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sugar_in_your_tea

@sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works

Mama told me not to come.

She said, that ain’t the way to have fun.

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sugar_in_your_tea ,

Instructions unclear, aluminum powder stuck in my naughty bits.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Wow, how do you suck that bad at aiming?

sugar_in_your_tea ,

That's how a lot of people handle deleted data in database, it's literally just a flag. That's why there's a recommendation to edit Reddit posts before deleting them, to ensure they're actually overwritten so they can't just be restored.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

It was sort of true in the past, but not anymore. I think writing random data once is probably fine, even for most state level actors.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Well, there's a non-zero chance they were too lazy to implement that.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Yes, that's certainly possible, but it's also out of my control. I have basically three options:

  1. Delete account - we know this doesn't delete comments
  2. Delete comment - "seems" to delete comments, but we've seen comments get restored - so probably using a "deleted" flag
  3. Edit comment with nonsense and when delete - should poison comment if they're just using the deleted flag

That's it. There's no guarantee it works, but it has a much higher chance of working than the other two.

And there's a good chance they delete old backups. Hosting every edit is expensive, so there's a decent chance they clean up old data after some months.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Warning, here's the cynic in me coming out.

The NY times has a vested interest in discrediting AI, specifically LLMs (what they seem to be referring to) since journalism is a huge target here since it's pretty easy to get LLMs to generate believable articles. So how I break down this article:

  1. Lean on Betterridge's law of headlines to cast doubt about the long term prospects of LLMs
  2. Further the doubt by pointing out people don't trust them
  3. Present them as a credible threat later in the article
  4. Juxtapose LLMs and cryptocurrencies while technically dismissing such a link (then why bring it up?)
  5. Leave the conclusion up to the reader

I learned nothing new about current or long term LLM viability other than a vague "they took our jerbs!" emotional jab.

AI is here to stay, and it'll continue getting better. We'll adapt to how it changes things, hopefully as fast or faster than it eliminates jobs.

Or maybe my tinfoil hat is on too tight.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

I honestly don't understand why they didn't just use RFID for the grocery stores. Or maybe they are, idk, but it's cheap and doesn't require much training to apply. That way you can verify the AI without needing much labor at all.

Then again, I suppose that point wasn't to make a grocery service, but an optical AI service to sell to others.

That said, a lot of people don't seem to understand how AI works, and the natural response to not understanding something is FUD.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

The purpose of the RFID wouldn't be to catch thieves, but to train the AI. As the AI gets better at detecting things, you reduce how many of the products are tagged. I'm seeing something like $0.30/ea on Amazon, ~$0.10/ea on Ali Express. I'm guessing an org like Amazon could get them even cheaper. I don't know how well those work on cans, so maybe it's a no-go, IDK.

Barcodes could probably work fine too, provided they're big enough to be visible clearly to cameras.

Regardless, it seems like there are options aside from hiring a bunch of people to watch cameras. I'm interested to hear from someone more knowledgeable about why I'm wrong or whether they're actually already doing something like this. I don't live near any of the stores, so I can't just go and see for myself (and are they still a thing?).

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Is it though? Customer acquisition is harder with retail customers, so they're probably saving quite a bit of money by selling in bulk to data centers. Also, with capacities getting higher, I don't know if looking at total shipments is all valuable.

They're losing the low margin, low end market and retaining and probably expanding the higher margin, high end market.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Yup, I have two drives in a a RAID 1 on my NAS, and I'm considering adding two more. No problems for 5-6 years I've had it.

So for me, HDDs aren't going anywhere. In fact, I'm likely to buy more because streaming services are sucking and I'm looking to store more content locally. I have a bunch of DVDs to rip, and I'll probably get a much more "DVDs" as well going forward.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Eh, someone needs to be the first to exit the matrix.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Yup, it's a great way to fill that "I want to watch something" need.

I buy and rip DVDs/Blu-rays that I want to keep, and then stream the rips from my NAS. It works pretty well.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Eh, they're not that big, especially if you discard the cases and store them in a binder.

