I never had anything against WFH and actually did it for three years straight between 2008 and 2011.
I actually think that anyone has different preference wrt in the office versus WFH.
I commute every day and I take 1h and 15 min one way due to bad public transportation. I could, technically, do everything I do via WFH. But I'm not doing it, and I get pretty annoyed when people tell me "why don't you do it?"
Well, it's my personal experience and in no way is meant to act as a judgment towards others. Simply put, WFH reminds me of when I was locked inside my house for 70 days. I was and still am an introvert but I found the experience down right horrible. On top of that I had a very stressful work period with often daily tense situations. And there was no real way to "escape" (I did, mentally, but I was close to a breakdown).
Ever since I was able to RTO I never did a single day WFH and I'm making sure that in no way work can get inside my house. If I ever had to remote work in the future I'm thinking of renting some co-working space.
Well, long winding post to say that yes, some tightening of WFH rules may be not justified, but IMO it's one person's experience and attitude that makes WFH worthwhile or not.
Perhaps OT but I see often these comments on HN. How do these devices (I don't own one) lose functionality over time? Features removed through updates?
The home assistant speakers aren’t making enough money to justify the large teams behind them. Thus we’ve seen significant layoffs on those teams in the past year.
BigCos are looking for other ways to reduce costs. Killing features is one way to do it.
There have also been situations where a feature is removed because of legal action; lawsuits alleging the features violates a patent.
I got lectured by Bard when I asked about help to improve the description of an action scene, which involves people getting hurt (at least the losing side) even if marginally. I suppose you can still jailbreak ChatGPT? I didn't know it was still a thing.
One of the reasons I entered an apparently very focused Mastodon instance and left after two months.
I was absolutely not interested in discussing politics, let alone culture wars that are absolutely incomprehensible to me.
It doesn't surprise me that BlueSky goes in the same direction, to be honest.
While I currently use SD.Next[1], I have tested ComfyUI locally with my AMD card. The UI can be daunting, but you learn quite a great deal about how a Stable Diffusion pipeline works. In addition some innovations and advances find their way into ComfyUI first.
While I believe learning ComfyUI is challenging, but it becomes much simpler when you understand the underlying workings. In the long run, I am more optimistic about ComfyUI. It's worth investing.
I've got a few hundred hours in both auto and comfy, and I think the two UIs solve fundamentally different problems. I think I maybe even agree with your statement in the same way I think Linux has a brighter future than Windows, but they'll both be around for a long time, and they are both incredibly useful.
> “Unilaterally” outlawed by elected governments who can be peacefully deposed, that is to say, not unilaterally at all.
Well... It took one signature on an administrative act and almost everyone in Italy, not in China, was under house arrest for 70 days with armed soldiers on the streets. No oversight, no checks and balances, no constitution, nothing. This warrants being very careful of any government activity.
And at some point someone even suggested to postpone elections.
But more on topic, the only reason the Commission is going gung-ho is because of the elections next year. They are very afraid.
It is my impression that checks and balances, constitutions etc need to work exactly in times of crisis. If they only work when everything is all right, they are useless. Especially when it comes to freedom.
The fact that a government minister even wrote in a book (hastily taken off the market) that he hoped the situation would be used for "a new cultural hegemony" speaks volumes.
Didn't dictatorships always use justifications for threats or emergencies to be instated?
An emergency doesn't justify taking away fundamental freedoms. Hence, anything the EU does in this space, justified or not, must be scrutinized.
> It is my impression that checks and balances, constitutions etc need to work exactly in times of crisis. If they only work when everything is all right, they are useless. Especially when it comes to freedom.
Agreed, but you haven't demonstrated that these checks and balances have been violated. At least in the US, authority was exercised and at times found overreaching and at times found well-within Constitutional bounds. That's exactly those checks and balances functioning correctly.
> The fact that a government minister even wrote in a book (hastily taken off the market) that he hoped the situation would be used for "a new cultural hegemony" speaks volumes.
What volumes does it speak?
> Didn't dictatorships always use justifications for threats or emergencies to be instated?
Nope, not always. And even if that were true, it's also true that threats or emergencies have sometimes required extraordinary government action that didn't result in dictatorships.
> An emergency doesn't justify taking away fundamental freedoms. Hence, anything the EU does in this space, justified or not, must be scrutinized.
Of course not. But obviously the debate is what is "a fundamental freedom" and what counts as "taking away." Sure, scrutinize away. Just don't assume that lockdown == illegal == immoral == people don't agree with it == you can just assert that it was illegitimate. People elected the governments they elected, a crisis emerged, and those governments did what they felt they were elected to do, and if you disagree you just vote for different leaders next time around. That's how it works. We're obviously not going to do snap elections every time a new crisis emerges.
