christmas wouldn’t be christmas without 42 geese

in my defense, your honor, i didn’t think anybody would actually fall for it

windows 11 is a next generation experience. microsoft teams now has 16 times the detail

how the fuck could they have possibly done things in a way that makes explorer tabs depend on recall?

if they can’t even separate out recall from the rest of the operating system then i have absolutely no faith it will be secure.

why write better software when you can simply tell the customer to buy better hardware?

i would probably word it as something like:

Robots.txt is a document that specifies which parts of a website bots are and are not allowed to visit. While it’s not a legally binding document, it has long been common practice for bots to obey the rules listed in robots.txt.

in that description, i’m trying to keep the accessible tone that they were going for in the article (so i wrote “document” instead of file format/IETF standard), while still trying to focus on the following points:

• robots.txt is fundamentally a list of rules, not a single line of code
• robots.txt can allow bots to access certain parts of a website, it doesn’t have to ban bots entirely
• it’s not legally binding, but it is still customary for bots to follow it

i did also neglect to mention that robots.txt allows you to specify different rules for different bots, but that didn’t seem particularly relevant here.

but then the market would be ever so slightly less free. the horror!

from the article:

Robots.txt is a line of code that publishers can put into a website that, while not legally binding in any way, is supposed to signal to scraper bots that they cannot take that website’s data.

i do understand that robots.txt is a very minor part of the article, but i think that’s a pretty rough explanation of robots.txt

my money is on it being skynet

real phones with counterfeit parts resulting from third party repairs doesn’t seem that surprising given how restrictive apple is about providing authentic repair parts. i would not be surprised if this turns out to be another case of them shooting themselves in the foot because they got too greedy.

i’m not yet sold on this “old vs new” thing. while i do agree that it would be better if people were more engaged/active about boycotting things and pulling out the pitchforks, my understanding is that hasn’t been the historical precedent in situations like this. the pitchfork stuff certainly did happen quite a lot in the past, but my understanding is that it was for more extreme problems than a social media company shutting down third party apps (which many people didn’t even know about). but then again, it might be hard to compare this to the company transgressions of the past.

my understanding is that frustration is building, and if things continue in this direction, they will reach a tipping point where people do actually stop using the website all together and switch to alternatives. and, this ban on protests will give the reddit executives much less information on how close things are to that tipping point. (not to mention that the ban itself will probably accelerate things.)

but i could be mistaken about this, and i’m open to changing my mind on it.

so many leaders are forgetting what the point of protests is. yes, protests are annoying if you’re a leader. but they’re better than the alternative. that’s the whole point.

the person that you’re replying to said something that’s true about the USA. they didn’t say anything about other countries.

for another example, i can say “if you’re in the USA, then the current year is 2024” and that statement will be true. it is also true in every other country (for the moment), but that’s besides the point.

There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there’s no need for debugging.

i’m terrified of people who think this way. my experience has been that they are much less inclined to check for bugs in their code and tend to produce much buggier code

it also bothers me when people say “my algorithm” to refer to the thing that recommends posts to them. people shouldn’t ever say “my algorithm” unless they personally own a copy of the kick-ass prog-metal band

well, according to the congressional budget office,

In 2023, federal subsidies for health insurance are estimated to be $1.8 trillion

and this report by research america shows that the private sector spent around $150 billion on “research and development” in 2019.

it’s no secret that the private healthcare industry jacks up the prices of things to increase profits. so, some napkin math makes me think it’s not that far-fetched to think that we can save more than $150 billion in healthcare subsidies if we stop privatized healthcare and dramatically lower the costs of medical care. we could then put that $150 billion back into research, without needing to appease the private sector at all.

that’s not the full story though. according to the NIH, the US government spent over 30 billion dollars on the covid vaccines.

and this is not unique to the covid vaccine. here’s a source with two particularly damning quotes:

“Since the 1930s, the National Institutes of Health has invested close to $900 billion in the basic and applied research that formed both the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors.”

and

A 2018 study on the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) financial contributions to new drug approvals found that the agency “contributed to published research associated with every one of the 210 new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010–2016.” More than $100 billion in NIH funding went toward research that contributed directly or indirectly to the 210 drugs approved during that six-year period.

“Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today’s citizens.”

exactly which “needs” are they trying to meet?

that sounds like a better choice to be honest. i haven’t used signal much and i didn’t know they supported that sort of thing

telegram has “secret chats” that let you set a self destruct timer for all messages sent in those chats. i don’t know of many other alternatives. and even telegram isn’t a drop in replacement, but it could work, depending on what you’re looking for