Curious Canid

What makes me sad is that everyone is focused on gaming the election. The question shouldn’t be about what position on Gaza might have gotten Harris more votes. It should be about what Harris believed was the right policy. Not that I think that actually had much to do with it either.

We need to elect people who make decisions based on ethics and not on polls.

I feel weird if I go to the kitchen and don’t have a phone with me. Then again, I’m weird, so having a phone with me may not be the issue.

He doesn’t seem to understand that even virtue signaling still involves virtue.

Chording keyboards are never likely to become mainstream because they have a steep learning curve. That doesn’t mean they aren’t a great idea or that they don’t work quite well. This looks like an unusually clever implementation of the concept.

The particular application makes a lot of sense. The combination of a wearable keyboard with extremely fast typing and text-to-speech would solve a real problem for people who can’t talk.

Personally, I’ve played around with chording, but came to the conclusion that I actually don’t need that much typing speed. Most of my typing is either coding or writing emails. In either case, I stop to think about what I want to write often enough to keep my maximum word rate quite low. I can type around 90 wpm on a regular keyboard, which is still faster than I can compose.

People keep expecting Trump’s followers to suddenly wake up and realize they’ve been scammed when they see what he actually does in office. Most of their support for him is based on obvious lies and they have seen how he really behaved as president. Either they know he’s been lying and don’t care or they have deluded themselves into ignoring reality altogether. Watching him stab them repeatedly in the back in not going to change their opinions. And if he hurts people they don’t like badly enough, they will still consider that a win.

VLC has been versatile, reliable, and available across platforms for a long time now. I use it for the simplicity of having a familiar and ready solution.

You can be certain that if you’re upsetting Trump, Musk, and Zuckerberg, whatever you’re doing is making the world a better place.

This is an encouraging development. Decoupling development from server management will help level the playing field.

I think people have already done a god job of covering the likely concerns. Here are the things I would emphasize.

Bear in mind that a lot of developers just hate doing documentation. :-}

Make sure that their management has made working with you a part of the engineers’ work load and goals. No one is going to provide good information when every minute they spend is putting them behind on things that directly affect their careers.

Provide them with a context for what you are trying to accomplish. Tell them the why and how, not just the what. That information can be very general or it can be at the level of providing specific examples of how you intend to present the information you gather. Find out what they would like to know, particularly since it’s likely to vary from person to person.

Keep in mind how different people can be. There are reasons for the stereotypes about developers, but their are pointy ends on every bell curve. You are likely to find a few people who communicate very well and can help you get the information you need from those who do not.

You sound like you have good intentions and the skill set for doing this kind of work. Don’t let negative responses discourage you. Work with the people you have, treat them with respect, and make sure they get credit for the work they do with you. Let them see what you’re doing and ask for feedback. There are going to be things you can’t control in the process, but if you work openly and in good faith people will usually respond in kind.

This can certainly happen on Lemmy. And you can bypass it by setting up yourself and your communities on a different instance with more reasonable rules.

Lemmy can’t change human nature. It does not restrict bad behavior. It offers alternatives. Everyone gets to choose among instances and communities. The hope is that people will shift away from the ones that become toxic when better options are always available. It tends to be a gradual process, but I think it is working.

Go forth and donate to real journalism outlets! When I cancelled my Post subscription I took that money and put it into ProPublica.org and a few similar sites. (I was already donating to NPR and PBS.) We don’t have to let the billionaires provide our news, but we do have to contribute if we want independent journalism.

He still owes a lot of money in fines and civil judgments. He did the same thing with campaign contributions during his run.

I think that’s a clever idea. I’m inclined to agree with the majority that it probably isn’t something I would want, but I would be interested in trying it out before I passed judgment. The Trackpoint would be the main competition, and it would be hard to beat.

I would not want a printer built in. It would add size, weight, and cost for something I do not need. I’ve pretty well stopped using paper, both at home and at work. I print something maybe once every couple of months.

That was a US-centric perspective, although I think it applies more generally. What you’re talking about is classic economic theory, which was a pretty accurate picture in the past. More recent developments suggest that some important things have changed in the actual economy over the last half-century, which have been reflected in new economic theories.

The central problem is that businesses are no longer as sensitive to traditional market factors. Monopoly, collusion, and the capture of regulatory functions have allowed businesses far more control over both their markets and their labor costs. Meanwhile, wealth inequality has drastically reduced the amount of discretionary income that is available. The traditional economic model still mostly applies to the wealthy and what’s left of the middle class. The majority of consumers no longer have the means to participate as they did.

Neither inflation nor deflation address wealth inequality. The relationship between salaries and prices is broken. Traditional economic indicators assume that businesses doing better means the average person does better, but that is no longer the case. Most of the gains now go to wealthy investors. That leaves us with a situation where the traditional economy looks great, but large numbers of people can no longer afford housing or food. Unless you are part of the 1%, that is not really a good economy.

When people talk about “the economy” they almost always mean Wall Street. That has less and less to do with the economic environment that those of us outside of the 1% live with every day.

Lower prices are bad for “the economy”, but they are often good for the vast majority of us. We aren’t the ones who benefit, even indirectly, from businesses making more money.

I think it is irrational, in the sense that executives’ sole legal responsibility, at least in the US, is to make as much money as possible for their shareholders. Favoring control over productivity is a violation of that. They are gratifying their egos instead of doing their jobs.

Of course, in a sane world, how they treat their employees would be an issue, not just profitability.

People who run startups, even the successful ones, tend to be awful to their employees. I should say, especially the successful ones.

Me too. Musk can’t actually manage people, but he can pretend more convincingly if he can see them in person and yell at them. There are a lot of managers like that and there are far more executives.

My company looked at the actual business results from the period of COVID remote work. Productivity went up, so they decided to keep things that way. It also allowed them to get rid of all their office space, except for a sparsely populated headquarters building, which is saving them a lot of money.

Most studies have shown that workers were more efficient when working remotely. Why would any executive want to reduce efficiency and increase infrastructure costs? The Return-To-Office push is not rational. It represents an inability to adapt to changing conditions. If boards were doing their jobs, they would be quietly showing those executives the door and looking for better people to run their companies.

The list of possible permanent solutions will not include doing anything about climate change or the other conditions causing the problem. Instead, they will focus on making obscene amounts of money for giant corporations until it becomes obvious they aren’t going to work.

It’s been a while, but I always had good luck with a half-wave dipole. It takes some effort to put one up, but it isn’t that hard or expensive. At the time, I was also able to get some ancient used gear for a couple hundred that could handle all the HF bands.

I’ve been thinking about getting back into that, with natural disasters becoming more frequent and severe.