normal and nothing short of greed continues the behavior. The technology before this ran/runs without anyone knowing. Consider VLC, or XBMC.
To quote your quote:
I got the product launched. It worked. I was proud of what I’d created. Then came the moment that validated every concern in that MIT study: I needed to make a small change and realized I wasn’t confident I could do it. My own product, built under my direction, and I’d lost confidence in my ability to modify it.
I think the author just independently rediscovered “middle management”. Indeed, when you delegate the gruntwork under your responsibility, those same people are who you go to when addressing bugs and new requirements. It’s not on you to effect repairs: it’s on your team. I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise. The idea that relying on AI to do nuanced work like this and arrive at the exact correct answer to the problem, is naive at best. I’d be sweating too.
Eh, there’s a little more than that.
Most of those things are up for debate following each hurricane season.
Eh, I went to a few pretty good museums in Key West once. Although, they also tried to become The Conch Republic for about a day that one time, so maybe they don’t count as mainland Florida.
I’m not a lawyer.
Today, in Vega v. Tekoh, the court backtracked substantially on its Miranda promise. In Vega, the court held 6-3 (over an excellent dissent by Justice Elena Kagan) that an individual who is denied Miranda warnings and whose compelled statements are introduced against them in a criminal trial cannot sue the police officer who violated their rights, even where a criminal jury finds them not guilty of any crime. By denying people whose rights are violated the ability to seek redress under our country’s most important civil rights statute, the court has further widened the gap between the guarantees found in the Bill of Rights and the people’s ability to hold government officials accountable for violating them.
I take this to mean that cops just got immunity from being sued if they violate procedure, specifically by failing to Mirandize a suspect during an arrest. It’s a big deal for accountability, but I don’t think that has anything to do with the validity of gathered evidence (speech after arrest) brought against said suspect, if this step is skipped.
I’m not going to bother breaking down the SCOTUS ruling remarks; they’re corrupt as hell and I don’t need that kind of mental anguish today.
NGL, I was hesitating on building a MAME cabinet, but having one with the art and build of a legendary fake game? Sounds perfect.
A couple of extra things about this.
The episode was co-authored by William Gibson of all people. The fact that one of the key authors that gave us cyberpunk as a genre, went on to write a painfully mediocre TV episode about virtual reality, still leaves me kind of stunned.
WRT to “live-action standing-in for VR”, it can be done artfully. Avalon does a great job of using practical effects and creative set locations to portray cyberspace. Also: there’s a lot of run-and-gun here, and nobody stands around. Which is to say: they really whiffed hard on the x-files episode, as there’s clearly a better way to do this.
In a small, anecdotal way, I can say with confidence that the level of fiber trenching that happened (in a major metro area) from late 1999 through 2002 was on a whole other level.
I’ve seen this. You’ll get a video recommendation that is technically on two channels at once, and you may be subscribed to only one of them. This may be particularly annoying if you’ve deliberately not subscribed to the other guy featured in the video.