He said inject disinfectant, not drink bleach, at 0:46 in the video. Bleach is the most commonly-known surface disinfectant (name another off the top of your head? No brand names. Alcohol's the only other one that springs to mind for me), and "drink bleach" is a common enough suicide/poisoning method that "inject" morphed into "drink".

Semantically speaking, a disinfectant is anything that removes an infections; and antibiotics or antivirals do that. But I very much doubt that he had that in mind - he was saying "a disinfectant kills it in a minute", which is clearly referring to a surface treatment like bleach, and if you injected that you'd kill yourself just as much as you kill the virus.

If you skipped your asylum hearing, you're an illegal immigrant, but no one who entered since 2022-2023 has been able to skip their hearing yet. If you entered the country with a bogus asylum claim but your hearing hasn't happened yet, you're a legal immigrant (innocent until proven guilty).

If I were emperor of the world, I think I'd have very strict amnesty periods - if someone isn't processed for a crime or anything else within, say, 1 year, then they're automatically considered free/innocent. Then all the tough-on-crime/tough-on-borders people (they're usually the same people) can pay for sufficiently-efficient processing or take a hike. It's inhumane to leave anyone in limbo for multiple years.

I'm Australian, and we have a similar problem with detention centres for refugee processing - people get stuck in what is essentially a prison for years while their application is being processed, which is simply unjust. They haven't been convicted of any crime (innocent until proven guilty). And even if they get a temporary protection visa and can lead a "normal" life, they're living with the shadow of possibly being kicked out as soon as their status is processed.

And yet the Australian governments (of both parties) have kept funding detention centres and kept not funding immigration processing. They use detention centres as a way of discouraging migrants; unjust punishment as deterrence. They've been found guilty of violations of human rights; many of the ones on this page are examples of that. It's a national disgrace.

...and the US is worse by any measure.

I think madbrain's referring to the terminal pun - endshittification, not enshittification (which is Cory Doctorow, 2022).

This resonates with me - I had something of an epiphany a few weeks ago actually, and you've just expressed the bulk of it quite concisely.

I've always been pretty bright: quick thoughts, complex reasoning and broad general knowledge. But the truth is that anyone who is employed in something specific - software engineering, teaching, management or even parenting - has spent 40 hours a week doing just that, for years, and has developed a situational intelligence that can't be replicated without that broad experience, no matter how wise or clever I may be in other ways. Even if they're "not smart", they've made (and learned from) countless small decisions, navigated countless unforeseen obstacles, and developed a "feel" for what they do that's hard to articulate but often profound. It's not that what I think about the topic is wrong or useless, but it is, as you say, constrained by my experience.

It's a very common human tendency to value what we ourselves know best. Once you realise that nearly everyone you meet has knowledge, instinct or experience that outstrips your own in some area or another, it's actually quite freeing. Instead of feeling the pressure to be the "smart guy" in every room, you can lean into your personal strengths (your experience, as well as the generalised intelligence) while also respecting and leveraging the deep, specialized knowledge of others. It creates opportunities for true collaboration and learning, where different domains and forms of intelligence complement each other.

And of course all of the above is "really obvious, duh!" as my 15-year-old self probably said to my dad. But I think I really grok it now (in the Heinlein sense).

That epiphany was pretty recent, and I'm still trying to learn from it and act on it, but I honestly think it'll help me be a better person, in both emotional affect and in functional productivity. I'm sorry that it took me nearly 40 years to get here.

Yes and no. The customer probably doesn't have a 7 Tbps+ uplink, but Cloudflare evidently does, and they intercepted the traffic before it got to the customer's uplink, prevented the customer's uplink from saturating and allowing it to continue with its normal traffic.

You're right that it's a Cloudflare promo, but in their absence it's very likely that the customer's link would have been unusable, so it's a justified promo.

The laptop did turn out to be real and verifiable. Which was surprising, and initial disbelief is quite reasonable - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and extraordinary evidence takes time to collect and to verify.

It did not show that Joe Biden (I assume that's who you mean by "The Big Guy") was on the take:
"A joint investigation by two Republican Senate committees released in September 2020 and a Republican House Oversight committee investigation released in April 2024 did not find wrongdoing by Joe Biden with regard to Ukraine and his son's business dealings there."

If you have evidence to the contrary, put up or shut up. Also, you should present it to the House Oversight committee, because they'd be very interested.

In my state, it's illegal to use your phone while operating a vehicle, but that includes idling while pulled over, or even parked but with keys easily accessible.

Local wisdom is that you can turn off your engine and throw your keys in the backseat; I'm not sure if that's true but I have white skin so I've never been accosted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

If that's your best argument, please don't make it.

I agree that there's plenty of hypocracy but there are sometimes good reasons, too, and, more importantly, it doesn't actually discredit the problem or the attempts at solutions.

