Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org

@Teri_Kanefield I'm torn between "Yeah she will" and "She will never see that money because if there's one thing we should have learned about Trump's MO by now, it's that he never pays anyone if there's any way he can help it."

@acsawdey @urusan I do, from time-to-time, ruminate on how hard it would be to, as a business proposition, configure and sell such machines.

And the answer is, unfortunately, "pretty bloody hard." Non-tech-savvy parents are a *very* difficult demographic to make happy.

@acsawdey @urusan I remember when Google had to add the policy to block the "no internet" dinosaur game at the behest of schools.

I was immediately of two minds about it. On the one: obvious and easy request from the customer, nearly trivial to satisfy.

On the other: wow. If the class is *so* boring that kids would rather play the dinosaur game, you are *wasting their lives* and *deserve to be ignored.* Kids' time is valuable too, and their lives just as finite as everyone else's.

@Azure @urusan Libraries are curated book collections though. There are varying levels of curation, but librarians *definitely* make choices about what to stock in their finite shelf space.

@urusan In general, I find that authoritarianism you can opt-in to is pretty great, actually. One can argue it's a major driver of the popularity of the Apple ecosystem as well: "You can run this software on any computer you want... As long as we made the chips, and the chassis, and the OS."

... and as a result, there's a whole *category* of compatibility woes that Mac users just never run into. Apple's OpenGL stack was, for the longest time, the only OpenGL implementation I could trust because they'd wrapped OpenGL in their own compatibility layer and made vendors code to that layer (or get out of the pool). Hard on card vendors, *amazing* for end-users.

And Chromebook is the platform I recommend for my elderly relatives now because it's nearly impossible to entice them to sneak malware onto it, since Google controls the OS and the extension store.

Sometimes, freedom makes people's lives harder. In the extreme, maximal freedom is foregoing society to go live in the woods, and it turns out that'd kill most people. ;)

@lauren Unprecedented in core engineering... kind of. Previously, Google did soft-layoffs to core by closing entire offices and making those engineers an offer to go somewhere else, knowing a lot of people can't just pull up stakes. And, of course, they've played the ugly Silicon Valley game of growing and shrinking the temp pool like they're a bungie cord made of human livelihoods for their entire existence, more or less.

... but basically unprecedented in core engineering.

My favorite part of crimew's extraction of the no-fly list is that the list was extracted from test data. Because they were using live data as test data for a unit test.

Jesus, people. This is basic stuff. *Never* put real user data in your test pool. You *synthesize* that shit.

@3psboyd As self-affirmations go, "the bastards won't do to me what they did to Leela" is pretty solid.

Criticize George Santos all you want, but I, for one, am glad we finally have *someone* in Congress who understands first-hand the dangers and wastefulness of an Agni Kai and can finally take steps to ban that barbaric ritual.

@lauren No, you're thinking of Zaphod Beeblebrox.

George Santos was a Waterbender.

@Popehat Well that's good news.

The Water Tribe has had too little representation in past sessions of Congress.

@sarahemclaugh I guess at Chinese gender reveal parties you just pop a balloon full of 『？』confetti.

@ocdtrekkie @ido I haven't bothered to follow up in detail yet (because, tbh, I burned out on wanting to finish the game before I finished it). I think I'll have to repurchase the game on another platform to continue, but there is / will be a way to dump my save state and load it into another instance.

#frc

The meta this year is encouraging swerve drive, but it's a lot to ask of young teams to put eight motors on a robot.

Let me introduce you to synchro-drive (https://groups.csail.mit.edu/drl/courses/cs54-2001s/synchro.html). In its simplest configuration, two motors drive all the wheels on the robot: one turns them all synchronously and one spins them all synchronously. This is done using belts and your favorite flavor of right-angle gear chain.

It does have the one unusual property that while the drive train can drive in arbitrary directions, it can't turn the chassis. So for FIRST Robotics, one would have to couple it with a solution for swiveling whatever end-effector your robot has to finish the job. And slippage on the turn chain would be killer because there's no way mid-match to turn the wheels independently of each other. But if you can tolerate the challenge of keeping tension on your belts or chains, this can be way fewer motors than swerve.

Video of a synchro in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nurCA5Q4_hw

"""
Now family, I know you're worried about me and my time in the hospital. But fear not, for there is a god watching over me in my hour of need.

And that god is Crom, who wants me dead.

So I go now to battle for my right to draw one more breath in this ragged existence, to spite him who looks upon us with gloomy judgment.

Grieve not my fate, o kin! For I shall wrest my right to live from his dark grasp! And should I fail? Hah! Then I shall at last meet him face-to-face, and my fists will drag answers from his silent mouth!
"""

@ocdtrekkie @ido I actually bought Cyberpunk 2077 specifically on Stadia to play the meta-game of "Can I finish this cyberpunk interactive fiction before the unaccountable corporation with the exclusive ability to gate my access to this piece of entertainment pulls the plug?"

I have lost that game. ;)

@sarahemclaugh I think the relevant signal that rarely gets talked about is the opinion of the median Chinese person.

This should not be the only signal considered---too many Americans, for too long, were very comfortable with the notion that slavery was a fine arrangement. But over in the English-speaking world I hear a lot of "It must be terrible for them" that Chinese people I've talked to find ranges from under-informed to absurd.

@lauren This evaluation is pretty self-evident to anyone who was using social media after January 6th.

On Facebook, the mechanism for identifying objectionable content went absolutely bughouse. I'm pretty confident they got so panicked they fell back on keyword matching with no human oversight for awhile just to tamp down the rhetoric after the insurrection.

... turns out there are only a handful of things that can end the gravy train for a tech CEO, and "Being thrown in jail for aiding and abetting treason" is one of them, so I think the social media company owners panicked.

@Women4Popehat @Popehat "All beliefs are literally the same." ~This asshole, apparently.