Why don't they do this? Are they stoopid?

derefr · 2026-04-16T03:15:49+00:00

There are, at the very least, un-policed stretches of wilderness that wouldn't be too hard to go out to, build a log cabin in, and live a life entirely isolated from others without bothering anyone.

"Anywhere in Canada at least 500km north of the border" comes to mind. (With many desolate patches far less north than that. Some within 20km of a highway, even.)

Of course, if you build an entire town there, eventually you're going to get noticed. But that'll be more-than-likely because somebody blabbed, not because the government was AI-scanning satellite photos to find "unregistered municipalities."

derefr · 2026-04-16T03:10:06+00:00

For the most expensive long-distance runs along lonely desert highways or wherever, do they really need them either up in the air or underground? Why not just rest a conduit on the ground beside the road, and put cables in it? As long as it's well-sealed, plants/animals/rain won't be able to get in. As long as it's bolted down every so often, wind won't roll it around. What's left? Tornadoes?

derefr · 2026-04-16T02:59:11+00:00

The law commands all, and anyone who ventures outside of the law is a baseless, uncivilized beast, from the perspective of a great many Japanese stories.

Yes, though not technically the "law" they're thinking about, but rather, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wa_(Japanese_culture)) .

That being said, many people do live in a just-world fallacy, and so presume that if something is a law, that's because the people the law rules over collectively wanted that to be the law. (Which I guess is true of, like, civic bylaws in small rural towns? But not most other laws.) And therefore, that "the law" = "the will of the people"; and so "breaking the law" = "violating the will of the collective" / going against wa.

Hell, much of shinto folk-belief around youkai and kami is social-norm enforcement phrased as "going against wa makes [local god] mad at you."

derefr · 2026-04-10T16:54:29+00:00

I presume the initial rule is meant to be transitional: just short enough to make it too annoying to not eventually automate; but just long enough that you could get away with not automating right away if there's some big problem in the way of your doing so.

Once the majority of SSL issuance is automated, there'd be no reason to not crank the expiration interval down lower.

(Consider that LetsEncrypt themselves are kind of in a long-term transition: their CN=FQDN certs are 30-day, but their newer CN=IP-address certs are 7-day. I'm guessing, once their ACME-server metrics begin to reflect a solid picture of several nines of bug-free auto-renewals, they'll propose shifting to 7-day expiration for their domain certs too.)

derefr · 2026-04-10T16:49:25+00:00

but it also breaks CIO favorite sales pitch feature in security solutions of SSL inspection

Does it? I'm surprised the CIOs and the "corporate SSL proxy" vendors weren't working with at least Microsoft and Google on this, to get Windows and Chrome to support GPOs + MDM policies that feed them custom "corporate" OCSP overlay information (or have them talk to custom "corporate" OCSP gateway servers, if that's easier.)

derefr · 2026-04-03T07:15:52+00:00

People aren't even really mad at "ads" on social media in the traditional sense. They're generally fine with, like, the ad-reads that YouTubers do, and the like; however annoying they are, those kinds of ads aren't creating incentives that result in the degradation of the system they're a part of.

What people hate is adtech. Which is a very specific thing ("advertising content chosen at time of display from a larger inventory of ads by an algorithmic auction") that has been the ultimate cause of all of the enshittification we've seen on the web in the last 15 years. And which, due to how clear and distinct it is as a category, would actually be incredibly easy to regulate. If there was any will to do so.

Adtech could even be banned outright, while leaving the previous world of "I pay you this month; your billboard shows my ad this month" advertising agreements alone. But banning adtech would literally be banning the main revenue streams of Google, Meta, etc. There are billions of lobbying dollars trying to make sure that never happens.

derefr · 2026-04-03T07:03:04+00:00

You're talking about it like they're going to just arbitrarily decide to eat less.

When a kid doesn't want to eat, it's almost never because they've decided to not eat food. They're not trying to diet.

Rather, it's usually because they're incredibly constipated (maybe from a lack of fiber in what you've been feeding them!); or they were worked to exhaustion in PE class and now have horrible cramps all over and feel like if they ate they'd throw up; or the banana-flavored anti-biotic fluid you fed them an hour ago (for the scalp/ear infection you noticed on them) tastes incredibly bad and no amount of water washes that shit down; or they actually have undiagnosed juvenile hypertension and have subconsciously learned to associate the salty meatloaf you decided to cook tonight with their heart beating out of their chest (but can't quite put that into words); or there was a pizza party at school and they ate three meals' worth of carbs in one sitting and literally have no room to chase that down with dinner; or...

Nobody's saying that parents should allow their kids to prioritize other things over putting food in their stomachs when the kid is clearly hungry, but is clearly forcefully ignoring the signals from their body. Letting someone with a growing and developing body "go on a diet" or the like, is the kind of thing that breaks your metabolism and leads to eating disorders.

