We reached peak woke four years ago. DEI is dead. The corpse is still twitching in a few corners of academia, but that's about it.

I don't think the center left ever moved. The center left just didn't push back against the far left because why alienate them? I mean, the far left is perfectly capable of just deciding to sit out the elections. A non-trivial number did exactly that in 2024 because they were mad that Biden didn't take a hard line with Israel. And given that the GOP has turned insane...

IMO, the center left does need to push back against the far left. But I don't think the mainstream Democrats are going to get that message until they get smacked in the face with just how out of step a lot of those far left positions are. It's not going to be DEI/woke crap now, it's going to be the full on socialists.

But the only way for the voters to deliver that much-needed smack is by handing them a severe electoral loss. Which also isn't going to happen because the GOP has gone insane.

Likewise, the GOP needs to be smacked in the face with a solid loss to bring them back to reality. But that's not going to happen because DSA...

I think for the next cycle or three, we're going to be stuck with two increasingly-extremist, increasingly out-of-touch parties, and neither is going to get the kind of big loss needed to wake them up.

People don't do that. Even if they come to their senses the vast majority will just not want to talk about it... or else they're revise history and say they never actually supported what they support.

I meant restrict, of course.

They'll have the same problem with Rust, which also uses pointers all over the place (though it calls them references). The difference is that the no hopers will be unable to get the Rust code to compile, while with C they can get it to build... and then hope that valgrind can find the ways it's broken -- because it is broken. They might be able to get the Rust to compile by eschewing pointers and cloning every damned thing so the borrow checker will shut up, making their code so inefficient that they might as well just write Javascript, or else by using raw pointers in unsafe blocks -- but unsafe Rust is actually more unsafe than C, with a lot more rules you have to follow and things you have to be careful about, so their code will be far less likely to work than it would in C, even.

(For those who haven't looked into it, the rules the borrow checker enforces don't go away just because you're using raw pointers in an unsafe block. The borrow checker stops enforcing the rules but the compiler absolutely continues assuming they're properly followed. In other words, in unsafe blocks you have to be the borrow checker. C intentionally gives up some performance to be more forgiving. Rust. Does. Not.

For one example: The C compiler assumes that any pointer may be aliased and so generates extra instructions to read and write through pointers when if it could know that the pointer was the only thing in the system referencing that memory it could optimize those away. The Rust compiler assumes that if you have a non-const pointer to some memory, that pointer is the only way in the program to modify that memory, so the compiler is free to optimize away any unnecessary reads or writes, and to reorder things as convenient (you can get this behavior in C if you tag your pointers with strict). If you stay in the safe Rust pool, using references, the bounds checker ensures that the compiler's assumptions are always true. If you write unsafe, though... it's on you. Screw it up and your code will be broken in crazy-subtle ways.)

SCO, the Santa Cruz Operation, was a pretty cool company that had nothing to do with any of this crap. They sold a pretty decent x86 Unix throughout the 80s and early 90s, but ultimately were forced out of business because they found it hard to compete with the Microsoft marketing machine pushing Windows NT on one side, and free, open source Linux on the other side.

Unable to continue, they sold their Unix rights to Caldera Systems, renamed themselves Tarantella and were ultimately bought out by Sun Microsystems. It was Caldera that ultimately morphed into The SCO Group, then became a copyright troll hoping to score a settlement with deep-pockets IBM when it realized that it couldn't make UnixWare competitive either.

As we did 20 years ago, we should call the original company SCO and label the copyright troll TSG to keep them straight. They were not in any way the same company; there were no leaders or employees or buildings or anything in common.

I suppose. I find AI prose increasingly-grating. I have to read it all day while working and when I hit some web page that uses all the same obnoxious phrasing and structure I tend to just close the tab and look for a different source.

You missed a few. It's "worth being precise about" something that is "load-bearing". Don't forget to sharpen a distinction, too.

Meh, I suppose. IMO it's not worth optimizing in a car that's able to remember settings associated with a driver. In "dumb" cars, if the regular drivers are different sizes (I'm 8 inches taller than my wife) you need to be able to quickly and easily adjust the mirror positions, because you have to do it a lot. In my Tesla, I mostly find it annoying that the main rear-view mirror doesn't automatically adjust, requiring me to reach up and move it by hand. I think the best fix for that, though, is to replace it with a screen fed from a rear-view camera.

Again, this mostly seems moot with per-driver, automatically-applied settings. I have the air flow adjusted to my liking and never touch it. I never manually adjust fan speed, either, only the thermostat... and that I do by long-pressing the left thumb wheel then scrolling up or down. I have to long-press because I like the media controls to be the "primary" use of that wheel.

I think this claim is overrated, at least for me. I end up having to look quite a bit. Obviously once I've found the control I could look back at the road while I adjust it... but I often don't do that in vehicles with manual controls, like my truck. Again, I prefer to adjust the climate control by changing the thermostat rather than playing with temperature or fan volume by "feel", and I have to see the temperature display which is in the center console. I know what temperatures I prefer, though, so I look move my hand to the control, rotate it until it shows the temp I want, then return my attention to the road.

Similarly with the sound system. I know what volume I prefer and adjust until the display shows that level. On the rare occasion I listen to the radio I don't use the tuning knob, I use the "scan" button, which requires looking while I hit the button, then listening until the right station comes on, then looking while I hit the button again to stop the scan.

Different strokes, I guess. I quite like Tesla's system. I did prefer having a stalk for the turn signals rather than the buttons on the steering wheel. My wife likes the buttons... which is interesting because she prefers to drive manually a lot more than I do, so it may be that I just haven't given them a chance. She says she likes that she can signal without having to take her hand off the wheel. I use FSD pretty much all the time except when I'm driving for fun, which I basically never do in environments where I have to use turn signals.

