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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • It’s faster until you need the human operator to keep coming over because the anti-theft sensors keep getting tripped up by false positive readings. Or you need to find some vegetable code that a normal cashier has memorized.

    Self checkout is great when it’s done well, and total shit when poorly executed. And unfortunately, it’s not always just a matter of technology (which normally keeps improving); it’s often a matter of business model: sometimes customer convenience is really important, other times loss prevention (which creates frustration) is more important.

    I’ve seen countless good self-checkout experiences backslide into crap experience because the business felt that a controlled client is more profitable than a convenienced client.


  • Driving off with the rental car is a fine analogy if we were comparing this to not returning a DVD you rented.

    But this is not that. And that is kind of the point.

    Piracy is a breach of contract for sure. The point the author is trying to make is that our current licensing contracts around media are out of touch with the social contract (you pay for something, you get it).

    Hence the moral hazard. So companies will flaunt the social contract (like in the case of Sony) with impunity but will get rightous as soon as people flaunt the legal contract. It’s a double standard, where all the power is in the hands of those with the biggest legal department.

    You can’t define “theft” untill you first define justice. And if consumers and media holders can’t even agree to a just system, then why bother categorizing anything as theft at all?


  • Cataloging individual DNA data casually at a massive scale opens the door for massive genetic discrimination of all kinds, from discriminatory health insurance premiums and hiring discrimination to aparthied, eugenics, and genocide. “Don’t be silly that’ll never happen here.” Is the height of affluent arrogance.

    Humans have proven themselves to be fully capable of these horrors, it is just a matter of time until it happens again, and when we create tools of consolidated power-- just like IBM created machines that enabled Nazi concentration camps–we only increase the chance of enabling some deranged element of society oto repeat these catastrophic horrors.

    All that downside just so we can consume 15 minutes of dopamine.





  • Typing characters is maybe 1% of the job. The other 99% is understanding how the change affects everything else. Changing a single line of code in a function called by 1000 other functions each themselves called in 10 other functions can still potentially be more work and a bigger change than changing 9000 lines of code in a function called once.


  • Debatable whether minified JS is “open source”, in the same way that compiled machine code is technically still visible, just unfeasible to comprehend (despite, or perhaps in spite of decompilers).

    Anyway, minified JS lacks comments and prompts to read from. The explanation I have accepted is just the sheer massive quantity of JS code and libraries coupled with all the documentation surrounding it.


  • Professional engineering is really about implementing processes and procedures that create reliable and dependable systems. Ultimately it’s about responsibility and risk management. Being an engineer has nothing to do with understanding or implementing technology or technical details and specifications (unless you are in an extremely junior level engineering position). That work already has another title: that’s called being a technologist (and there ain’t nothing wrong with that title and that work).

    Very, very, very few technologists (including self-taught programmers, computer scientists, and even some engineering grads) have, or even understand the skills needed to manage technical risk, simply because those skills are not part of any of those curriculums and the licensure required to be recognized to conduct those activities. It requires knowledge, training, and certification specifically, not just a university degree or x years on the job. Of course, it’s not the sort of distinction that the general public understands by “engineering” since the public kind of just takes the act of technical risk management for granted.

    Conversely, it’s perhaps also why the number of engineers with hands-on skills is shockingly lower than we expect: using technology is not on the engineering curriculum.

    But yeah, just because the general public confuses technical skills with engineering doesn’t give you, lacking all three of : an accredited engineering degree, an engineering licence, and perhaps most importantly, malpractice insurance, licence to call yourself an engineer.


  • SkyNTP@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.worldEuropean Union Presses Ahead with Article 45
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    1 year ago

    It’s stupid shit like this why regulation is not the answer to big tech. But then we wouldn’t need regulation if big tech didn’t ruin all that was good about the Internet to begin with.

    People are the problem. At large scale they turn everything to shit. Both in the private sector and in the public sector. Both meddling, making decisions on your behalf. In all cases taking your power away. It was better when we were just small communities, suffering and learning from the consequences of our own actions.




  • Am I throwing away all my mice, keyboards, DAC, digital pens, and other peripherals just so I can have a connector with more bandwidth than I’ll ever need? Nah.

    Am I buying them or adapters all over again just so I can be compatible with a new universal standard that I don’t need? Double nah.

    KVM switches, or breakout hubs that these devices plug into, then a single USB c device goes to the computer is the most logical avenue for a migration. But this will take a long time. Most people don’t even have that kind of luxury.


  • There’s a fine line between deserving of being scammed because of who they are and consequences of actions or inaction and it’s important we do not cross that line.

    People have to take some responsibility to think critically about the content they consume. If people are not capable of consuming content responsibly, perhaps they should not consume content at all.

    The alternative is policing content itself, and that is a very dangerous place to be for a whole host of other reasons.