This quarrel is the usual political theater intended to distract from all the awful shit happening in the background (dismantling the remains of the welfare state and safety nets, impending environmental & climate disasters, and the ol’ favorite - insane wealth redistribution upwards).

However this time, with an actual fascist in power, all the prop guns on stage are actually real and I wouldn’t be surprised if Elon is deported or even “found dead”. He fucked around and got a fascist elected, I hope he finds out. Either way, this is not something to pay any attention to.

No birthright citizenship in a country founded and inhabited almost entirely by immigrants, with no mandatory national ID? Yeah that’s gonna be a shitshow and a half.

True enlightenment is realizing that variables don’t exist, it’s all just a sequence of bits in RAM that we assign meaning to as desired.

Ascension is realizing that bits don’t exist, it’s all just trapped electrons in transistors which we imagine to be bits.

Transcendence is realizing that transistors or code doesn’t exist, and it’s just some quarks and electrons attracted and repulsed by weird forces, vibrating and convulsing in a soup with entropy constantly rising until the heat death of the universe, of which we make futile attempts to make sense or purpose.

Next time a consumer get stuck with a practically irreplaceable battery because it’s too expensive from a company, they will look at other companies selling equivalent products, AND how much they are charging for batteries.

No. Just look at the current phone market. The average consumer doesn’t care enough about repairs down the road, or at least it doesn’t affect their purchasing decisions, they are mostly driven by convenience and familiarity. If what you’re saying was true, everyone would be buying fairphones.

I also imagine a business of spare parts because just having to give the right data, e.g. specifications like cell, module, pack, C-rate, E-rate, SOC, DOD, voltage, capacity, energy, cycle life, but also connectors and just size, will probably open up dedicated spare part vendors.

Those specs are already widely available for many phones and in fact you can buy aftermarket 3rd-party batteries for most of them. The problem is that battery replacements are painful, require specialized equipment (at least a hotplate, suction cup, spudger for most phones) and skills (not breaking the screen/glass back, unglueing the battery without exploding it, then carefully glueing everything back together etc). This is what the law should be addressing first; if it were easy to replace batteries (like a 1-minute job instead of 30-minute job), you would see a lot more DYI replacements and probably way longer lasting phones on average.

While 3D geometry is more difficult for me than 2D, I could almost immediately tell that the answer is no, there are infinitely many points H that satisfy this. The reason it’s unintuitive is that our intuition about what “perpendicular” means comes from 2D and poorly translates to 3D.

The most intuitive explanation I can muster is this: imagine all possible planes that pass through both A and P. It should be obvious that there are infinitely many of them (I visualize it as a plane “rotating” around the AP axis). Each of these planes intersects the given plane since it passes through A. Think of the intersection line. It never passes through P (unless P is on the plane), so it is always possible to draw a perpendicular line from P to that intersection line. With one exception (when the perpendicular line falls on the A point), the point where the perpendicular falls satisfies the conditions for H. (I think all such points actually form a circle with AP’ as the diameter, where P’ is the parallel projection of P to the given plane, but I’m not 100% sure)

Eh, honestly it’s, like, functional (you can recognize it and draw a facsimile of it in 3 minutes with two pens). I wouldn’t call “it pretty good”.

Whenever I need to provide an estimate, I ask everyone on the team for their gut feeling, take the second-largest estimate and multiply by 1.5. Seems to work pretty well. (if you can’t tell I don’t know what I’m doing with management)

the third is only a problem if you’re already looking for a problem.

“Is vacation 28 days” should not be a question, it should be the minimum mandated by law. “Will you work weekends” should rarely be a question, it should be heavily regulated and only allowed for positions where it’s truly required (and never to compensate for management fuckups).

Feels like they are both made up scenarios for rage-bait.

Actually for both of them, the conclusion is correct. “The second they’ll get a better offer they’ll vanish” - no shit, this is how it works under capitalism. Want to keep them? Make a better offer. “The second they find someone to do the same for less pay, they’ll fire you” - no shit, this is how it works under capitalism. Want to make that harder to do? Join or organize a union, and otherwise fight for your labor rights.

