The dark spot is only an issue if you’re using a laptop or something. Pen and a pad of paper is fine outside. Loose stacks of paper is obviously not ideal.

Unfortunately, most of us need to work using screens these days. I have hope for the future with these smart AR glasses. With the screen on the glasses, it shouldn’t be a problem to use them in bright light. And, feeling the sun on your skin is one of the best parts about being outside when the weather is good.

I don’t even like Hawaiian shirts. What’s the point of that collar? Why is western wear so obsessed with putting that style of collar on absolutely everything.

The same thing would work with e-ink. It works fine in super bright sunlight. Unfortunately since it physically spins little balls with electromagnets the refresh rate is very slow compared to conventional screens.

checking the code is much harder than coming up with it yourself

That’s always been true. But, at least in the past when you were checking the code written by a junior dev, the kinds of mistakes they’d make were easy to spot and easy to predict.

LLMs are created in such a way that they produce code that genuinely looks perfect at first. It’s stuff that’s designed to blend in and look plausible. In the past you could look at something and say “oh, this is just reversing a linked list”. Now, you have to go through line by line trying to see if the thing that looks 100% plausible actually contains a tiny twist that breaks everything.

I have an old YouTube app on my iPad, and it still works fine. One of the more responsive apps on the device. I get nagged nearly every time I use it to update to the newest YouTube release, but that’s impossible. I’d first have to upgrade my OS, and Apple no longer releases new OSes for this generation of iPads. So, I’m stuck with an old YouTube, which mostly works fine, and an occasional nag message.

I’m sure within a year or two mine will be like yours and YouTube will simply no longer work. But, for now it’s in a relatively good spot where I can use a version of YouTube designed for this particular hardware that doesn’t feel sluggish.

You do really feel this when you’re using old hardware.

I have an iPad that’s maybe a decade old at this point. I’m using it for the exact same things I was a decade ago, except that I can barely use the web browser. I don’t know if it’s the browser or the pages or both, but most web sites are unbearably slow, and some simply don’t work, javascript hangs and some elements simply never load. The device is too old to get OS updates, which means I can’t update some of the apps. But, that’s a good thing because those old apps are still very responsive. The apps I can update are getting slower and slower all the time.

which was probably written by AI

That’s the key bit. You would expect that one of the first tests for a custom OS would be whether it runs doom, so of course the AI is going to write the text that you’d expect to see: “It runs doom”.

Except real money is used for taxes and government spending. Fake money is needed only by criminals.

Bitcoin actually has legitimate uses

Ransomware.

“Expensive cartoon monkey pictures”

You should be. The system sucks. Even though it’s not Doctor Evil in a cave, it sucks that American oligarchs have the power they do. Even before Trump they were using their money to get people elected and lobby them to bend the laws in their favour. And now, with Trump, they’re just outright flattering and bribing him and getting what they want without even needing to hide them. But, they’re also symptoms of a problem. The values of the US are fucked up and this is really just a reflection of those values.

Mostly the AIs are built and controlled by public companies. Anthropic’s ownership is secret, but about 10% is owned by Google, and about 10% by Amazon. For OpenAI, 1/4 is owned by Microsoft, 1/4 is owned by their non-profit arm in some bullshit scheme, 1/4 is the employees (presumably including CEO, etc), and the remaining bits are early investors. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, nVidia, Oracle, and other public companies are owned by regular investors, pension funds, investment banks, etc.

Billionaires are part of the problem, but so are pension funds, investment banks, and regular investors who own a bit of stock in their 401(k)s.

This isn’t billionaires using their private money on private projects to fuck up the world like some kind of mad Bond villain. They’re not breaking any laws. They’re not doing anything in secret. They’re not doing it in order to kill people, or to try to take over the world.

This is the whole system where these companies are following the laws and trying to generate profits for their investors. Killing all the billionaires would be easy and satisfying, but it wouldn’t fix the problem, because the problem is a systemic one.

If it were Doctor Evil hiding in a cave, working on a doomsday machine, you’d need to send in Austin Powers to stop him. When it’s regular public companies doing it, you can stop it by just changing a law. The US system is so fucked up that it may be impossible to do that. But, in say France it’s probably much more likely that someone can just pass a simple law saying “you can’t do that”.

Most people who sign up as an enlisted soldier are dumb, desperate or both. Many probably believed the idea that Trump wasn’t going to start any new wars. And, to be fair, maybe he wouldn’t if the Epstein stuff hadn’t been quite so devastating for him.

I don’t think many signed up so that they could kill children to help distract from the Epstein stuff.

This might work for anybody who signed up for the military after Operation Epstein Fury started, but my guess is there aren’t going to be many of those.

Most of the rest probably signed up while Biden was president, and thought at worst they’d be going to war to help keep the oil industry profitable.

I think a lot of people use it instead of Iranian. Technically it might be an ethnicity. But, for example, I can find restaurants that advertise having Afghani food but no restaurants with Pashtun or Tajik food, restaurants with Syrian food but not Arabic or Kurdish restaurants, etc. But, while most restaurants go by the name of the country, not the ethnic group, there are no Iranian restaurants, only Persian ones.

AFAIK, a lot of Iranian-Americans go by “Persian” because there was already such a stigma associated with the name Iran.

He’s failing my secret purity test. I can’t tell you what the purity test is, because it’s secret! If I told you what my purity test was, he might find out and pass it. But, if he passed it because someone told him what it was, that wouldn’t count. So, all I can tell you is that he failed it! Trust me bro!

That’s his argument, but I don’t really buy it.

For example, what would Hollywood do if Canada suddenly stopped respecting copyright? (I know we’re talking about the anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA, but the C in DMCA is “Copyright”, so this would definitely be framed as Canada not respecting copyrights.) A lot of movies and TV shows are now made in Canada. I imagine a lot of those companies would pull their productions out of Canada. So, whichever politician passed the law would be labelled as the one who killed Canada’s entertainment industry.

If Canada allowed jailbreaking John Deere tractors, or HP printers, they might stop selling them in Canada. If Canada allowed people to bypass Apple’s App Store, Apple might ban all apps from Canadians and Canadian companies. That might piss off farmers, or CTOs, venture capitalists, etc.

Taking this step might create a lot of new jobs, but that’s a big unknown. How many jobs? How well paying? How long would it take for them to be established. They’d have to weigh that against all the people whose jobs might be disrupted. So, it’s much easier to stick with the status quo, even if that status quo means just bending over for the US.

At least 3.

Exactly, so this wouldn’t make things any worse.