I used Swappa to buy my last phone. Not certified, but much cheaper. The condition of phones is “graded,” and the sellers have an incentive to keep their reputation on the platform high. I had good luck, the one time I used it, at least.

GPU acceleration, true-color, image display, etc.

Yeah, I used aircrack to gain access to one of my neighbors wifi and used it for about a month when I moved into my first apartment. After I got my own connection, I set up a guest network/SSID that was open,

Ideally, children would be educated and trained better to think critically; making people harder to manipulate through emotion. But, pragmatically, yeah, marketing/propaganda strategies are useful and even necessary for progress.

Your article made me wonder if there were any theories about ethically appealing to emotion, and I found this (psychological/political) theory interesting: https://semihcakir.com/blog/the-affective-intelligence-theory/. As I understand it, it posits that when people have low anxiety, their thinking is just habitual, but when they experience anxiety, they open themselves up to new information.

Liberal three-percenter lore?

I mean, I do think non-violent disobedience can be effective, but the state usually makes it violent. State sanctioned protests where most obey most of the rules isn’t disobedience. Is a good start though, and I hope things progress (in a good way).

So much more than an init system though, which I think is why people don’t like it. Personally, the only annoyance I have is I preferred log files over journald.

Used Teams for a bit. Seemed fine, just used it like any other IRC clone. Didn’t use it for video. Windows has a lot of annoyances; death by a thousand cuts. The Windows ecosystem also sucks: to the point where graphic card and mouse driver installers try to install spyware.

Kinda weird GPT4-Chan wasn’t referenced. A guy fine-tuned GPT-J on 4chan, then deployed bots to write posts. I guess it was more of a stunt than academic or scientific, but training on 4chan improved the model’s performance on a truthfulness benchmark.

Yeah, that’s how they sell it. Problem is, studies have shown the fraud in these programs isn’t much of an expense, in the broader context. And, Trump has granted clemency to Lawrence Duran, who stole $205M from Medicare, which tells you they don’t really care about that. These programs are actually pretty efficient, and spending funds to investigate small-time fraud would often cost more than just letting it happen. It’s not like tons of people wish to be on our shitty social programs that don’t even supply enough help for the people that absolutely need it.

Kinda depressing that all of big-tech seems to have given up “innovating” (finding applications for publicly-funded research), and have become rent-seeking dinosaurs.

From the people I know, who do depend on these programs and like Trump, they don’t believe they will have their benefits reduced. The think the other people, “taking advantage” of the system will be kicked off. It’s being sold as reducing fraud and abuse. The right-wing has been pushing this framing for decades, and many people have bought into it.

but it turns out all that cash was going toward a workforce of over 700 Indian engineers, rather than an AI.

I doubt much of that cash was going to their workforce. Should have though.

I agree that AI is overhyped and these billionaires are dumb out-of-touch psychopaths. All these people are in a kind of fascist/accelerationist cult (e/acc, Dark Enlightenment, etc). They’re also trying to focus on automating the well-paying white-collar jobs away now. It was possible to automate fork-lift drivers away decades ago (I’ve worked in a factory that did just that), it’s just usually cheaper to pay someone a low wage to do it.

Guess I just prefer languages that do it this way:

class AClass {
  var aProp = 0

  fun aMethod() {
    aProp++
  }
}

Though I suppose confusion and bugs can happen when you do something like:

class AClass {
  var aProp = 0

  fun aMethod(aProp: Int) {
    // `this.aProp` is needed to access the property
  }
}

Hmm, I’m having trouble just landing interviews. Probably 50-100 applications before an interview. The possibility of losing my home is all that keeps me motivated. I do like software engineering though, and am always working on personal projects that probably won’t make me money.

But yeah, I do find it hard to motivate myself for practicing leetcode problems, and I do suck at them, since most stuff is just about remembering algorithms I learned in a class more than a decade ago, and the few times I’ve needed to implement them myself in my career, I’d just look them up.

I’m not sure it’s “AI” causing lack of demand though. It’s just most large companies have given up “innovating,” and are in rent-seeking mode now. In the US, at least, I’ve heard that many companies are only hiring devs in India to backfill the devs they’ve laid-off or quit. I’ve interviewed with an agentic AI startup, and it was pretty obvious it was “Actually Indians” (underpayed, overworked devs would fix the shitty code their AI agent would write). Most of the interviews I’ve gotten were to lead a team of all-remote Indian devs.

I’ve always found needing to manually add a class instance parameter (i.e. self) to every object method really weird. And the constructors being named __init__. Not having multiple dispatch is kinda annoying too. Needing to use decorators for class methods, static methods, and abstract classes is also annoying. Now that I think about it, Python kinda sucks (even though it’s the language I use the most, lol).

Haven’t used it yet, but venice.ai looks interesting; they have a good privacy policy. Right now, I just use ChatGPT with the “improve models” setting turned off, and use “temporary chat” mode. I don’t really trust OpenAI to be doing the right thing though. I’ve used 14B models locally, but they aren’t as good as 72B+ models.

I like ranger (https://github.com/ranger/ranger).

I know a couple life-long Republicans I sometimes briefly talk about politics with (one family, one acquaintance). Neither of them like Trump, but like the idea around Project 2025. One is an evangelical Christian, the other is a Catholic.

The Catholic strongly believes government should be run like a business, and the president should be like a CEO, so he should be able to fire everyone and replace them, if needed, with workers that will execute his plans. He’s also an anti-abortion, and tough-on-crime/immigration type. However, he strongly disapproves of Trump seemingly being pro-Russian now, Trump and his cabinet’s personal lives (he’s always strangely fixated on people’s personal lives, in a moral sense, for some reason), the take-over of the FBI and CIA, and the tariffs hurting his stock portfolio.

The evangelical Christian just doesn’t like Trump as a person, and doesn’t like Russia. He’s a just-world-hypothesis, small government, women are subservient, pro-business type; but also low/lower-middle-class, and has needed, and will need the social services he opposes. I guess his opinions are pretty similar to the Catholic’s, just a little more extreme on the social side, and supports policies that have always hurt him. I mean, Republican policies hurt the (fairly wealthy) Catholic too, but at least they get to say their taxes are lower and there’s less red-tape.