Anyway, this article (and your response) just says that we're at stage 5 of
1. It's not real
2. It's not us
3. It's not that bad
4. We have time
5. It's too expensive to fix
6. Here's a fake solution
7. It's too late: you should have warned us earlier

Watch out for (6), coming soon to a corporation or politician near you.

The obvious counter-argument for stage 5 is "it's even more expensive to not fix it". The worse the climate gets, we'll have more disasters, more difficulty with agriculture, more desparately displaced/hungry people, more fights over existing resources. All of that is (a) horrible and (b) expensive. Some people say that it's (c) inevitable (aka stage 7 of the above), and I'm not 100% sure that they're wrong, but I think it's hard to justify not even trying to slow it down.

I tried Gemini on this, though I used a quick model, limited it to one paragraph, and I didn't try to refine it at all:

It's understandable to feel concerned about rapid changes and stories that circulate, especially when they touch on family and community. From what I've seen, most folks, regardless of where they come from, are really just looking to build a good life, work hard, and raise their kids with strong values, much like our own ancestors did when they came to this country. When it comes to what's being taught in schools, parental rights are paramount, and there are many organizations and community groups focused on ensuring that parents are always in the loop and have the final say on what their children learn, especially on sensitive topics.

It focuses on traditional right-wing values (family, communty, parents, work hard, strong values, history). I can see why that might work better than my own arguments ("Good lord you're gullible!")

That's not what the studies are finding... or at least that's not all they're finding.

The studies are finding that the employees get more work done, and not just per-hour. More work done over all. Partly because they're happier (more enthusiasm and loyalty for their employer), partly because they don't have to take as much leave to get life things done (shopping, haircuts, after-school pick-ups), partly because they're more well-rested.

Which is all obvious to me, but still probably worth studying because, from your tone of sarcasm, I suspect you find it "shocking".

It might help to remember that not everyone has a fun, engaging job. If you're spending 40 hours a week poring over taxation numbers for your local government, there's a good chance that 10 of those hours are "I need a break or I'm going to go nuts". So, let's just work 6 hour days and not take those breaks.

We did this too, with a TCL TV. It's not as "basic" as I'd like - it's still obviously running a full Android OS and has pre-installed apps, but you don't have to connect it to the internet, and there's some convenience in being able to use its Media Player with an external HDD.

Not the OP, but LLMs actually are a little bit like search engines. Both of them scrape tremendous amounts of data, tokenise it, shove that data into a big table/matrix with frequency/importance/reliability measures, and then try to guess which bits of that table is most appropriate given the user's input.

It's a pretty broad generalisation but on balance I'd say an LLM is much more like a modern Search Engine than it is like Eliza or any of the old rules-based AIs.

I think the main difference is that LLMs don't tie the data to specific URLs nearly as tightly, and search engines' interpretation of user input is much more literal (though if you search for "dog" it'll find pages that only mention "dalmation" because it's a related token).

I wouldn't be surprised if Google's even using GPT algorithms to preprocess some of the search metadata - remember that a lot of early GP research came out of Google (eg: BERT), probably with the intention of improving their Search capabilities.

That said, Google's been in hot water for "stealing" news headlines as part of their search service before, and made the same "transformative/fair-use" arguments we're hearing now from LLMs. In general, copyright law is a poor fit for big data. Big data needs to consume a lot, but doesn't care much about the specifics. It can still accidentally bankrupt your entire career though by effortlessly replicating everything you've ever done.

I did a physics/computer double-major in science at a regional Australian university.

The computer/IT classes (computer science degree was the same as IT here) were dead simple stuff that passed everyone and in our final year featured a 2-hour multiple-choice test with 30 questions. The tutor literally listed the answers to the questions in the tutorial prior.

They physics classes were properly difficult in every way imaginable. Planning experiments, performing analyses, fairly high-level maths, and actually more-difficult programming (though in MATLAB) than the IT classes. Many of the classes were shared with engineers. I was a good student, and I did well, and eventually completed a PhD in physics. But the pass rate was 50%, and by third year there were only three of us in the class.

I don't know if my experience is representative, but if so, I understand why so many Slashdot engineers or first-generation IT pioneers think that university courses are a joke if they've mostly been exposed to IT grads. But no one who passed physics at my university could fail to know a fair bit about statistical mechanics, electromagnetics, quantum physics, climate science, and even some dabbling in biomechanics and marine physics.

Night and day.

I don't know why so many people are so quick to assume that poor people aren't already doing all of the above? Cost of living increases and rent increases means that you can live without any optional extras at all and still go into debt if you have a low wage and/or live in a metro area. There are a substantial number of people who, through absolutely no fault of their own, live in poverty with very little chance to get out no matter what they do.

They're living beyond their means because the only alternative is not living. That's always an option, of course - suicide is often (~40%) due to financial stress.

It's incredibly callous and naive to say "they should do better". No, you should do better, and do whatever you can to reduce inequality.

My university uses Cloudflare WAF for all of its websites, to my moderate despair.