Not an exact alternative (it’s missing reviews and photos are relatively rare), but I use OsmAnd for this. Most “official” trails (e.g. those maintained by the park administration, etc) are mapped on OpenStreetMap already. There’s also support for “Travel Routes” (I think they come from WikiTravel? Not sure); this covers the most popular “unofficial” routes. Once I ran out of those, I started just looking at mountains without trees but with a path to the summit marked on the map. This way, I’ve been able to find hikes for almost every weekend for three years now (definitely over 100 at this point) in a tiny country (Georgia); I’ve obviously had some misses (paths being overgrown, trails being meh, etc) but overall I’ve found it really nice.

a mobile OS that basically eschews backwards compatibility

I have an app built for Android 4 running on my Android 15 device. It looks ugly but it works. Of course other apps will not be so lucky, but some backwards compat is absolutely there.

a desktop OS that can still run 30 year old applications

Not really, Microsoft is steadily breaking old stuff. For example lot of 10-15 year old software that was doing something hardware-related would be broken now due to driver signing changes/restrictions (e.g. WinRing0 things).

the most popular OS

It’s barely the second most popular OS, after Android. iOS is pretty close behind it. And yet the amount of complaints Windows gets seems to be far higher than that of Android.

To me it seems they’re behaving (driving? riding?..) in a very surprising/unsafe manner on the road. Admittedly I’m from a country with a completely different driving culture. Do people just ride scooters like that in China?

Also, there’s this interesting legal question of who is responsible when one of those things crashes into a car or a pedestrian.

Other than that, this is cool as heck and I want my bicycle to do the same now.

For example, in the US, Samsung has had locked bootloaders on all its phones since the Galaxy S7.

Yikes. While shopping for a new phone last year I was under the impression that at least in the European market they still allow you to unlock the bootloader, even on the latest models. The catch is that there’s pretty much no third-party Android distros that work with the phones, because they don’t release drivers or kernel patches and people have to scrape them from first-party OS images, which sounds horrible.

You can (on most Android phones) run an Android fork that doesn’t have Google services running and gets software and updates from elsewhere, e.g. GrapheneOS. Can’t do that with an iPhone. I get that you’re still ultimately dependent on Google to continue Android development and make security updates, but it’s way less of a dependency. And yes, GNU-ish Linux on phones would be awesome.

Both iPhones and MacBooks (to a lesser extent) rely on US services provided by Apple. They (techically) can execute arbitrary code on your devices if you have auto-update enabled (and probably even if not). They’re almost definitely spying on you, your habits, your decisions etc.

Good for the environment? I recycle everything I can. I don’t use plastic bags or single-use cups. I avoid using heating in the winter to save on CO2 emissions (used it for 2 days this winter when my gf was sick). I stave off aircon in the summer for as long as I can to save electricity. I’m vegan (mostly because of ethical concerns but also because meat is awful for the planet in general). I avoid using my car when there’s an alternative (cycling/public transit).

Good for me? I do at least some exercise (stretching, workout, jogging, cycling) every workday and hike on the weekend. I brush my teeth twice a day, floss weekly, and get a full dental cleaning annually, and because of this (and genetic luck I suppose) I never had any issues with my teeth (don’t have even a single filling). I don’t drink alcohol or smoke at all. I avoid caffeine and sugars when possible.

I feel privileged to be able to form those habits, and also often blame myself that I don’t do better. I’m addicted to fat and carbohydrate-heavy foods, can’t bring myself to clean the apartment with any regularity beyond the most necessary, and can’t form a habit of regularly reading books. Sometimes I wonder how other adults manage when they have a 9-5 office job with commute times, kids, etc.

Don’t get my hopes up

Anything more complicated than business logic in JS/Python sends LLMs into a guessing game that can take you those 3 hours to get out of. Try asking it to write embedded software in C, hardware-interfacing code in Rust, or any non-trivial TemplateHaskell.

I hate that I understood the joke immediately…

We made a (so far internal) tool at work that takes your activity from Github, your calendar, and the issue tracker, feeds that to a local LLM, which spits out a report of what you have been doing for the week. It messes up sometimes, but speeds up the process of writing the report dramatically. This is one of those cases where an LLM actually fits.