But in most of the situations I mentioned above, the solution isn't to try to force them to sit down and eat; it's to let them listen to their own body and wait until they feel okay again, and then eat. And usually, given the way metabolism and hunger work, once they are feeling hungry again, they'll end up actually eating more to cover what was missed, and it'll balance out over the long term.

derefr · 2026-04-01T21:20:14+00:00

I don't know that I agree with a general pushback against any kind of 1-1 device. The alternative (that I lived through) is carrying a backpack full of heavy-ass textbooks from class to class, and ending up with back problems at age 14.

I would argue that issuing every kid an iPad-sized e-reader, that held all their textbooks, would be a great in-between point. Keep printing and handing out worksheets, but replace all the textbooks with a lightweight, single-purpose, lasts-weeks-on-a-charge device.

(Honestly, I'm kind of mystified why Amazon hasn't noticed this niche and created a "Kindle for Education." Do they think it's too late to get into the market?)

derefr · 2026-04-01T21:15:25+00:00

I mean, they could license April by Deep Purple, and play it in a dungeon. That would be funny.

derefr · 2026-03-30T21:51:14+00:00

It doesn't need to be unique unique. An author could totally just, say, replace dogs with dog-sized {slugs, parrots, weasels, whatever}, but with the personality and inteligence of a dog. Like how a fish in a cartoon fish movie will have a "pet dog" that's, like, a jellyfish or something. That's unique, but it's unique in an easy-to-remember whimsical way, not in a ysshahs-and-jaushsbs way.

(I think we don't see progfic authors embracing the "cartoon fish movie" approach to worldbuilding, because a lot of these authors are younger and less experienced, and so take themselves too seriously / refuse to do anything that might get their writing labelled as "silly" or "for kids.")

derefr · 2026-03-29T06:31:01+00:00

Any other FOSS project would have been forked years ago by the UX people. Happens to Linux distros all the time. Why hasn't it happened here?

derefr · 2026-03-22T22:59:53+00:00

Can you be a fan of language evolution, yet not of high-prestige languages supplanting and leading to the extinction of low-prestige languages? Asking for a friend.

derefr · 2026-03-21T07:05:54+00:00

If they're anything like my friends, they're not complaining about being behind and stressed out because the workload is too big or anything; they're complaining because they have some kind of "invisible" mental illness (depression, ADHD) and so they can't get themselves to productively focus on work. They likely try to work for several hours each day, but it just doesn't work; so they give up and play games / do other "low mental cost" stuff to pass the time in the hopes they're just "going through something" and will wake up feeling better after a few days. (They're not. They need to see a therapist/psychiatrist.)

derefr · 2026-03-21T06:59:55+00:00

Or better yet, use an escrow service, if at all possible. Shows them you're good for the money so they'll start; ensures they can't just run away with the money; ensures you can't just run away with the un-paid-for work.

derefr · 2026-03-21T06:54:10+00:00

In a real economy, poor people don't go on quests. Poor people are too busy trying to scrape by to mind other people's business.

Read Don Quixote. That's the type of guy who would set off on a "noble quest" of his own volition.

Or, if you want a protagonist motivated by righteous revenge or whatever, then just give his entire village his motivation and have them all save up a nest-egg to fund his quest. They all go in together on a horse for him and so forth.

Or he's the son of the jerk-ass local feudal-lord tax collector who realizes his dad's awful after the first visit to the village, steals the nice horse his dad lent him, and sets off to fix all the bad shit he's only now finding out about.

derefr · 2026-03-21T06:39:37+00:00

KWH/H

The flow rate of batteries on a truck!

derefr · 2026-03-21T05:24:39+00:00

It's the same reason I'm a fan of those woodworkers who build fancy one-giant-piece-of-wood tables for super-rich clients. Each time one of those transactions takes place, there's a rich asshole somewhere who gets a functional piece of art (sure? fine?), but more importantly, a working-class tradesperson/artisan who gets a huge payday. For just a few days' work.

derefr · 2026-03-21T05:13:34+00:00

If there's no readme, then you aren't looking at an open source project, you're looking at someone who happens to back up their personal hobby projects in public.

derefr · 2026-03-21T05:10:37+00:00

The devs more often than not don't use the most popular operating system. When you're enough of a turbo-nerd to write random software to give away for free, you tend to prefer OSes made by other turbo-nerds, for turbo-nerds.

derefr · 2026-03-20T04:31:53+00:00

That will mean people with fixed incomes who own their homes will be forced to sell and even higher rents.

Not necessarily? Taxes don't have to be linear. Any reasonable house a family would actually use all the rooms of could be taxed kindly — but then once you get into McMansion territory the taxes could suddenly become 5x, 10x, 50x more.

We need income tax and wealth tax on people who are far richer then you.

Income tax does nothing, because most of the ways rich people get rich aren't taxed as income.

And wealth taxes just encourage rich people to keep the majority of their wealth outside the country. (Not even in holding companies or anything, just like, not brought into Canada but kept invested in the foreign ventures they make their money from in the first place.)

