I take applications from high schoolers to participate in and use a lab I run. Let's say I get one app from a kid who is from a rural Kentucky holler, and I get another from a kid from coastal Rhode Island. Both kids are in the same grade, and both have a sufficient GPA required to participate. As presented, both could be admitted to the program but I can choose only one of them because only one person can be accommodated. I could quietly reject the kid from Kentucky because of an assumed education of lesser-quality and that they will be harder to work with as a result, as the kid from coastal RI is very likely to go to school in a far more affluent area and thus probably has a better education. Predicament resolved. I can congratulate the perceived-affluent kid on their acceptance and send the Kentucky kid a "We're sorry, better luck next time" form letter of rejection. One of them was going to get rejected anyway.

If you protest and say "Hey, that wasn't a fair assessment! You're making gross assumptions about both kids!" you would be correct. Doing what I described would not be fair. But stuff like this does happen often and in ways where plausible deniability makes it easy to do and any challenge impossible. DEI principles guide deeper assessments of merit, it doesn't replace merit. It keeps people in positions of power and decision-making honest, transparent, and makes us ask ourselves if we've been honest and fair in what we've done by others. Put plainly, being uncomfortable with that kind of introspection may be an indicator of something one needs to work on.

Nothing, you say? Comp Sci web app coding major detected. You're right if the schooling were only, and purely, about a transfer of information. But we know that uni/college brings way more than that, as it brings environment and resources to utilize, practice, and enhance any book-read knowledge. Engineering and physical sciences students can utilize professional-grade labs stocked with all manner of materials and equipment and learn how to navigate those environments. Communications students have entire studios at their disposal. Art and theatrics students get professional stages and galleries. Social sciences students obtain access to regional networks of government and professional programs to work with and learn from. Would you want a med student that has never seen the inside of a teaching hospital or clinic to diagnose your illness? I can't understand how you've managed to spawn your assertion.

Thank you for pointing this out. To expand on this, it's the ITU that also coordinates and regulates geosync orbit slots - it's not a free-for-all up there. It's a finite about of area that must be kept regulated to ensure a sat collision doesn't f-up things for everyone else. With the density of LEO rapidly increasing, we need international agreement and orchestration there, too, to keep it usable and minimize the chance of a worst-case scenario.

I'm not even sure this is tinfoil -- this just sounds like a plain and reasonable explanation.

I didn't switch out all the incandescent bulbs in my house to LEDs just to save myself some money on my electric bill. I also did it to reduce my "take" from the grid; with the hopes that the sum reduction of everyone replacing items in their everyday lives with ones that consume remarkably less energy would require less overall power generation, which in turn would consume less fossil fuels, which would put less CO2 into the atmosphere.

But no, some individual with a wire rack full of nvidia cards running full tilt 24/7 is going to blow my contributions to reducing energy consumption away, and that of many others as well, for their goal to accumulate magical internet nickels. TBQFH, I couldn't give 2 shiats to the desired of miners.

This is my county, and I appreciate not only the environmental benefit and the fewer amounts of particulate and nitrogen compounds being spewed into the air, but also not being stuck behind a bus that has a tailpipe that is level with my car's air intake and is therefore mainlining diesel fumes into the cabin while I wait in line to drop the kiddo off. They are still too young to ride the bus.

I'm fascinated by the swipe at Apple for being a walled garden, but at the same time you're somehow comfortable being beholden to Steam.

I think you've explained why truly driverless cars in today's driving environments, where the operator is absolved from any fault in accidents, is not possible.

That's still confusing responsibility with capability. Even with driverless and pilotless concepts, *someone* set the entire thing in motion. That someone is still responsible for the car being on the road (or the plane that is flying) and is therefore responsible for what it does.

With aircraft, there is always a Pilot In Command. The PIC (and, really, the entirety of the flight crew) are still responsible for everything an aircraft does, even if it's on autopilot. The PIC must still pay attention and monitor both systems and the situation at all times. If the autopilot being active is not appropriate for the situation or is operating the aircraft unsafely, it's still the PIC's responsibility to assume control and (attempt to) correct the situation. You just cannot assume that the autopilot will always do the right thing.

I really don't know why this concept hasn't been applied to driverless cars. The infrastructure for truly driverless cars does not exist on all of the roads nor is it standardized, even though the mechanisms might be, so attempting to completely absolve the quasi-non-driver from responsibility is for the operation of the vehicle is wondrously dumb. This is especially true since driving environments will be mixed with drivered and driverless vehicles for quite some time and the same hazards that exist today will exist for just as long.

Have you considered the possibility that the devs of Kontakt and Ableton are using undocumented or non-public APIs, which is often a cause of such a scenario?

TIL. Thanks for that tip.

Yes, exactly. I don't know how many times each day I try to edit markdown and it either reverts to regular text or seems to think I want the entire message written as a code block. Oh, and let's not forget the oh-so-Windows-y preservation of text formatting and color when you paste something in from a different source and it looks incredibly fugly inside Teams as a result. Using this app beyond pecking out simple messages feels like you're wrestling with an oiled mongoose that really wants to maim you in any way possible.

After having worked at a company that used Mattermost, I thought that things couldn't get much worse until my next place of employment used Teams. At first, I thought the issues were because of the Mac client, but the Windows one fared no better. The bugs were one thing - grossly delayed notifications, markdown that never reliably works, terrible UI lag, and random things such as files being shared in chat suddenly being rejected or not visible to anyone else. Then there are just the design issues - it's plainly attrotious. The modes of use are so stilted and awkward that it seems like someone's first-year experiment than any kind of polished app meant for wide consumption. And don't get me started on the whole OneDrive vs. Sharepoint schizophrenia.

A dream would be "Discord but for business". I mean that in terms of a client that works and performs pretty well with features that are consistent, clear, and reliable. People seem to quickly dismiss that becuase dIsCoRd iS fOr kIDs aNd gAmErS

Exactly. This isn't pro-privacy. This is merely giving the CCP a monopoly on invasive use of personal data.