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You can absolutely start regulating behaviour after the fact. Australia famously bought a bunch of guns back from people who had previously legally bought and owned them, and melted them down. There's no reason you couldn't offer people money in exchange for the surrender of their previously legally purchased surveillance racket goods. You can also frankly just regulate the central service/company out of existence in the case of, say, Ring.

OK you can do a lot of things. It becomes far harder to implement it after it becomes normal

It's easier to ban ring from selling devices in 2010 when nobody had them, then to take them away from millions who feel their personal benefits of not having to get off the couch to see who's at the door outweighs the societal harm.

That's before the arguments about societal benefits (coperganda does well at this). You change the argument from a hypothetical "this could help stop crime" to a concrete example "in this case we found out who robbed little old granny thanks to our surveillance network".


But their willingness to just make stuff up has escalated so far… I don't think copaganda has the effectiveness it once had. It's gotten burned through gratituous abuse.

Yeah, it really sucks when people have hobbies!


Hobbies are perfectly fine. Here, his hobby is to work for technology, certainly not that technology should work for him.


This is not an accurate assessment in the StarCraft II case. It was released in 2010, and LAN play was definitely still popular. I remember because I was part of a University club/society that was running ~200 person ~3 day LAN parties at the time, and I recall the intense loathing we had for how incredibly difficult Blizzard had decided to make it to actually play the game you had paid for, on your own network.

If anything, LAN play became less popular because it was intentionally hampered by Blizzard and other companies.


> If anything, LAN play became less popular because it was intentionally hampered by Blizzard and other companies.

THIS!!! Such gaslighting: "Oh look fewer people are using the thing we said we wouldn't support"


One thing I internalised when speaking with a physiotherapist is that part of avoiding serious issues is making sure you don't stay in the _same_ position for too long. One good ergonomic position is an excellent start, but changing your position several times throughout the work day is even better. This apparently helps avoid building up strain and inflammation in pinch points, balancing out the fatiguing action more.

I have found that my Ergodox allows me to juggle my keyboard halves around the desk at different angles and spaced apart at different widths, and I can put my trackball either to the right of everything or between the halves. It's a single anecdote, obviously, but I have been able to make my ulnar and carpal entrapment issues mostly go away by finding better positions while working and by not staying stuck in one posture or position for too long at a time.


I'm using an old Marquardt Mini Ergo(modded to ps/2-usb meanwhile) which is split, but fixed. Either I am so used to it by now, that I don't want to use anything else, but that is not how I remember it when I got it around the year 2000, or slightly before that. It felt like it was made for me!

But I'm not sitting like a robot in front of it. My office chair is set to sviveling back, which I often do. I'm even exchanging that chair for an inflatable big rubber ball to sit on, from time to time.


It does actually wrap up well enough I reckon. It's not really a cliffhanger or whatever.


> I don't want to have to ask AI to rewrite my train handling config files just to get some little motor to spin.

I reckon you could probably still figure out how to just edit the text file. And if it's not fun to do that, then, surely it's just not the right hobby?


Yeah that's just flat out not correct. If you're writing through a file system or the buffer cache and you don't fsync, there is no guarantee your data will still be there after, say, a power loss or a system panic. There's no guarantee it's even been passed to the device at all when an asynchronous write returns.


Yes, for file systems these statements are true.

However, in our experiments (including Figure 9), we bypass the page cache and issue writes using O_DIRECT to the block device. In this configuration, write completion reflects device-level persistence. For consumer SSDs without PLP, completions do not imply durability and a flush is still required.

> "When an SSD has Power-Loss Protection (PLP) -- for example, a supercapacitor that backs the write-back cache -- then the device's internal write-back cache contents are guaranteed durable even if power is lost. Because of this guarantee, the storage controller does not need to flush the cache to media in a strict ordering or slow way just to make data persistent." (Won et al., FAST 2018) https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/fast18/fast18...

We will make this more explicit in the next revision. Thanks.


This is what I do! The API itself is not particularly amazing (the way it handles batch requests as a MIME multipart formatted POST body where each part is itself a HTTP request is particularly obscene).

The underlying data model is kind of OK though: messages are immutable, they get a long lived unique ID that survives changes to labels, etc. There is a history of changes you can grab incrementally. You can download the full message body that you can then parse as mail, and I save each one into a separate file and then index them in SQLite.


> Car usage is going to 2-10x.

What a bleak vision of the future.


It's beautiful.

Automated conveyance from front door to anywhere.

Perfectly comfortable, unscheduled, private.

I cannot fathom the bleak pessimistic perspective of wanting fixed trains and busses over this. Crying babies, rude people.

American transit sucks and it's not getting better. It's tolerable in cities like NYC, but even so it's a far cry from Asia. If you're not American, please don't project. We'll never have that here. We are not dense enough for it.


I vote for the "bleak" interpretation.

The main problems with cars are not about the fuel they run on, or the level of automation. They're the space they occupy per passenger and duration of use, the mass they have to move around, the materials required to build them, tire particulates, and the danger they pose to other traffic participants. None of these are alleviated by the thing-du-jour the car industry presents as a solution to all the problems on any given day. The real issues are all endemic to the concept of a car in the first place.

And, maybe, if more people stopped seeing random encounters with some of their co-humans as just an annoying moment of having to deal with icky other people, we'd make some progress on our loneliness, aggravation and political polarisation problems.


Actually, you don't need to do anything of the sort! Nobody is owed an easy ride to other people's stuff.

Plus, if the magic technology is indeed so incredible, why would we need to do anything differently? Surely it will just be able to consume whatever a human could use themselves without issues.


> Nobody is owed an easy ride to other people's stuff.

If your website doesn't have a relevant profit model or competition then sure. If you run a SaaS business and your customer wants to do some of their own analytics or automation with a model it's going be hard to say no in the future. If you're selling tickets on a website and block robots you'll lose money. etc

If this is something people learn to use in Excel or Google Docs they'll start expecting some way to do so with their company data in your SaaS products, or you better build a chat model with equivalent capabilities. Both would benefit from documentation.


It's not unreasonable to think that "is [software] easy or hard for an LLM agent to consume and manipulate" will become a competitive differentiator for SaaS products, especially enterprise ones.


Maybe, but it sure makes all the hyped claims around LLMs seem like lies. If they're smarter than a Ph.D student why can't they use software designed to be used by high school dropouts?


Honestly that last paragraph is absolutely true. In general, you shouldn't have to do anything.

If your website is hard for an AI like Claude Sonnet 4.5 to use today, then it probably is hard for a lot of your users to use too.

The exceptions would be sites that intentionally try to make the user's life harder by attempting to stifle the user's AI agent's usability.


Browsing a website is not an affront to the owner of the website.


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