I'm not saying I'm in favor of sending the wayland/systemd/gnome3 crowd to gitmo...but I'm not saying I'm necessarily against it either...

Seeing as it puts you at the mercy of the people who make your stuff for you.

History, both recent and not so recent, repeats this lesson again and again.

Only a matter of time before it becomes possible to decode people's internal monologues remotely.

Or just train yourself to think unsexy thoughts, think unsexy thoughts, thin unsexy thoughts...

Maybe it's the onset of middle age taking over from knee-jerk skepticism talking, but at this point I firmly disbelieve in total any PR materials invoking any hot topic in the news, lefty news, righty news, and nominally straight news alike.

I went to school 20 years ago and everything was (then still-alive) solaris/bsd or (then new) Linux. University web infrastructure, engineering school computer lab thin clients, etc.

When I started work, it was a little different, but the same effect. Most of the legacy systems were from the early 90s and made for solaris or hpux. And by the time it was time to port to a more modern os, us new kids naturally gravitated to the path of least resistance and least licensing costs. That was either pure oss linux or (eventually) red hat, which by virtue of being intended a mass market product competing or complementing purley oss solutions, was loads cheaper than something (by then) niche like a vendor-supplied unix system.

Windows got skipped over for everything except desk machines.

Now it's 20 years later and us greenhorns are turning into greybeards who've never in our careers seriously considered doing anything serious on windows.

Studying superstition as an anthropological curiosity is different from studying it as a theory of the universe with predictive power.

It is useful to understand the general outlines of crazy. It is far less useful the expend effort at becoming crazy.

I've never studied astrology, voodoo, or divination, and yet I have a very strong opinion that these things don't belong as degree programs at universities. Go figure.

Sniffing out witches, on the other hand, is an essential skill, whatever name it goes by.

Yes I do. In this particular case, the news divisions of these media companies consistently align with Democratic party messaging.

Political speech being protected explicitly by the 1st amendment, this isn't a bribe the way a bag of cash is a bribe, but it is an exchange of favors when D politicians go out of their way to protect D-aligned media outlets from perceived threats from R-aligned private actors.

Like I said, I have no dog in the fight and don't really pay attention to corporate media on either side without a hefty grain of salt. But I do find it interesting that a lot of people seemingly believe the hardball is only out of bounds when it flies in a particular direction.

But I do find it intriguing how it's okay to launch politically motivated lawfare from one direction, but it's a crisis of democracy when it comes from the other direction.

Almost like the outrage and cheerleading are an act while the lawyers keep on collecting a few k or more per hour dragging these things out...

If training data weights itself by sheer volume, one might expect the thousand page paperweights she wrote to make the average chatbot sound just a little more objectivist than the average bear.

Every dealer everywhere pushes thousand dollar tire warranties for $800 worth of tires. It's just background noise when you're buying a car.

Chatbots whose ripply muscles and chiseled features ravish the conversation like a trashy romance novel.

I'll be back as a consultant at triple the rate in less than 18 months to clean up the mess...

Even if you're automating something you yourself do on a regular basis.

This is a general property of the universe: put something under a (metaphorical or literal) microscope and you discover things that are at once obvious and at the same time fantastical.

Making Things is fun and frustrating that way.

Being unaware of where the opponent is and going through the motions of kicking a phantom ball was very much par for the course.