I mean, the Black Panthers started because people realized that peaceful unarmed protests would be violently busted, but peaceful heavily armed protests were politely watched from across the street. Blindfiring into crowds is a lot less appealing for cops when the entire crowd can return fire.

Yeah, my complaints about Apple all stem from the fact that my industry has a standard program that only runs on Macs… And every Mac I’ve used has inevitably ended up taking 4x as long to do basically anything else when compared to Windows or Linux. The only reason I ever use a Mac is because my job requires it, and even then it is only begrudgingly; if there was a way to run the program on anything else, I would have done so a long time ago.

And yeah, I agree 100% about the “different first, better second” design choices. Lots of the most frustrating things about Macs are due to intentional design choices that Apple makes. Not because it is better for the user, but simply because it is different.

Because China supposedly used Nvidia cards to train DeepSeek, which blew all of the US AI out of the water. And apparently that raised some eyebrows, because Nvidia wasn’t supposed to be selling to China (free market, right?). Since China was eating big tech’s lunch, they cried to republicans (and gave them a bunch of reelection money) and now we have this bill. The point is to be able to remotely disable cards if they’re outside of their sale region.

There’s also the fact that the entire American education system is set up to teach Americans that peaceful protest is the only acceptable form of protest. History classes teach about the American revolution as if it was a fully justified break from an oppressive monarchy… And then as soon as it’s done, there’s a hard turn towards “but that was the only time violence was justified. In every other case, you’re expected to peacefully protest instead. Here, have another portrait of MLK Jr in case you forgot what he looked like.”

The Black Panthers were barely even a footnote in my history books. There weren’t any mentions of the union riots, where factory workers threatened to drag the owners out of their offices and lynch them. Because those would show that violence is effective.

Apple has had it built into iOS for a while now; This person likely got scammed out of $10 to “buy” a feature that was already baked into their OS.

Yeah, one of my most often stated phrases at work is “you can’t make people read.”

Error pops up, explaining exactly what the issue is and how to fix it? Oh god, let me call IT to see what I need to do. Yeah, you can’t make people read.

Some piece of equipment or machinery has changed in some meaningful way? Management is quick to go “just hang a sign on it, letting people know the new process.” Nope, you can’t make people read. People will physically move the sign to the side, try to use the machine like they previously did, and get surprised when it doesn’t work as expected.

Some area is unsafe due to work happening overhead? “Oh just hang signs on the doors, telling people not to come in.” No, you can’t make people read; I have seen people push their way past physical barriers with big “do not enter” signs, just to ask if we’re open. How about we lock the doors, and disable the keyways on all the doors (except one, where we have physical barriers to entry) until the work is completed?

The floor is freshly painted? People will walk past six different “do not enter - wet paint” signs and physically push past stanchions or barriers, and then act surprised when their shoes stick to the floor.

I’ve said for a while that you could shut down an entire city with just a few buddies and like $200 in drywall screws. Have each friend drive on a different highway (or in a different direction on each highway) and sprinkle drywall screws as they go. Not just like a single dump, but a good consistent scatter so the entire highway is a minefield and takes hours to properly sweep up.

They also removed radar, which is what allowed them to make all of those “it saw something three vehicles ahead and braked to avoid a pileup that hadn’t even started yet” videos. Removing radar was the single most impactful change Tesla made in regards to FSD, and it’s all because Musk basically decided “people drive fine with just their eyes, so cars should too.”

Yeah, Gnome is like the Apple of the Linux world. The devs have the same kind of “we know better than you do” mentality towards design. The issue tracker is a lot of “hey the OS won’t let me do [edge-case scenario that an OS should be able to do, but which most users won’t bother with]” followed by the devs going “Gnome isn’t designed to support [edge-case scenario]. Bug report closed.” Like the devs have a very “it’s not a bug; It’s a feature” mentality, and anyone who runs into that bug must be using the OS “wrong”.

This is honestly a win-win. Either the courts recognize that the LLM uses stolen copyrighted content, or they recognize that torrenting is legal by default.

Though with the way courts have been bending case law into knots recently, I wouldn’t be surprised if they somehow word the ruling in a way that favors Meta and makes torrenting outright illegal.

It’s a directory. When you create a new note, it creates a new file inside of that directory. My point was simply that you can always just browse the directory and read the plaintext file for whichever note you want. Obsidian simply adds things like text formatting and automatic links to other notes.

Yeah, I tired Audiobookshelf and gave up after fighting with it for a day or two. It refused to read or write any data on my NAS, so it couldn’t actually save/load any audiobook files.

It stores your data in plaintext, and simply uses the program to parse special formatting characters. There are no attempts at obfuscation or encryption, and it doesn’t lock you into a walled garden that refuses to play nice with other programs. The program itself is closed-source, but anyone could write an open source version to parse the same info… There just hasn’t been a good reason to do so. Even if Obsidian as a company and program ceases to exist overnight, your data is still safe on your machine and can be read by anyone who cares enough to dig into the file. Hell, you can even open it as the plaintext file and dig through it manually.

This is the third time today that I have seen a reference to the sword of Damocles. Almost as if the entire fucking world feels like it’s only a thread away from destruction…

And here’s a reminder that if you run a Plex server, there’s an app called Prologue which turns it into a fully fledged audiobook server.

Plex doesn’t natively support things like audiobook bookmarks in m4b files, and tries to just play them straight through like a gigantic 4 hour long music track. But Prologue does support bookmark data. Prologue simply uses Plex’s service to access the files, (because admittedly, Plex is good for letting newbies remotely access their content) and then it ignores Plex’s built-in “lol just play it like music” instructions, and actually parses the files for bookmark data.

As someone who couldn’t get Audiobookshelf to work properly, (something about not being able to access network drives via Docker), Prologue has saved my audiobook library by allowing me to just host it via Plex instead.

And then there are things like poor sleep hygiene when very young can trigger a correlates with the development of ADHD later on.

FTFY. Correlation≠Causation, especially in cases like you mentioned. It’s a chicken and egg scenario.

Are kids getting ADHD because they didn’t sleep well? Or is poor sleep hygiene an early indicator of ADHD? Lots of people with ADHD have poor sleep hygiene, even as adults. Many will struggle with things like Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, because they get their biggest bursts of focus late at night when everyone else is asleep, the brain is releasing dopamine to keep them awake, and distractions are limited. Every single adult with ADHD has stories about getting focused on a project right before bedtime, then suddenly realizing the birds are chirping outside their window and the sun is rising.

Yeah, I actually hate that forums are being abandoned in favor of Discord. Especially since a lot of the moves are for tech support. Discord serves an entirely different function than a forum. A forum is for someone 10 years ago to ask a question, get it answered, and then have that question pop up as a search result for the next decade whenever others have the same question. You didn’t need to create an account and start your own thread to get your question answered. You just googled it and found it.

Discord acting as a replacement simply means that people constantly ask the same “how do I [x]” questions all day every day. It’s exhausting because every single question needs to be answered with it’s own reply, instead of simply having the answer ready to go as soon as the user googles it.

I get it. You’re a startup tech company. You don’t want to pay for server space for a forum. And Discord is free, so you might as well just start a server there. But that means your admins/mods are going to spend all day responding to every single “how do I update”, when it could simply be a google search instead.