I was under the impression that Digital IDs are not a picture you bring up and hand to LE - it’s a RFID token transfer that you tap to authenticate on a reader. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be LE officers who will bully people, or that people won’t be smart enough to recognize that the picture on their phone isn’t their ID, but that not how digital IDs (are supposed to) work.

Something you have, something you are, something you know. Are you willing to give up proper security for your cause?

The question I have is what can we do (in the marketplace of paying devs for indie projects) to prevent them from adding improvements and merely keep the projects compliant as new OSes swap out old libraries? Most of the really good, popular utilities have been ruined by bloat and, in the most successful cases, sale to corporations which instantly enshitify.

I’m an engineer. I use all of it. I use it whether I’m writing technically correct and accurate forensic reviews or doing math in my head (or on paper) to analyze a condition in real time or checking a complex finite element model to ensure that there are no improper assumptions or invalid boundary conditions. AI/ML is really useful for some things, and deadly for others.

Rote memorization may seem unnecessary, but a mental catalog - whether it be quotes, body parts and systems, equations of natural phenomena, or even manufactured parts and specifications - is the hallmark of someone who can work independently in a real time industry. It may not matter for some jobs, but it’s make or break in others.

On the contrary, it will raise the floor of required credentials. When everyone has a HS education, an undergrad degree is needed to stand out. Now that a bachelors is the de facto education level, a masters degree is necessary. If it gets easier to get a MS degree, we’ll be requiring a PhD for entry level positions.

Yet. Infrastructure on this scale moves slowly and the transparentness of pricing changes on short time lines in physical stores is hard to track. It exists in emergency economies - we call it price gouging - but that’s usually quite obvious. The idea of dynamic pricing has existed forever - hotels, airline flights, movie tickets, taxi rides, even electric rates. As technology advances it offers the opportunity to use the technology to shorten the time window for pricing changes more and more. An extra two tenths of a percent profit seems like a trivial amount. Amazon and Walmart combined for more than a trillion dollars in sales last year. 0.2% is a very non-trivial $2 Billion. If it becomes available, it will be exploited.

o7

Fly safe, cmdr

That was a nice term report by a precocious 5th grader or, more likely, an AI generated article.

I’m shocked that the free market healthcare isn’t serving the needs of the population at large. This requires a fundamental change to the way we do things. I think we can all agree it’s time to create a special non-profit category for any existing for-profit healthcare or pharma company doing business in the US. They’re clearly constrained by over taxation and things like this wouldn’t happen if they were unburdened.

^/s

Can we add a down vote bot for bot posts?

Funny - I’m going to be in Boston in three weeks. Unfortunately I think all my time is booked from the time my plane touches down to the time I head back to BOS.

Fascinating interview around the technology. As someone who is generally skeptical of wild “zero carbon” claims, this was interesting enough that I would definitely go out of my way to see the process in person, just to learn more about it.

Huh, I guess I’ve just adapted with the enshitification arc. It aways seems pretty clear when the publications are not specialized that the “reviews” are really just generated or copy/paste lists of devices with affiliate links - and are essentially just paid advertising (though paid by vendors and not manufacturers in this case). I will agree that it’s infuriating to have to sift through the ever-growing AI generated content to find something which has novel information.

T-mos general coverage outside of city centers and interstates is trash (they’re all pretty bad, but Tmo is very binary). I’d get it over xfinity, but it’s not even offered in my major university town due to coverage limitations. And it’s not like there aren’t big pipes nearby - the university consumes more than 100TB of data traffic a day; their Netflix traffic alone was so large just 3 years ago that they were on the edge of getting a co-located Netflix rack on campus.

Indeed. This is definitely Hanlon’s razor on their part. Though, still, this is a failing of humans - to recognize the impact their actions impose on others.

And, ime, a lot of corporations are serving content through third party (or at least non-native) servers, which means that any blocker which touches any of those servers breaks content completely. I’ve experienced major Travel, banking, and retail sites which simply don’t work unless most blacklisted sites are allowed. That means either turning blocking off for that main site entirely, or spending an hour testing every one of their 30 off-site connections to see which ones break. I don’t have that kind of bullshit time, and the rest of my family don’t have the patience or skill to do that troubleshooting. PiHole turned out to be multiple hours a week of frustration so I gave up - I already have a full time job and full slate of hobbies. In-browser blockers are, at least, easier to toggle on and off.

Just to be clear, generally stock buy backs are not to increase revenue or dividends, but to increase the stock price by creating a false scarcity. Potential dividend increases from corporate stock ownership are a shell game as the corporation received the dividend and it is simply added to the cash on hand and book value.

Nearly all growth in stocks is capital based. Every corporation wants to increase revenue and profits because that forms the basis for valuation. Yes, there are young companies who are “forward looking” and trading on factors based on revenue and not net income, but most of the market is based on a net income multiplier (which varies by industry).

As much pressure as the boomers (and soon GenXers) will place on revenue, it will never be enough to support the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed. Rather, they will be selling capital to fund their retirements. This will lead to long term stagnation of stock prices (in the best scenario) or a collapse of market value as retirees try to sell their stock for the next 9 month round-the-world cruise. This is a negative feedback loop, too, as the more people sell, the lower the value of their stock, requiring they sell even more shares to get to a fixed value in cash. I think of this as just one more Fuck You (added to the collapse of public health and public retirement subsidies) the boomers will be handing Millennials and GenZ. Actually, I thought you might catch a break with housing, as the value of housing as they all move into retirement homes would drop with the glut of units coming to market. Alas, corporations have found they can buy those units and rent them back at exorbitant rates, so they’ll be tag teaming the boomers in fucking over the youth of today.

How fucking daft do you have to be to not know when you’ve brushed your teeth?

I’m about 99% sure that this is exactly what credit card companies do.

You know what would be a not-bad change? A global lock button, or simply allowing you to lock items which are correct (but which you have not manually changed - what a dumb fucking rule that is). I just want Plex to stop fucking up stuff that is working - or at least give me a “don’t fuck my shit up” switch. Maybe they’ll release a premium - premium tier so that I can pay extra over my lifetime license to get them to stop fucking up my stuff…but I doubt it.