I heard about this a couple of years ago when the court case was still going on, the podcast Behind the Bastards did a 2 parter on it, and it's just absolutely *weird* that anyone at eBay gave two shits about this newsletter. 99.9999% of eBay users on both sides of the transaction would have never heard of the newsletter, much less read it, so who cares? And the CEO involved here, he's not eBay's founder, he's like hired gun #12 or whatever for the slot so it's not like they're slagging his lovingly handcrafted lifelong labor of love or anything.

The BtB podcast eps on it are worth a listen if you're into that sort of thing, provides a lot of detail.

MORE socialism? Where's ANY socialism in the US worth the label?

Also, that capitalism is working out so well. For the thousand or so people at the pinnacle. The average people not so much, but who cares about them, they're poors, right?

"That is not how it works.
LLMs are not trained on thousands of projector models, how do you come to that idea?"

Where in the hell did I say it was 'trained on thousands of projector models'? I implied it was trained on the ARTICLES at Projector Central. You know, the ones have relevant review data in them that the search engines also scrape that your LLM also relies on? The ones that are no longer being written at the same rate because their views and ad revenue are down, the ones that will eventually stop when the site dies?

And it's going to get worse. Much of what they've trained their models on is user created information from a lot of sites that are now seeing sharp dropoffs in traffic because people aren't going there for info/answers any more, so there's less incentive to post new information and many of those sites will just go completely stale.

A perfect example is projectors. 5 years ago if you wanted a projector for a price range, you'd go to projectorcentral.com and a few other sites for detailed information. Now most people say to an LLM "I have $1000 to spend on a projector, what should I get?" And the LLM uses the information it trained on from projectorcentral and other sites to answer. Projectorcentral's traffic is dropping and so are their posts so the LLMs are training less and less from actual informed data and more from marketing crap. And it all enshittifies.

Here in British Columbia we just changed our clocks for the last time and will remain on UTC-7 indefinitely. Parts of B.C. (the northeast part) have been UTC-7 all year for a long time. The southeast part has been Mountain time (UTC-7/UTC-6) for a long time. Neither are changing how they do time.

I applaud losing the time change but I'm not crazy about permanent DST. People obviously haven't thought this through, what it's going to feel like come November.

...laura

Near-lifelong B.C. resident here...

People have grumbled about time changes as long as I can remember. Pick one. Stick to it. Just do it.

I can't say I agree with their choice. Not so much the crazy late sunset in the summer - we're used to that - but the very late sunrise in the winter. The sun will still set by 5 in December and January. So what?

...laura

"Please" and "thank you" are relics of a bygone age to most people.

The one that pisses me off is the habit of customer service people addressing men respectfully ("sir"), but not addressing women with respect ("ma'am" or equivalent). This isn't an issue in places like Texas, but it's very much an issue here in Canada.

...laura

When I first saw 4k I was startled by the picture quality. I also winced at the price tag, and shook my head at the lack of native 4k content. I now own a 4k TV, stream lots of 4k content on line, and generally like what I see. I shoot my own YouTube videos in 4k.

Is 8K just not that much better? Lack of content? Or just bad timing, people would rather spend money on food than a new toy?

...laura

Subaru do a lot of things well - they're masters of all-wheel drive - but this is nuts.

I bought a VW Taos earlier this year with the usual trial subscription to Sirius XM. I was going to pull the plug when it expired but Sirius XM offered me a steep discount if I re-upped, so I did. They did it so readily that I wonder how many people are paying full price...

The bulk of my listening is two channels, Hits One and The Pulse.

...laura

Yes, there are corridors and city pairs in the U.S. where high-speed rail could get people from one city to another quickly and efficiently. But what do they do when they get there? How do they get around?

...laura

Too much money for not enough content.

When I had my morning toast and coffee earlier today I chose between three YouTube videos. An analysis of a high-performance motorcycle engine, a review of an off-road vehicle and troubleshooting a hybrid car. All cable ever has these days is reality shows.

...laura

The company standard for servers is RedHat 10. RedHat 10 does not support 32 bit applications.

The legacy app is running happily on RedHat 9.

...laura

I support a legacy app that was written back in the 1990s. It originally ran under VxWorks with custom hardware, variously 68k and PowerPC.

The first port I did was to Solaris. No byte-order issues and I kept the 32 bit ABI. It worked well.

When the Powers That Be decided to ditch Sun hardware and Solaris in favour of x86 and Linux I ported it to Linux. Parts of the code weren't byte-order clean, but I worked through them. The code is heavily 32 bit dependent and I never did create a viable 64 bit version (I tried, believe me...), so it runs on our last 32 bit server in the data center. The service it supports is slowly dying so there's no business case to spend any more time or money on it. If the business case existed I'd apply what I've learned in the meantime and rewrite it from scratch anyway.

The Linux port was initially unstable. It would run for a random time, hours to weeks, then two threads would deadlock. After a couple of years of letting it run and watching it crash I traced the deadlock to an "optimization" that didn't actually do anything, with an if statement that had about a one in a trillion chance of going the wrong way. I removed the optimization and the application has been running fine ever since.

...laura

The issue is not that the climate has changed - it has, and it will continue to do so - but what we're going to do about it. No matter what the crisis, the solution always seems to be greater government control. Usually at the cost of our way of life.

What part of NO do you not understand?

...laura

My employers recently signed up for a ChatGPT account and I've been seeing how it can help me.

I remain responsible for the big picture, for actually making apps that work on iOS and Android. I've found ChatGPT helpful for refining details. It saves sifting through years worth of Stack Overflow postings. It's a handy tool, but it won't replace me any time soon.

If you say "Chat GPT" in French it sounds like "chat j'ai pété" ("cat I farted"). I guess I need to get out more...

...laura