I would also rather buy digital, but in general, they're not available DRM-free. I can rip the DRM from physical media, so that's what I do. Pirating is technically illegal, even if I own license, so that's not something I'm interested in.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

My personal rule is that I'll buy it as long as the original creators are profiting from new sales. So I'm happy to buy Switch games, but I'm probably not going to buy N64 games because they're not available from the original devs.

I may buy even if that's not the case if buying is a better experience than getting it some other way.

If DRM-free digital copies existed for movies, I'd buy them. But they don't, so I buy physical media and rip it to my NAS.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

I'm not a lawyer, but I think there's a legal defense under the DMCA, here's the applicable part of the code:

(B) The prohibition contained in subparagraph (A) shall not apply to persons who are users of a copyrighted work which is in a particular class of works, if such persons are, or are likely to be in the succeeding 3-year period, adversely affected by virtue of such prohibition in their ability to make noninfringing uses of that particular class of works under this title, as determined under subparagraph (C).

Subparagraph C describes the process by which the Librarian of Congress reviews such exemptions, and specifically calls out non-profit and educational use.

AFAIK, this provision hasn't been tested for a regular home user making digital backups of their copy-protected media for non-infringing use. There's a plausible defense here: I can't use a DVD player on my phone, so this law restricts my ability to make non-infringing use of the material I own when traveling without access to a DVD player (AFAIK, those don't exist on planes or at campsites) or my physical DVD. So it's reasonable to use a digital copy so that I can do non-profit research with the content on disks I own.

To me, that seems like a reasonable interpretation of the exception under this provision, and I think it has a reasonable chance of being upheld in a court of law. I don't think it's ever been tried, because copyright owners don't care about people making backups, and they wouldn't want to set legal precedent about this either. This argument hinges on whether ripping for home use can be considered "educational purposes."

So yes, I'm okay with ripping DRM from a disk I own because I think there's a legitimate legal defense. There isn't a legitimate legal defense for piracy, at least not one I'm aware of.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Because then I cannot legally prove that I haven't given it away or sold it. In order to have any hope of a legitimate legal defense, I need to have a copy to prove that it's actually a backup. And no, buying (or borrowing) something, ripping it, and then returning it doesn't count as a "backup," that's illegal duplication.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

? You can just mute someone in the call if they can't find the button, which is literally in the top right of the screen, right next to the share and leave buttons.

Maybe my experience is different because I use Teams exclusively on my work Mac, but it tends to work better for calls than anything else I've used (Zoom, Slack, Google Meet). I've literally never had issues in my end with the desktop app. Maybe the webapp is different?

That said, I hate teams. The chat function sucks, especially when trying to post code snippets, or really any form of formatted text. And for some reason, some of our business-y types refuse to use Slack, so I'm stuck having to deal with two separate chat systems at work. But the video has pretty much never given me problems.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Eh, it works pretty well in our org. We use it for almost all of our meetings, and we have pretty much no issues. Then again, our entire team is on macOS and we have it integrated at the corporate level (so meeting rooms and whatnot use it), and it's a pretty solid experience.

My main complaints are:

  • chats absolutely suck
  • seems to use a bunch of resources
  • people we interview seem to have issues (I'm guessing the webapp sucks?)

We use Slack for text communication and impromptu video chats, so the chat issues don't bother me all that much.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

We use both: Teams for meetings, Slack for everything else. Slack sucks for meetings IMO, and Teams sucks for chat. We have to use Teams due to corporate (all the meeting rooms are integrated with it, all corporate meetings use it, etc), and we picked Slack because it sucks less.

It's a pretty decent setup.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Zoom

I don't trust zoom whatsoever (e.g. this incident).

And honestly, I don't really like Zoom. I used it during COVID because that's what everyone else used, but it never was good.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Chats are not the most basic use case for Teams, meetings are. And meetings work pretty well.

Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira (investors.squarespace.com)

Stockholders will receive $44.00 per share in cash, which represents a premium of 29% over the 90-day volume weighted average trading price of $34.09 Squarespace, Inc. (NYSE: SQSP ), the design-driven platform helping entrepreneurs build brands and businesses online, today announced that it has entered into a definitive...

sugar_in_your_tea ,

I'm with namecheap. Good enough for me.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Yup. We got a new CEO, and they did a big push for productivity and enforcing our 3-day in office policy. My team had been on 2-day since the pandemic WFH policy ended, and my boss said we'd give it a try, and if it sucked we could go back. We had worse productivity, so we went back to 2-days in-office. The company policy is still 3-days in office, we just ignore it.

It really depends on your boss. A good boss can ignore stupid company policy, and a bad boss can ruin good company policy. My boss is one of the main reasons I took the job, and it's also why I'm still here (I'm pretty sure I'm underpaid, and my boss is upfront about that, but I like my boss so I'm sticking with it for now).

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Yes, bed and breakfasts rock, and I try to use them when I travel because the experience is way better.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Yeah, I think the main issue is supply. Airbnb works because of a mix of supply and costs. There just aren't many nice places to stay in resort areas, and the few that exist are extremely expensive (e.g. fancy hotels). Likewise, hotels are often more expensive and less convenient if you have a large group (e.g. my family likes to vacation together, and there's like 20 of us).

The problem seems to be long term residents feeling the pain of increased housing costs. If you legislate against that, those tourists will still need to go somewhere, which means more hotels or more strain on transportation from the outlying areas to the tourist area. If mass transit is effective, that's not a big issue, but far too often that's not the case, so you'll just end up with tons of traffic.

My proposal is to not ban it, but instead limit it to residents, so in order to do short-term rentals, you need to be physically present a majority of the year. Otherwise, you need to apply as a regular rental, which can be limited to certain areas near transit hubs to keep traffic under control. Then improve transit into the area so tourists who don't fit in the city can easily get there.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

The ones I've been to are comparable to a hotel and include a good breakfast. So yeah, a bit more than an Airbnb, but not that far off from Airbnb + good breakfast restaurant.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Nah, car good, train better. I also hate stroads.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Yup, use the train to go medium to long distances, use a bicycle or feet to go short to medium distances.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Interesting.

Someone there mentioned Codidact, which is available today.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

To help others? That's why I did it. Someone editing that into the highest upvoted answer is good because more people will see it.

Unless you care about karma, how is this bad?

sugar_in_your_tea ,

I'm working on a P2P Reddit alternative, but Reddit is basically a more complicated StackExchange. Here's the mapping:

  • stack exchange site -> community/subreddit
  • question -> post
  • answer -> top level comment

The missing bits:

  • selected answer - easy metadata to add
  • comment on question
  • bounty - is it needed?
  • tags - again, easy metadata to add

Maybe I'll consider forking my project once it's ready and turn it into a QA site. The hardest part will be useful search due to its distributed nature.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

I guess I've moved to the part of my career where Stack Overflow isn't that helpful, but I've found a lot of utility in searching issues on GitHub and Reddit posts.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Not yet, but I'll post it somewhere here soon. I want to make sure the basics work properly first so people have a good experience on the first try. It's pretty rough right now.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

You don't need to go crypto to get there though, IPFS and similar exist and work. IPFS itself is kinda slow, but Iroh is aiming to be a more efficient alternative that solves similar problems. There are also protocols based on BitTorrent.

The way these work is basically:

  1. users connect to relay nodes
  2. relay nodes connect users directly
  3. users continue communicating directly w/o any servers

Then you build stuff on top to keep everything in sync. No servers, aside from the initial connection, which means minimal risk of anything ever going down. If relays go down, anyone can set up another and people reconnect.

The problem is that step 3 is quite complicated, and there are a ton of technical complexities to synchronizing information at scale w/o a central authority. Mastodon/Lemmy/ActivityPub gets around this by having each node (instance) be a complete copy of everything that node cares about. You get a ton of duplication, and eventually that means costs pile up. With a proper decentralized system, there doesn't need to be nearly as much duplication since you can always hop through some peers to find what you need.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

It's useful for anything online where cash would be useful. So paying for services, money transfers between acquaintances, donations to charity, etc. It turns out cash is useful for crime, and privacy-focused cryptocurrencies work like cash, hence are useful for crime.

