Notices by Raven667 (raven667@hachyderm.io)

@skinnylatte for those that dont have pets, dental work is basically a surgical procedure and requires the pet be under anasthesia, neither of which is cheap or easy

@skinnylatte I had that happen once and it was the weirdest thing. I interviewed at a tech startup in '08 which I didn't know much about, but turns out they scraped facebook and did profiling/data analytics for hire, which is kind of skeevy, but that's not the weird part; after I interviewed there someone sent me an email to my personal account from a yahoo.com address using the same name as the company which read

> You may want to think twice before joining [redacted]. The financial situation of the company and outlook isn't as optimistic as it appears.

I was offered but declined and ended up finding a much better job with a local University a few years later. I just checked and the company seems to have existed until at least 2019 so their warning may not have been factually accurate but it's a super weird red flag if someone at the company had access to my application info and used it to privately warn me off, whatever was going on, I don't want to be a part of. yikes.

@dalias @becomethewaifu @zzt i am not a hardware designer but i think that is one reason, on x86, the provided OS often has motherboard chipset drivers provided by the hardware vendor, which can tweak them for how they _actually_ wired up the components. Even when the chip has a perfectly functional driver for another OS, the driver isnt going to have knowledge of implementation specific quirks unless someone has that specific hardware and the time/tools to make it work. Thats why your business-class or very common, long-lived models work, and more aggressive vendors with a lot of skus and model turnover, only *mostly* work.

And i also think it is accurate to say that the lowest level hardware state is often managed by firmware and not the os kernel software, so is dependant on whether the firmware apis have quirks, as this is also model specific

@dalias @futurebird @iwein it does feel like the advertising is pushing a breakdown of social cohesion that says you are only safe in a Mad Max post apocalyptic world if you have your own terrifying blacked-out death-machine. The isolation fits in with suburban aesthetic where everyone is in cosplay colonial homestead in a hostile wilderness.

@inthehands Christ, that's dark, but fair. The culture that allows people to keep trying to "make number go up" without any accountability for what that would even mean in the context of human society. They are all paperclip maximizers unteathered from any philosophy of humanity, humility or utility.

@thomasfuchs I'm not sure there isn't fundamental design flaws where the Starship just doesn't have enough margin of robustness so that it'll be catastrophic when they put any amount of weight on it or anything in the flight is even a little rougher than expected. If they had a safety margin they wouldn't have so many blow up

@thomasfuchs its extra frustrating because the Falcon9 is the best rocket that has ever been built, they clearly had the engineering talent at one time to leapfrog the entire industry while Boeing went down the tubes, where is the evidence of that now? Starship seems like a clown show, it seems Musk scares away all the talent now that he's gone fully off the deep end, plus an inability to be flexible and recalculate when making a bad decision

@inthehands I don't have enough mastery of estimation to make a fair comparison of the cost of build vs. buy. Especially now, there are enough high-quality libraries and toolkits that are easy to license (FOSS) that the cost to build what you want really isn't that high, and you can simplify a design greatly if it doesn't have to be highly abstract to cater to a wide audience but instead only has to do one thing in one way.

I think what's really important is to always have a cadre of developers on hand who are capable of building out custom services as needed, even if you do just buy something, they will be needed to do integration and reporting work, but having the capability means you are able to take advantage when there is an opportunity to do something cheaply in-house instead of letting a vendor gouge you. Esp when _you_ know how much work it takes to build the thing they are selling you, and are not impressed.

@inthehands One thing about Universities is that they often share information and resources with each other in ways that private businesses do not, or at least they do in my limited experience, so one school building a tool they can license to other schools for a nominal fee, or each pony up an FTE for development/maintenance, is a reasonable approach to compare with buying something from a proprietary commercial vendor. Internet2 hosts a bunch of infrastructure projects that have this model, but not many of them are direct end-user edtech services.

@dalias @JessTheUnstill I think some politicians want to *appear* to be stronger than they are, and they are afraid to confront a problem like insubordination to democratic rule from the forces head on, even to name it what it is, because they bring attention to their weakness, they prefer to work on problems where the political upside is more clear and there are fewer risks, although plenty are happy to work on nothing at all.

@dalias @JessTheUnstill they pretty much openly threatened DeBlasio's daughter when there were mass protests in 2020 against police violence. The NYPD Union official Twitter account sent out a message to the effect of "we know where your daughter lives" that was a pretty open threat.

@inthehands @Sadsquatch I have an old friend who basically lived on doing small simple websites for local businesses, sometimes in trade (bartab), but its a service that every business needs. A couple pages, with hours, menu, contact info, that gets updated with daily specials or event calendars, that the business owner can update themselves with just a few CMS features or they can email the stuff to the "web guy/gal", who can spend an hour or two per month per client. SquareSpace and Wix have taken a lot of that kind of business but it really can be distributed to a local web designer per 100 businesses or so for probably the same money as a consolidated service, keeping an army of web designers housed and fed sustainably, but it doenst make private plane money for one dude so ...

@thomasfuchs my PC is about 10y old and it plays stuff fine, I think the hardware requirements arent really going up unless you want to render high precision at some insane resolution, the hotness seems to be to render at a normal res then estimate the higher res image rather than precisely render it. But if you just render and display at normal res, like 720p you get the same quality on a 10y old GPU

@dalias yeah, that's a given,

@skinnylatte never learn, those measurements are useless anyway, and most things are marked in metric as well which helps. One place where traditional measurements make sense is in cooking with seasoning, I'm not going ot use a high precision scale to measure out 5 grams of salt, but I can throw a 1/4 teaspoon easy.

@thomasfuchs I feel that. Maybe it comes from a fear of being manipulated by malicious rumors (as a positive interpretation) or a fear of conflict and excuse to do no moderation (as a negative interpretation).

What do you feel this behavior stems from, or do you know of any research which attempts to pin it down?

@skinnylatte congrats on not dying! happy birthday. 🎂

@thomasfuchs people want to "ShAKe thInGs UP" like a bunch of bored monkeys

@thomasfuchs @anon_opin what I find annoying, maybe it's a Firefox thing, is that the `<time>` element seems to exist to solve this problem but doesn't to do anything for me. The time Element has a datetime attribute which takes an iso8601 timestamp so you could tag the text "one year ago" with the exact time which a browser could display as a tooltip or a reader could have a specific way to say.

@skinnylatte Honestly this joke example is better than some of the technical documentation I've read, as a software developer / sysadmin, at least it lists the path you are expected to find some config file in, so many docs will just say "and go change the foobix setting in the config file" without ever saying _where_ the config file is located (or what you are supposed to change it to), so you have to strace the process to figure out where it loads configs from which is a ridiculous thing to have to do. Or something will say to "frobnicate this setting" but won't tell you what the setting actually _is_, is it "setting=Frobnicate" capitalized is it "setting='frobnicate'" in quotes is it "setting=3" (where 3 is defined as Frobnicate somewhere else), or is it "setting: { value='Frobnicate'; }" or some other format. Even better when there isn't a message about an invalid setting, so guessing wrong just doesn't work with no indication as to why. A simple example could clear up so much confusion from trying to describe things in words, badly, but is sometimes mission impossible.