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Comment But of course! (Score 1) 37

What's the point of having a national military if you can't use it to pump taxpayer dollars into corporate coffers?

*scenario*

"Fox company, we'll airdrop a licensed mechanic and a licensed parts salesman onto your position around 0930, as soon as they finish repairing some stuff the enemy captured last year and make their way back to our side of the lines. Division says hold your position as best you can until then -- and remind the riflemen not to use their weapons as clubs, as that will void their warranty. It would be better for the overall war effort to let you position be overrun."

"No, Davies can't fix the autocannon even if your lives depend on it. Division says to shoot him in the arse if he so much as touches it."

Comment Re:I mean - most of them are local first (Score 3, Insightful) 98

Yep - absolutely agree with you. Just because a devices is locally controllable and has opened up localhost:8080, that doesn't prevent it from also opening a connection to https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbadthing.example%3A9999%2F and uploading everything it can find to it. Concepts are orthogonal.

Comment I mean - most of them are local first (Score 3, Interesting) 98

HomeAssistant's main strength is in tying otherwise incompatible devices together. Local first is not unique though - HomeKit is local, Matter is local, I don't know much about the Alexa/Google setups but I believe they can be controlled locally too.

Don't get me wrong, Home Assistant is an excellent bit of kit with lots of standardisation and automation. But this article is pushing the wrong part of its strengths - local-first isn't unique. Pick the right ecosystem and it's all local-first anyway.

I have many different smart vendors in my home - Google (originally Nest), Philips, Meross, Aqara, Eve, Ikea, LightwaveRF, Shelly, Eufy, Switchbot...none of them require the internet. All of them can work locally. All of them work in the same ecosystem. Then I have oddities which I use HomeBridge for to bridge the gap - Roomba (older, non-Matter, Worx Landroid (robot lawnmower), Dyson Hot'n'Cool thingy, Logitech Harmony...even plugins for Synology which show the NAS's temperature and allow shutdown. Through the use of HomeBridge, I can draw them into the same ecosystem too. None of this requires the internet.

The meme is completely overblown and quite often you can tell by people that don't actually use this kind of tech. Obviously if I want to control this kit from outside the home then I need an internet connection, and if I want to update any of the kit then I need to download the updates from the internet for that too, but operation from within the house? Just a HomeKit/Matter hub, that's all.

Comment Re: Has Climate Doom Modeling Turned Into Clickbai (Score 1) 130

Sorry - as a full-blown human-caused climate change believer, I am also old enough to remember being told that we were in an inter-ice age era and that it would end in my lifetime. I'm in the UK, and I clearly remember a school textbook with drawn pictures of Trafalgar Square fully iced up. This would be early 80s.

Let's not deny that bad information has been given in the past. Bad information is also likely being given today, and will be tomorrow as well. Mistakes happen. I like that this paper has been caught and do not in any way see it as a problem.

Comment I'm already playing x86 games on ARM (Score 4, Informative) 44

I'm seeing a lot of scepticism in the posts, whereas in fact this approach works really well. I'm going to use the example of the Mac - Rosetta 2. I play games running x86 code all the time on my M2 ARM chip, and it's not really noticeable at all. Taking exactly the same approach and applying it to Linux - yep, why on earth not? Already proven to work well.

Comment Conclusions (Score 5, Insightful) 169

The one conclusion we can draw from this is the folks drawing conclusions are exposing nothing but their own beliefs.

All we know is the dog was unleashed and the Waymo hit it.

We don't know if the dog shot out from under a parked car, so it was literally impossible to avoid. Or if it was sitting in the middle of the road and the Waymo ran straight over it.

All the folks trying to assign blame one way or another are doing so completely prematurely.

Comment Re:They warn about the dangers of Socialism (Score 3, Informative) 58

...while demanding the public ownership of the means of production. Can't write parody any more.

There's a narrative on the right that fascism was a left wing form of government.,

But the reality is that both fascism and communism were extreme right wing forms of government.

Fascism openly so, but also communism. Remember what fascism actually cares about, maintaining order, obedience to authority, sacrificing for the glory of the state.

Communism was supposed to be about equality and the people controlling everything in a bottom up manner. But the moment you implement it on a national scale you end up with a small inner circle, and they either go fascist like the USSR, or a technocratic dictatorship like China.

There's a reason that when the USSR fell the one narrative you heard was about how much the government lied (because they were far right masquerading as far left). And there's a reason why it was so easy for Russia to go far right under Putin, because they were under far right rule in the USSR.

So yeah, demanding public ownership is pretty on brand for fascists.

Comment For anyone from the UK who likes this stuff... (Score 3, Insightful) 17

...consider listening to One Person Found This Helpful", a BBC radio comedy show about absurd reviews for often even more absurd products. Surprisingly good show.

For anyone not from the UK...not sure if you can access it, but even if you can you're going to need to make your way through a full-on Birmingham accent. Godspeed, you brave intrepid souls.

Comment Re:Blaming a single cause (Score 1) 89

They've associated changes in the civilization with the changing climate conditions, it's likely not 100% certain, but it looks like a pretty likely cause.

It's easy to think that the world is "full" now. But the reality is that only a small percentage of the earth's surface has been "modified" by humans. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.weforum.org%2Fstorie... If we needed to move, there are still vast untouched tracts of land that could be tamed.

That is a very weird take. The bits we modified are the best land, temperate zones, river banks, grasslands. You really want to move to some of that "untamed land" in the Sahara, Siberia, or Greenland?

And honestly, that map looks like a massive underestimate. I'm seeing big black regions in what I know to be largely unbroken crop land.

Submission + - Be nice - Batman is watching! (sciencealert.com)

Black Parrot writes: From ScienceAlert:

A new study has found that people are more likely to act kind towards others when Batman is present â" and not for the reasons you might assume.
[...]
Psychologists from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Italy conducted experiments on the Milan metro to see who, if anyone, might offer their seat to a pregnant passenger.
The kicker? Sometimes Batman was there â" or at least, another experimenter dressed as him. The researchers were checking if people were more likely to give up their seat in the presence of the caped crusader.
And sure enough, there did seem to be a correlation. In 138 different experiments, somebody offered their seat to an experimenter wearing a hidden prosthetic belly 67.21 percent of the time in the presence of Batman.
That's a lot more often than times the superhero wasn't around â" in those cases, a passenger offered a seat just 37.66 percent of the time.
[...]
"Interestingly, among those who left their spot in the experimental condition, nobody directly associated their gesture with the presence of Batman, and 14 (43.75 percent) reported that they did not see Batman at all."

The article goes on to speculate about what is causing people to be more generous.

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