> Agreed, but you haven't demonstrated that these checks and balances have been violated.
I mentioned specifically Italy, because that's where I live and where our freedoms where completely thrown out of the window by, as I said, an administrative act (not even the equivalent of an executive order, nor a law), from one day to another. An act that shouldn't have had that force, but well... rules were bent.
(A year later, people were also deprived of their ability to go to school or to work, which regardless of the reason, was equally bad)
> What volumes does it speak?
That while the event wasn't predicted, it sparked ideas on how to "revolutionize" society in a "different" way (the actual passage was about taking the pandemic as an opportunity to bring forth "a new cultural hegemony of the left"), not caring about consequences.
And we see the same with other aspect of society (misinformation, climate policies...). Some EU commissioners (Timmermanns to name one, until he was in office) are hell-bent in that direction (although this time there's significant pushback).
> those governments did what they felt they were elected to do
Outside my country, in many others (e.g. Spain), courts actually said that well, governments weren't allowed to do what they did.
While I won't ever call myself an artist, there are people who do not just click and get an image. My workflow involves getting the right prompt out, then manual touch up of the images (sometimes drastically so) using Krita and a Wacom tablet, or composing scenes with 3D mannequins from CLIP STUDIO PAINT and then feeding them to ControlNet (up to several CNs at once), generating and touching up again.
I would argue there's a definite creative process here.
Which is kind of funny in a way. I am no artist but I'm using Krita with a smallish Wacom tablet to manually refine illustrations generated by Stable Diffusion.
But again, some of the Krita team have had strong ideological positions on many themes. Luckily you can keep using the software whether you agree or not (and you can contribute, too).
It's a bit more complicated than this (disclaimer: I followed the trials and vaccinated earlier than most).
The current wave of anti SARS-CoV-2 vaccines skepticism has multiple facets and is also country dependent.
First, the risk profile of the disease meant that the best solution would be vaccinating those at risk immediately and leave the rest for judgement of the individual. However, people took the infamous Israeli study about 94% reduction of risk of asymptomatic infection (hence transmission affecting) at face value (the 5MM people from that study weren't swabbed regularly; it was an extrapolation), which meant that some tried to follow the dream of impossible elimination (impossible since March 2020) so they thought everyone needed to be vaccinated. Previous evidence on other CoVs was largely ignored.
Second, many vaccinated to go back to a normal life. Imagine the reaction when those people were faced with more lockdowns, masks, restrictions... Some thought they were made fun of.
Third, the government officials absolutely hated good news as they thought fear was good to achieve compliance, at least in UK and Italy. In Italy, not the nutjobs, but respected members of medical society unwillingly questioned the efficacy of vaccines ("half-work", someone said). This confused the general public even more
Fourth, adverse reactions are to be expected and with loads of inoculations, some are bound to appear even if very rare. Even more with these vaccines which are highly reactogenic. The confused reactions on the AZ vaccines when there were cases of thrombosis were eloquent. Also, risk vs benefit ratio was not considered. Children have very low risks but have a higher incidence of (rare) adverse events. Given this, the ratio isn't favorable, but it was pushed anyway without solid data (the confidence intervals on FDA documents for pediatric versions of these vaccines are horrid).
Fifth, some countries went out of their way to make the lives of those not vaccinating very miserable. In Italy you could not even work without three doses. Children without three doses > 12yo could not take the bus legally. And the whole Canadian truckers matter.
While antivaxxers are a very loud but small minority with no real power (they're extremists) the whole matter was a massive failure at scientific communication. Also because governments wanted to treat citizens like stupid peasants that needed guidance by the enlightened. Well, not all of them, but in Europe there were many.
I commute every day and I take 1h and 15 min one way due to bad public transportation. I could, technically, do everything I do via WFH. But I'm not doing it, and I get pretty annoyed when people tell me "why don't you do it?"
Well, it's my personal experience and in no way is meant to act as a judgment towards others. Simply put, WFH reminds me of when I was locked inside my house for 70 days. I was and still am an introvert but I found the experience down right horrible. On top of that I had a very stressful work period with often daily tense situations. And there was no real way to "escape" (I did, mentally, but I was close to a breakdown).
Ever since I was able to RTO I never did a single day WFH and I'm making sure that in no way work can get inside my house. If I ever had to remote work in the future I'm thinking of renting some co-working space.
Well, long winding post to say that yes, some tightening of WFH rules may be not justified, but IMO it's one person's experience and attitude that makes WFH worthwhile or not.