251–260 of 557 posts
> (Apologies for slow load time: this blog runs on an ancient, slow Athlon box and this entry is currently being hammered by Hacker News readers.) Lol, and yet it still loads lickety split compared to something like cnn.com for instance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More people should block on Twitter. Blocking is far preferable, in an environment like Twitter, to pointless hostile misunderstanding. It's a bad look to dunk on someone for blocking you; just let them block and get on with your life. Pay it forward when someone pokes you on Twitter with a question you can tell is going to pull you into a time-wasting cortisol spike.
Its a shit rubbish reality that the only moderation option is infinite, is forever. Sever ties. End it. Write someone off as garbage. Your comment is way way too cancel culture for me. It hurts a lot having one bad exchange & having the door slammed in your face. Especially if it's some topic you feel strongly about, that you were trying to engage in. You may be right that it's a better tact than engaging. It's a shi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It's a shit system though, deeply dehumanizing ways of treating each other. The system was already deeply dehumanizing. "Block early, block often" is simply the inevitable and, frankly, only reasonable reaction to years of dealing with psychopaths, assholes and trolls on the internet. I only wish Hacker News came with its own killfile. Mine would be hundred of entries long by now.
Quoted post unavailable.
Then you haven't been looking very hard. Sites have tried just about every conceivable means of moderation from user-based moderation to charging money per account or post to karma to forcing real-name accounts. It isn't a systems problem, it's a people problem - described by the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, and you can't just cleverly engineer away people problems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
the immediate personal need to not live in a flooded zone is one thing to consider another thing to think about is the global geopolitical/civil war/economic possible disruptions and consequences of something like potentially half to 3/4 of bangladesh's population becoming international refugees. imagine what happened with syrians around 2012-2015 and people trying to get into europe multiplied by a factor of 50. and…
Global Warming is absolutely a slow motion comet strike. We don't believe the science, because we don't WANT to believe it. Those of us that DO believe it feel like robots, speaking to the rest of mankind in ones and zeros. And it's still 10-20 years away, we all think. We will just move north (or south). We will just move inland or uphill. We can science our way out of this shit. Not true. None of that is true. When…
Why not? We have a lot of promising developments both in cheap energy production and in reducing the cost to vacuumed green house gases out of the atmosphere. I can easily see a world where we change almost nothing about life and still achieve net negative carbon by just ripping it out of the air.
Honestly we even have the technology to do it now just limited will if things ever get real bad that would change very quickly.
So wrong. “If” sars1/2 had gone pandemic. The reason they didn’t is because they don’t make you infectious in an asymptomatic way like cov19. It wasn’t an “if.” They never will. And also, covid 19 is not 1 to 4 percent lethal. It’s more like 0.02 percent lethal. A Stanford professor said so. But he could have said we were lucky to not have gotten hit by a different virus that kills 80% and travels asymptomatically. T…
Sometimes you have to stop listening to what people say and get out your own tape measure/calculator. If not for yourself, so other people can take you seriously.
We have .25% of Americans officially dead from COVID so far. Not of infected Americans, of the general population. If not more person dies, "A Standford Professor" is already off by a factor of 12. Officially 1 in 5.7 of us (58m out of 331m) has been diagnosed, so even if there are people who got mild cases and didn't report, that number is likely to climb to anywhere between .7-1.4% of the overall population. Dead. In the ground. That's almost two orders of magnitude off. And if we cluster so much that hospital resources are exhausted, then that number will be higher.
> low-lying coastal nations like Bangladesh And lots of other places. About 1 billion people live along coastlines at 20 meters or less above sea level, and 200 million at 5 meters or less. I live in a wealthy country but well within the 5 meters range and am already having to think about whether it wouldn't be more prudent to sell my house today, now that it's still worth something, and emigrate to somewhere with a…
the immediate personal need to not live in a flooded zone is one thing to consider another thing to think about is the global geopolitical/civil war/economic possible disruptions and consequences of something like potentially half to 3/4 of bangladesh's population becoming international refugees. imagine what happened with syrians around 2012-2015 and people trying to get into europe multiplied by a factor of 50. and…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not terrible. I pay something like $140/mo for 1gbps (in reality I've never seen speeds >300mbps) with no data cap. $100 for ~100mbps with no data cap is reasonable to me.
You know you can like get them to fix that right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll go as far as to say that Starlink is now so good i honestly believe it's going to change the other industries and not just its own. As an example I've been looking at properties outside of suburbia since testing a friends Starlink terminal. I know i can get proper broadband on par with cable anywhere. It's changed my personal long term future plans. I think it's going to change a lot of things.
Isn’t starlink internet connection expensive atm? $99 per month plus one time h/w costs?
I get 1gbps for ~$100/mo in the bay area, but if I lived a few miles further from the city I’d get 10mbps DSL over wet string regardless of how much I’m willing to pay.
> But this is all predictable. (Except for COVID19 which was wide-screen WTFery, like the second world war—September 1st 1939 was not in fact predictable from September 1st 1929, for example: all that was predictable was that another European war would sooner or later see France and Germany at loggerheads.) I can't understand what this is saying. Not sure what 'wide-screen WTFery' is, but lots of people were predicti…
yes — even William Gibson, in a book Stross references in this blog post by using its term “the klept.”
for that matter, Obama predicted it too, setting up a pandemics office, and he did that because as (again) Stross himself says in this blog post, this pandemic came along after two prior coronavirus pandemics.
(I’m a fan, but I don’t think he did a ton of proofreading on this.)
> But this is all predictable. (Except for COVID19 which was wide-screen WTFery, like the second world war—September 1st 1939 was not in fact predictable from September 1st 1929, for example: all that was predictable was that another European war would sooner or later see France and Germany at loggerheads.) I can't understand what this is saying. Not sure what 'wide-screen WTFery' is, but lots of people were predicti…
I saw a quote recently along the lines of as much as spent on a single soccer team as the worlds budget for detecting near earth asteroids.