If only voters would get this worked up about corruption.

People are also ignoring the benefits. Data centers don't bring a lot of jobs after construction is complete, but they can generate a lot of tax revenues for counties and cities. Huge amounts of money that can be a real game-changer for the local budgets, and could be very beneficial for the locals. By itself that's not a reason to accept them, but it should be part of the overall calculation, and the net cost/benefit of the projects should be reasonably and fairly evaluated, and negotiated.

But this isn't what's happening.

The thumb wheels on the steering wheel do that. You do have to use the touch screen to put it in "mirror adjust" mode, but really that's something you only do once. Set up your driver profile, set your mirrors, then the car just always changes them to your settings.

I find the auto wiper works pretty well... it is important to keep the windshield fairly clean, but I like to do that anyway.

Yeah, the Model 3/Y handles are weird. The S/X handles are pretty nice. In theory the fact that they're motorized could make them a maintenance problem. In practice, little electric motors are extremely reliable. There was a problem with the wiring harness getting fatigued and breaking about 10 years ago, but that's been fixed.

Those are also on the thumb wheels on the steering wheel.

Before I came up with my current system I spent a lot of time looking into actuators for windows. They exist but they're expensive, often bulky and look like a lot of work to install and maintain. Then it occurred to me that I already have a whole-house fan (HVAC system)... if I could just get it to draw from outside rather than from the air returns. That part woks great and I think it does give me a pretty good single point of control. The only problem is that the house is pretty tight so I also needed a way to create some negative pressure, hence the laundry room to attic fan. I think that's still my airflow bottleneck.

As for whether I've crunched the numbers.... no, I haven't. And since I installed solar last year it maybe doesn't even matter any more? Throughout most of the summer I'm actually giving away nearly a MWh per month of electricity even after running house, A/C, car, steam shower, etc. So it's really more of a game to me than a serious attempt to save money. That said, I do watch my energy consumption closely (game, right?) and running the fans consumes maybe 400W. Overnight that's about 3.2 kWh. Meanwhile, my AC draws 4 kW, so if my AC kicks on for 45 minutes it consumes as much as the passive system does all night. And for that, the passive system cools the house by ~10F degrees while the AC will cool it by about 2F, which would indicate 5X efficiency improvement. But even that doesn't fully capture it, because the AC will cool the *air* by 2F while the passive system will cool the house and also much of the thermal mass, so it's actually moving quite a bit more heat out than the thermostat temperatures would indicate.

So, yeah, an order of magnitude more efficient seems about right. When outside air cools down at night!

I've also been thinking about building something for my shop. It's an uninsulated pole barn (30' wide x 40' long x 25' high) which gets quite hot in the summer and quite cold in the winter. I think some automated fans to exploit day/night temperature variations could probably move the average interior temperature several degrees closer to comfortable, year round. Even better if I insulate it.

Meanwhile I also own a Tesla, and am using a CarPlay adapter with it. Maps is better, particularly lane guidance and actually telling me which motorway junction number I'm coming off at. I can share an ETA with my contacts. I can listen to subscriber-only (paid) Podcasts. I can use WhatsApp (via voice of course), something sadly essential in the UK as the vast majority use that. I can listen to audiobooks from other than Audible. I can use the BBC Sounds app. I can...

You get the idea. I agree with you about integration - the time I will use the built-in map is if I'm on a longer journey that needs charging on the way, or if the journey is so short that none of the above really matters.

Personally I hope the rumours about CarPlay integration being worked on by Tesla are true, although I'd be surprised I must admit. But for me - works well.

I think that's fair, although it feels like the tone has gotten harsher.

Definitely. I'm actually already seeing a little of that in late August. Nights are getting down to ~62F, which is managing to cool the house to the high 60s. I'm wondering if I could get a higher-volume fan for the laundry room to increase the air flow... I'm sure that by the end of September we'll have nights in the 50s but days will still often reach the mid-80s. That's when another benefit of having it automated kicks in. If I were just opening a bunch of windows before going to bed, there would be a period of time when the house got too cold at night. With the automated system, when the house gets to 62F it turns the fans off.

Of course, as we get into winter, I pop the laundry room fan out and fill the gap with an insulated pillow of the type they sell for filling swamp cooler vents.

Speaking of swamp coolers... those have historically been fairly effective in Utah, thanks to the dry air. My first house had just a swamp cooler and it was honestly fine. I've actually thought that it might make sense to have all three: passive cooling, swamp cooler and central air. With a smart system deciding which to use when. You don't want to use the swamp cooler a lot on days when the A/C might need to run, because it raises interior humidity, which the A/C then spends a lot of effort extracting. Maybe... have to consider the cost of buying and installing the swamp cooler.

I'd guess, but stressing guess and agree would need to be studied, that your bias would be correct. I'm not necessarily a fan of the every single person's study plan is different school of thought, and think there's a lot to be gained from structure.

On the socialising I'm not quite so sure though - it's definitely changed the nature of it though. My 'kids' (now all adults, youngest about to enter final year of university) socialising all the time on-line. Voice chats with friends, Discord is how they organise meeting up etc.. They've also all three kept a healthy in-person socialisation side too, which is the part I was initially worried by when I saw this panning out over several years. I think that last bit is key - if you can balance both, then you get the benefits of going out with your friends with also the benefits of having a wider geographical friend base and the ability to stay in touch more easily.

Perhaps read the actual comment? I am agreeing with the study - quoted directly: ""The findings suggest that screen time can support children's and adolescents' cognitive processing. Presumably, the essential point here is what kind of things they do in their screen time. Teachers and parents should encourage children to use devices and screens in such ways that promote active thinking, problem-solving, creativity and learning," states Doctoral Researcher Petri Jalanko from the University of Jyvaskyla.".