Don't buy it as an "investment" or sign up for services to earn it, but it is useful for non-criminal things.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

That's not necessarily a given. Ethereum, for example, transitioned to proof of stake instead of mining and seems to have reduced electricity use by 99.5%. I'm not exactly sure where that number comes from, nor do I know a good way to compare crypto to other systems (e.g. do we count all the energy used by banks?).

But what I do know is that Bitcoin kinda sucks from an energy perspective, partially because they limit the number of blocks (e.g. buckets of transactions) per day, so mining is more valuable than on a currency with no such caps (e.g. more demand to mine each block = more miners = less efficiency per mined block).

What seems to be true is that cryptocurrencies have a large upfront energy cost due to speculation, and that plateaus as it hits a certain carrying capacity. So crypto scales decently well, and if you do proof of stake instead of proof of work, it seems to scale even better.

And then we get into the issue of where your energy is coming from. Since cryptocurrencies are global, they can be done anywhere energy is cheap. For example, daytime purchases can be done using excess energy in an area where it's night. For fiat, that energy use is more local, so you're more likely to process a transaction during peak energy use (afternoons), thus higher energy capacity needed. It's a really complicated topic, and I'd love for someone smarter than me to break it down.

But since it's so hard to calculate, there's a lot of bad information, which leads to unnecessary and unfair criticism from people who don't see value in cryptocurrencies. If you ask a crypto bro, they'll point to the massive amount of power used by financial institutions, and if you ask someone who's against cryptocurrencies, they'll compare POS and minor processing use by credit card companies to an entire Bitcoin block (which has lots of transactions). I'd really like to see an updated, neutral look into it, because all the information I'm able to find has huge holes in methodology.

But all of that is kind of irrelevant to the discussion about whether it's useful. If it's not useful, any amount of energy use is wasteful, but if it provides value, there's certainly an amount of energy we're willing to spend on it, so what exactly is that amount?

sugar_in_your_tea ,

But energy use isn't as simple as measuring transaction efficiency, there's a lot more to a currency than storing who transacted with whom. There's:

  • security of transactions - fraud and whatnot
  • coordination costs - international transactions, etc
  • cyber security, websites for managing money, etc

Or in terms you've used, someone needs to maintain that database, that database needs to be in some facility, and someone needs to audit the database. All of that is baked into cryptocurrencies. Yet the comparisons I've seen either account for way too much (e.g. bank tech support), or not enough (e.g. only POS and network costs).

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Lover of the Russian queen?

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Good and cheap.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Nah, we're cool with Japan eating our lunch. We just don't want a nationstate to artificially make their cars cheaper, even if they are good, to grab marketshare.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Nah, the reason is China is heavily subsidizing their EVs to snap up marketshare. If this was a US company, we'd call it anticompetitive behavior.

And no, I don't think we should subsidize anything. If the tariffs really are leveling the playing field, let them compete.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Yup, and I'm looking at them. But it's important to point out that they're not really discontinued, Chevy said they're planning to upgrade the battery packs and relaunch, but they're currently focusing on other car offerings. So I'm guessing it'll relaunch in a year or two.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

But why though? They were extremely popular...

sugar_in_your_tea ,

It's trivial to get phone numbers given an address in most cases.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Yeah, switching web apps seems like way too much work. I use a mobile app on my phone and the regular web app on my computer.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

As a native speaker, I read it as:

I haven't given it much thought, but there's a good chance I'll give it a shot.

It's a bit awkward, but I skipped over it and grasped what I assume was the intended meaning, so it's fine. Better words would be "suppose" or "guess" in this context.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

That's just not true, it's "usually" a scam. ProtonMail and Mullvad aren't scams just because they accept crypto for payments.

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