Another fun fact: German registration plates use a font for which it is difficult to change one digit to another, for example by adding a bit of tape. The font is called FE-Schrift.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-Schrift
But they left S, X, and Z rotationally symmetric, so if you choose a non-palindrome vanity plate with only those characters, you can mount it upside-down and fool plate-readers.
Manuals are fairly easy to find, but in my experience they are dumbed-down. They mostly contain simple Ikea-like instructions and a lot of legalese CMA warnings. That is not a dig at Ikea. Their instructions are great for assembling flatpack furniture. But servicing a faucet, a garage door or a lawn mower is on another level.
This state of affairs is partly due a change in the nature of products. They are in general more complex and no longer meant to be repairable. They are meant to have shorter life spans, and if serviceable are meant to be serviced by professionals. How much that is an improvement for the consumer, is questionable IMO.
> Manuals are fairly easy to find, but in my experience they are dumbed-down.
I just linked to the full CAD library for the modern version of these parts, though. It’s not dumbed down.
Use the search phrase “service manual” and you can find documentation for every appliance in your house. I frequently fix appliances for friends and even neighbors and have yet to be unable to find the service manual.
Same for cars.
I’m so confused by this comment section. Why is everyone convinced that the situation is so much worse today?
Its different for different children. Some of them understand more than you think, most of them dont.
I think that reading the classics can be beneficial to the first type. But some of the classics can be very bleak. Its not fair to the children to make them read those. 1984 is probably in this category. Read Animal Farm instead. It is also better for the second type of children.
If done properly, and in moderation, I think reading classics is beneficial.
The push for age verification must be about something else. There are good solutions to this, but they are ignored. Its always about some complex setup leaking information all over the place. It must be either ignorance or indeed about surveillance, as many here think it is.
Shameless plug: I wrote about hash chains some time ago. They are a nice and simple solution to age verification. https://spredehagl.com/2025-07-14/
The reality is that it's probably mostly about incompetence and lazyness. And tight purses of course.
When some country parliament decides to mandate age verification, it's really easy and lazy for them to just say "verify ages and do it reliably!" and stop at that. As a result, the services affected don't really have a choice to go towards those horrible solutions of scaning our faces or IDs or both and all the issues around that.
What should happen rather is "we'll build a system for age verification that is privacy focused and all you sites that are adult only will have to use it or any other system we deem acceptable" But this requires effort on the part of the government doing the law. And money.
Yes, wellknown solutions have a strong grip on you. In this case it is unfortunate.
I know that the preparations for eIDAS 2.0 (the European thing) did contain many good parts. Taking inspiration from SSI. So at that point their specifications were rather good. I havent kept up with it for almost one year now, so that might have changed.
I agree. But I also think there is an overlap between programming and writing. If you are a good programmer, you have some abilities that can help you explain a subject or argue some point. Especially when it is about something non-trivial.
I write to the computers because sure as fuck wasn't nobody gonna give me no money for writing to the humans. Instead, I am lead to understand that during the formative years of my primary caretakers, what people got for writing was jail time. And the people who put 'em there never actually went anywhere; they just became less visible as they shed the dead weight of the state apparatus.
As a result, computer touchin' is how my entire cohort developed sentience, since computers have the useful property of always responding correctly when asked correctly. Humans, meanwhile, can quite easily become trapped in a permanent low-intensity fight-or-flight state - where they only respond correctly to incorrect statements, and vice versa.
For better or worse, ChatGPT is pretty good at explaining people to you if you describe what you did and what happened and don't leave out the details. Just be aware that you're human too and it'll syncophantically tell you you're right if you leave anything out, which really strokes the ego, but doesn't actually help. Don't fall into that trap. If you're worried about privacy, get a local one instead of ChatGPT.
I'm definitely in the "for worse" camp on that one, and doing my part.
If I was exposed to LLMs when I was a wee atom, I strongly suspect it would've had a massively detrimental effect.
Tbh, an effect not unlike that of the shitfractal of media that our salad days were wasted on. You know, all those endless cultural artifacts that purport to explain people to themselves (in a literally - but at least somewhat more visibly - irresponsible way.) Just ... vastly more so.
Basically, with my socioeconomic background, if I'd had GPT as a kid, I don't think I would have even developed a mind. Exact opposite of a Diamond Age scenario.
Generally, I consider the perspective of people aligned with AI to be a perspective from which a P-zombie is superior in all respects to a conscious being. And I've seen enough of that shit without needing to fucking self-host it, thank you very much, go get an actual therapist, they need to eat too.
>> "Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity
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>It really needs to be, though, that's kind of the crux of it.
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>Federate or die off, it's time to get rid of old tribal thinking. We're all Europeans.
OK, let us play this game...
China, Japan, Taiwan and the Koreas "really needs to be" a single entity. Theyre all East Asian.
USA, Canada and Mexico "really needs to be" a single entity. Theyre all North Americans.
Nigeria, Algeria, Somalia, and so on "really needs to be" one entity. Theyre all Africans.
It is obvious where this is going, and it is not some place most people want to be. You never explained the rationale behind the need you think there is. You just stated your opinion. But your rationale would be much more interesting to hear.
China and the US are the two superpowers right now.
Together, they are of about the same scale as a united Europe. If we want to play in the same league as them and not be subjugated by them, uniting is our only way forward.
That sent me looking it up. It seems that NetBSD, as the only one, has a rump kernel, but it also looks like work on it stagnated around 10 years ago. That could be because the guy doing a thesis on them, moved on. There is quite some bitrot when following links. Do you know what happened? Were they a failure? Maybe they were surpassed by other OS architectures?
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