Source?

I’m more willing to forgive not getting Baizhu for the promise of unlimited cheap energy…

Whatever else you can say, Hillary was not channeling a lot of enthusiasm outside of a very narrow group.

It felt like there were weeks in peak campaign season where she wasn’t touring or making speeches. What even was her signature issue? (Considering how she was associated with the abortive attempts towards universal health care during Bill’s term, that would have been a sensible focus, but I don’t recall it mentioned once)

The whole campaign reeked of “play to not lose” rather than “play to win”. She assumed she was the annointed favourite, guaranteed the win, and that’s not really going to excite uncommitted voters. Bernie, at least, generated buzz.

Back in the Windows 8 era, I bought a little 8" tablet PC from Dell. It was flaky from basically day 1, and after ~2 weeks it bricked entirely.

I go to RMA and they ask “If we refund you $50, would you be willing to keep the unit? How about $75?”

Admittedly, they did give me a refund, but that was so the wrong branch to follow on the chat script, honey. If I’m going to be out over three hundred dollars for a paperweight it better at least be made of something cool like meteorite.

I guess I was startled when I went for my go-to desktop (fvwm) and it wasn’t in the main repo, but the AUR.

It feels like it means they’re not actually maintaining a lot of their package pool, just tossing it off on third parties.

I started with some UMSDOS-based “full X11 desktop in 5 floppies” distro on a 486, then went through Slackware, RedHat 5 with glibc breakage, actually bought a SuSE boxed set in the 7.x era, mostly stuck with Slackware unril I realized I wanted stuff like Steam and perhaps some degree of dependency resolution is nice. Bounced off of Arch (the AUR is a terrible concept IMO) and ended up on Void, which gives me Slackware-like vibes, but a little more built for broadband instead of CD images. Been trying Debian Sid latrly, just because I put it on my new laptop and I figured I’d go consistent, but I’m not sure I’m sold. Everything works, but even for an “unstable”, the packages are dated and I dislike systemd on principle.

Perhaps a lottery scheme would work, like hunting permits. That seems to manage a constrained resource.

I think 2049 is the 100th anniversary of the current PRC, so a reasonable target for ceremonial goals.

No different than saying an American leader said he wanted a Mars landing for the tricentennial in 2076. It’s good symbolism, not necessarily a technical merric.

I’m surprised nobody makes an affordable PCI or maybe even USB GPIO box.

To me, the RasPi served two purposes:

• if you wanted GPIOs and the associated ecosystem of hats/shields/capes/straightjackets but a less barebones experience than a bare metal MCU
• RiscOS, because an Archimedes is far rarer than even an Amiga or ST in the Rogue Colonies

I figure we get two things out of it:

• Regaining the moral high ground; we are no longer complicit. This is, to a big degree, playing for a domestic audience, and I think it’s what a lot of protesters are after. Yes, Congress may ultimately cut the cheques, but I’m pretty sure the administration can find ways to tie up delivery of support in red tape.
• Israeli impunity has always been backstopped by the assumption the US would never turn on them. If other countries turn up their nose, it doesn’t have the same meaning. Losing American support would be a huge shock to their political system.

Alternatively, we could go to the point and publically declare what everyone knows-- Netanyahu is fanning the war because once it’s over, his administration is defunct, and his legal problems resume. We could singularly demonize HIM as a warmonger-- personal sanctions, supporting his prosecution for war crimes, or classic Cold War style encouragement of regime change.

Yes, whatever we do, we piss off Israel, but if we don’t take off the kid gloves now, then when? If they finally admit to nuclear weapons by dropping one?

It’s just unusual that they’re always held to different/unrealistic expectations.

Perhaps they’re victims of their branding/positioning.

If a Trump, or even a Romney, says “we can wash our hands of a little genocide in the middle east for political gameplay/economic convenience/religious theories”, that’s pretty much within what people expect of them. The GOP has had a vaguely evil air since at least Nixon, if not McCarthy.

The Democrats, however, try to present themselves as trying to be on the right side of history. While this is no doubt a combination of cynical “this locks in some demographics” and “social justice is still cheaper than actual economic reform”, it means people expect a little higher standards. The bar is unbelievably low here, and he’s still tripping over it.

When will that be?

We couldn’t primary Biden in 2024 if we wanted to. Even the unaligned votes that should be a symbol of “hey, you’re not pleasing your base” were ignored. In 2028, they’ll surely push K-hole as the safe choice because even if Trump dies, you know they’ll put his head in a jar to run him again and clearly his only natural enemy is bland centre-right politics.

Biden’s appeal wasn’t that he was charismatic or brilliant or super-competent… it was that he was a reasonably sincere, respectable human, and he’s proceeded to squander that by failing to handle Gaza gracefully.

Don’t tell me he can’t do anything. Just run the same playbook we subjected Venezuela or Cuba to, and that would get Bibi’s attention.

Silly idea: computer vision for classtoom rollcall. Take a photo and it generates a list of absences.

Is United Express actually United? I thought those tended to be a regional carrier using the name under license.

I’d expect the labour friction to be still worse; I was peripherally involved with such a firm 20 years ago and know they had terrible problems with staff retention, mostly because they wouldn’t pay enough to retain people after they got fed up with the free-standby-flight privileges.

Yes, although I personally prefer “central planning enthusiast”.

I think we’re approaching the point where the word gets taken back by the community it was used to malign, if not there already. "

OTOH, it is a very effective product distinguisher. They don’t have to deal with the “Apple makes the best touchpad” meme by offering something else.

It makes shopping for laptops either super-easy or super-hard.

I can either get a Thinkpad, or try to find the one or two HP and Dell business laptops with one… and we all know how it ends (looks at stack of X230t, E585, and new L13)

Aluminium coins, like the Japanese 1-yen, can float on the surface tension of water.

If I’ve learned anything from GTA… just drive the news van around and hit pedestrians until you make budget.

Curious what the longest streaks of all time are. The PRI in Mexico had like a 75 year streak until the 2000s or so…

I’ve been playing with Stable Diffusion too, and the gacha/slot machine comparison is apt.

1 out of 50-100 images feels worth going through the followup of upscaling, tweaking and making something presentable for my low stakes desire of “gallery of wallpapers matching my particular taste.”

The big deal for me is “low stakes.” The catboy twinks have the wrong number of nipples? Your 20-page nobody-actually-reads-it report goes rampant and screams “pork pie!” in the middle of page 12? Nobody dies, no important process is at risk. I don’t trust LLMs with code because “plausible nonsense” isn’t good enough there. One missed subtle ! or & compketely changes the behaviour.

I should try ComfyUI; to be blunt, I went with Automatic1111 because there was a decent walkthrough on how to set it up on a Radeon card (using distrobox to isolate the nastiness that is Ubuntu from the rest of my machine)