This all interests me very much. In the analogy of the game developer, they are still bound by the rules of the computer system and the universe it runs in and potentially the programming language it is written in. Also, skill.

Taking that into the analogy, a God who is omniscient by our standards but limited by the capabilities of something outside of our understanding is honestly a more reasonable explanation to me than most conceptions about free will or whatever.

As a nerd, I don’t expect my parental control settings to work forever. They’re more there to prevent childish naivete from getting them into trouble, they probably won’t stop dedicated teen horniness. And I won’t even be mad, figuring out how to get around them requires learning more about how technology works.

I’ve had a few of those little gimmick penis candies and they are terrible. I mean, it’s just some trash molded into a penis to be funny. Where are the gourmet candy penises?

You are correct that a reboot will trigger a full rescan. I’m always on the lookout for better sync. I just don’t think it’s out there right now for easy bidirectional sync.

Basically, if you want to set and forget, Syncthing is the best option. If you want more control, you’ll need to look into setting up rsync scripts or similar, which will at least better let you control how often to sync.

That doesn’t fix the problem, it just changes who has the problem. Though I’ll admit that idiots buying bad stuff from other idiots in a cycle until eventually one idiot gets their life totally ruined feels a little on the nose.

Alright, best is an exaggeration. But $5/print assumes it breaks before I print anymore. The actual value is still unknown.

I got a Lexmark business laser printer from a place that was going out of business for like $50. Best investment I ever made. It just sits there quietly, not doing anything, until I print something like twice a year. Five years in and it still works fine, I haven’t even replaced the toner.

RatGDO is a local ESP device you can hook into a LiftMaster to connect it to WiFi in a better way. Highly recommend.

Usually I say “don’t mistake incompetence for malice” because so often when people fuck up, they aren’t doing it to be mean but just because they’re stupid.

In this case, though, you’re mistaking malice for incompetence. Everything Reagan fucked up was 100% intentional. I mean, punishing black people and poor people was basically a campaign promise.

They should flash when they are first turned on, so you can tell that they turned on. That helps diagnose connection issues versus power issues. After that, though, darkness please.

I like async but dislike await. I spend entirely too much time on everything I build trying to maximize how much I can do in parallel because I find it tremendously satisfying.

Nah, this one has a margin of error. It’s just that “take down a large percentage of all computers in the world simultaneously” is quite a bit outside of that margin for a security software.

I caved and got an A11y on sale. I explained why I think those games are trash, but at the end of the day I caved to peer pressure that wasn’t even directed at me. On the plus side, we can play stuff together in the same room now.

I’m so sorry to have to be the one to tell you but, based on your positions, you’re absolutely the crazy uncle. And I wouldn’t be surprised if you were drunk when you watched the 93 Super Mario.

Everyone’s like, “It’s not that impressive. It’s not general AI.” Yeah, that’s the scary part to me. A general AI could be told, “btw don’t kill humans” and it would understand those instructions and understand what a human is.

The current way of doing things is just digital guided evolution, in a nutshell. Way more likely to create the equivalent of a bacteria than the equivalent of a human. And it’s not being treated with the proper care because, after all, it’s just a language model and not general AI.

He’s always been a contrarian. It was harmless and even enjoyable in the 90s and early 2000s when, to him, that meant eating vegetarian and believing in some Hippie woowoo bullshit while being firmly against organized religion and generally distrustful of corporations.

I miss hippie Scott Adams. Weird right-wing Scott Adams is not enjoyable.

Outright bans are because government bodies are scared of nuance. You can also see this in “zero-tolerance” policies that do things like punish the victim because they were “involved” in a fight, or punish a kid who nibbles a chicken nugget into the shape of a gun.

To be fair to schools, nuance is hard. Suppose that the rule is “phones may not interrupt class.” Now, what counts as an interruption may vary between classes, between teachers, and based on what’s happening in class. A student may use it during a quiet period in the class when they’ve already completed their work, and that’s acceptable. A different student will then use their phone ten minutes later, when they’re supposed to be doing something. The second student will get in trouble, but then complain that the first student didn’t get in trouble. The parent will hear, “Brayden was using his phone and he didn’t get in trouble but the second I used mine, I got in trouble. The teacher has it out for me.”

If you’ve talked to any teachers in the past few decades, a common theme is parents siding with their kids against all logic, reason, and evidence. They’ll assume that teachers are petty goblins, just looking for an excuse to pick on their kid. And parents can be outright hostile and unreasonable. When my wife was a teacher, she received more than one actual death threat from parents because she enforced rules that did NOT have any nuance or discretion. Imagine if enforcing the rule was up to the teacher’s discretion versus an outright ban.

tl;dr I agree that a ban is silly, but I totally get why schools are doing it.

I would argue that your points about kids not caring and forgetting information are not inherent to the concept of education, but to how most places do formal education.

Humans learn best through practical examples that affect their lives, and through doing things. Sitting people down and giving them information, and then later having them regurgitate that information, is just not the best way. It’s cheaper, it requires fewer teachers and fewer resources, but it is not the most effective.

It’s basically the only type of jobs program that both sides of our broken government can agree on: petty nonsense that looks like it might do something useful, but really doesn’t, and only inconveniences the poors.

My city has both, and they’re decorated the same. I just wonder whether a really good burger place did this first and then crappy ones showed up to copy the decor and forgot to make the food good.