Google Search is not the only search engine, and it's really rather shit nowadays.

Google is essentially threatening to restrict access to a service it's neither the only one nor the best at providing. If nothing else, it'll force the students and teachers to investigate better options - something they might not have done otherwise. Not a smart move on the part of Google...

AI lets any cretin who can click a mouse shit out a social media app in 5 minutes.

That's insane money for a screensaver. And even more so today in the age of AI, when a monkey with a keyboard can ask AI to create the same thing in minutes.

There are two different traditions at work here. One is the European tradition starting with the French Revolution in which the Jacobins chose red as a symbol. The other is a 19th century South American tradition of distinguishing different political factions with the colors red and blue. They are entirely separate traditions.

Some of the problems that have arisen here are not the fault of Microsoft or Google or other platforms because they are due to a deeper problem in setting times: times must be set with respect to a particular place - a time should be recorded as a pair of a time and a geographical anchor. Since calendars and other such problems generally do not do this, changes in the relationship between time zones can cause problems.

I participate in a seminar whose organizer is in Ann Arbor. It takes place at 2pm on Fridays. That's 11am for me in British Columbia, three hours behind. Suppose that a change takes place that makes the difference only two hours. The time will become 12pm for me. Their calendars should still be marked for 2pm, but mine should now be marked for 12pm. This is because the time is set by the organizer in Ann Arbor. Hers is the fixed point and mine has to adapt to it.

But suppose I were the organizer? Then the time would be set with respect to my time zone. If I set the time for 11am my time and the difference between time zones drops to two hours, I will keep my calendar unchanged but people in Ann Arbor will have to change their calendars to 1pm.

The point is that it matters which location is the reference point. Does the seminar take place at 11am referenced to Prince George or at 2pm referenced to Ann Arbor? In the current situation, with organizer in Ann Arbor, my calendar needs to indicate that it starts at 2pm Ann Arbor time. The time it would display to me would be computed using the appropriate offset from Ann Arbor time. Any calendar that records a fixed time, whether in local time or GMT will be wrong when time zone offsets change if the time is one whose reference point is not in my time zone. What is needed here is lazy evaluation.

This is not Flock's fault. It's the fault of the police. Flock provided correct information about the suspect car. The police towed the car on the basis of non-unique properties like the model and color, and they ignored the testimony of the owner's neighbors. The police followed a lead and acted as if they had a solid identification when they didn't, something that seems to happen all too often.

https://theins.press/en/news/2...

The problem is, that is not true. I have seen multiple cases in which the information in an article is well sourced, in that the facts in the article are attributable to reliable sources, but the subject is considered not notable by many editors because he or she is not considered of sufficient interest. In some cases, the deletion is pretty clearly justified by a specific policy, namely that a person known only because of a single event is generally not considered notable. Even that policy is not a bright line since people known for a single event who have been in the public eye still have articles devoted to them. An example is Lee Harvey Oswald. He is only known for assassinating President Kennedy, but there is a lot of interest in him, so he has his own article, not merely a mention of his role in the article on the Kennedy assassination. Other cases are still more subjective.

One consequence of this is that there is a huge disparity between people in different walks of life. It seems like any band that ever got out of somebody's garage gets or any professional athlete, however minor, gets a detailed article, while people arguably of greater significance in areas that don't attract as much popular interest do not.

It is reasonable that Wikipedia should not want articles about your next door neighbor Joe, who may be a great guy but has not done anything notable, but the current policy is highly subjective and excludes a lot of people whom one might want to look up in an encyclopedia precisely because they turn up in the news or in a specialized area but are not widely known celebrities. The policy in its current form not only allows the deletion of interesting articles about people some people would want to know about, but it encourages unproductive deletion debates.

Well, ed is the default. And I still use ed a bit. But mostly I use Emacs.

I use Emacs daily, as I have done for 44 years. I use it for all of my programming, for editing flat-file databases, of which I do a great deal, for making notes, and for some kinds of writing. Even if I use LibreOffice Writer for a piece of writing, I will often draft it in Emacs first, then use LibreOffice Writer to format it. I find text-editing, as opposed to formatting, much more efficient in Emacs.

It's planet of short stature now

Interesting... I didn't consider that angle.
Thanks!

My opinion is that AI will kill Linux eventually. Not now, not when Linus uses it, because Linus knows how to code and is careful. But eventually the crappy vibe-coded junk will seep into the kernel. And then you'll get Microsoft-style code quality issues.

This is mostly the fault of the police department, not Flock, but one thing that Flock could easily do that would reduce this kind of abuse is to make all accounts expire after a certain period, say six months. It would not be a large burden for police departments to reauthorize the accounts of personnel who need access from time to time.

Russian sites like Yandex, Rutube, VKvideo... are great to find porn. But if they go down, I'll take the minor inconvenience for the sake of Ukraine.

More seriously, Yandex has been throttling queries rather aggressively lately, and I'm pretty sure it has something to do with their compute going up in smoke due to Ukrainian drones.