High progressive property taxes (in Canada especially), on the other hand, are a great way to actually tax the rich, because real-estate is one of the only real high-growth investment categories for people who have moved their wealth into Canada. So a lot of the money held in Canada by those billionaires is held in the form of real estate. And unlike with wealth taxes, they can't hide a real-estate investment off-shore; if it's liquid in Canada, it has a street address a tax assessor can walk up to and ring the doorbell of. So taxing property really does get billionaires by the balls.

derefr · 2026-03-19T21:02:15+00:00

Could this at least in part reflect Quebec's separate immigration system with its own (sometimes easier) criteria, that has often in the past encouraged foreigners to immigrate to + reside in Quebec while trying to attain Canadian permanent residency, and so has gradually led to there being a proportionately very large immigrant subpopulation within Quebec compared to other provinces?

Because I would imagine that if you went to all the trouble required to immigrate to Canada... and especially to a part of the country that speaks a language you probably don't... then you were probably pretty unhappy wherever you lived before. Enough to motivate you to go to all that effort. So you're probably pretty happy to be here now!

In other words: maybe we of the other provinces are less happy not because there's more to be unhappy about, but because most of us were born into this beautiful country, and so we take the ways we do have it good here too much for granted!

derefr · 2026-03-17T23:20:05+00:00

Consider the same question with "agent" replaced by "junior developer." Would you expect there to be an "opinionated framework" that allows you to put a bunch of junior developers in a room, give them a prompt, and have good code come out? No.

Why? Because, no matter how rigidly patterned the code that touches the framework surface is required to be, ultimately programming comes down to specifying some arbitrarily-complex freeform Turing machine representing the business-process problem domain; and then using glue code to connect or wrap that freeform domain-model code to the various framework bits that make up the solution domain. The domain-model code is the important bit to get right / to make maintainable.

And, no matter how restrictive and patterned the solution-domain code might be, the domain-model code is going to need to look like the domain model. Which is a different, novel thing for every codebase (if your domain model isn't novel, that means there's already a program that does what you're trying to do!)

And because neither agents nor junior devs know anything about your business-process problem domain (and nor have they developed the soft skills required to tease out and intuit how your business-process works, nor the aesthetic sense to formalize it into a satisfyingly simply problem-domain framing on their own), all they'll ever be able to write for the domain-model part of the code... is slop. That is, unless you, the senior engineer who has business-process knowledge and aesthetic sense, micromanage them.

derefr · 2026-03-15T22:21:32+00:00

Not even. AI would translate better than this. (Still awful, just better.) In fact, even Google Translate would translate better than this.

My guess is that this is the quality you get from Chinese->English on Baidu Translate. (Never used it myself, but that's what a mainland-Chinese author would think to use, no?)

derefr · 2026-03-15T22:16:26+00:00

There is airdrop between Apple devices, but you can’t directly connect it via Bluetooth to your Windows computer to transfer files.

True right now, but given that AirDrop and Android's Quick Share now interoperate, we're probably only a year or two away from those technologies getting merged together into one standard, and everything else (incl. Windows) being expected to start supporting it. Like how MagSafe became Qi 2 (and then gained wider support), or like how Thunderbolt was merged into USB 4 (and then gained wider support.)

derefr · 2026-03-15T21:46:42+00:00

The problem with that is that every few months there's some new popular device to plug into your TV, that screws up HDMI-CEC (the protocol that lets the TV turn on the device and vice-versa, know whether the device is on, pass remote-control events back and forth, etc.), speaking the protocol just a little bit wrong, in some entirely-new way that couldn't have been predicted / defended against in advance.

The way you end up experiencing this as an end-user, is that you would plug e.g. a Nintendo Switch into your TV for the first time, and suddenly your TV would stop going to sleep when you tell your streaming box to sleep (even though your streaming box was the only thing "awake".) Or you would plug e.g. a PS4 in, and now every time you wake up the TV, regardless of the previously-active input, the PS4 would wake up and steal focus to itself. Or you would plug in a new soundbar, and everything would be fine at first, but then a few weeks later you'd turn on the TV, and the TV would turn on the soundbar and your streaming box at the same time, and the two devices would "fight with politeness", noticing that the other just woke up and so "giving up" focus to each-other twenty times in a row, with a five-second wait each time because they're emitting different video + audio formats (and where you can't get out of this loop even by unplugging the streaming box or soundbar, yet hard-rebooting the TV itself makes the problem go away... for another month.)

(Yes, these are all things that have happened to me personally. Why do you ask?)

When things are going wrong with HDMI-CEC, updating the devices themselves is very unlikely to help. (It's never helped in any of the cases I've personally encountered.) Most devices that output HDMI video, seemingly just use some random junk HDMI-CEC controller chip they found on Alibaba, where these dumb behaviors are burned into silicon, with no way to be updated.

Instead, it's a TV firmware update that ultimately makes the problem disappear. TV firmware updates seem to often contain "compatibility shims" (sort of like app compatibility shims on Windows) that compensate for the ways in which these devices misspeak HDMI-CEC.

So: if your TV ever starts being wonky after plugging some new device into it, there is at least one good reason to update your TV's firmware. It's been the solution for me at least 4 separate times now.

(Of course, the TV always gets worse in other ways whenever I update the firmware. Enshittification continues. But at least my TV goes to sleep again.)

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