They are getting downvoted because they are making a bad faith argument. They state banning a for profit website for not complying with the laws is somehow equal to censorship, this is obviously not true.

Really I’m gonna need a source for that old timey radio claim. Because that sounds like it’s made up and even if it’s not, correlation does not mean causation.

There is no known mechanism for non ionizing radiation to have ANY effect on the human body or individual cells besides from a warming effect. And even the warming effect is quite small, there are normally a lot of other factors that have a way bigger effect on the temperature. See the Mythbusters episode where they tried to warm a chicken on a radar emitter. The turning of the radar cooled it down more than any warming from the radar did.

If there is any truth to claims that non ionizing radiation harms humans, physicists would be all over that. That would mean new physics in an area where there hasn’t been any new stuff for a long time now.

But it turns out we understand it pretty well and see no mechanism for any harm to occur. In that context all of the studies that find no relation are meaningful. If there seems to be no relation and there isn’t a mechanism to do anything, why would anybody think there is anything to find? Turns out it always comes down to FUD, to further some kind of an agenda.

I know a lot of folk that work at MS or have worked there, they are all very good people. They are highly motivated professionals that are top in their field. MS is a rich company and they recruit the best they can. However those are not the people making any kind of decisions. And it’s a cut throat company, if the budget gets cut, you are out on your ass. At least in most of the world, where strong employee protection isn’t a thing.

Don’t get me wrong, MS has a lot of bad apples just like any other company. Useless managers who say dumb shit and take praise for other peoples work. A leadership that doesn’t care about anything except their bonuses and the bottom line. But at least as far as the engineers go, there’s plenty of really good folk.

People also seem to forget how huge MS actually is. And a lot of the time the different branches within the company are as far away from each other as can be. Even within the same branch one can only talk to so many people.

At a consulting job I did recently they got an AI for a specific task to have an 25% rejection rate. Which I thought was pretty good and the team working on it said there was no way they could do better, this is the absolute best.

So they went and asked the customers if they would be interested in this feature and how much they would be willing to pay. The response was nobody was willing to pay at all for the feature and a 25% rejection rate was too high.

The reason customers gave was this meant they still need a human to check the results, so the human is still in the loop. And because the human basically has to do most of if not all of the work to check the result, it didn’t really save that much time. And knowing their people, they will probably slack on the checks, since most are correct. Which then leads to incorrect data going forward. This was simply not something customers wanted, they want to replace the humans and have it do better, not worse.

And paying for it is out of the question, because so many companies are offering AI for free or close to free. Plus they see it as a cost saving measure and paying for it means it has to save even more time for it to be worth.

So they put the project on ice for now, hoping the technology improves. The next customer poll they did, AI was the most requested feature. This caused some grumbles.

I prefer to think of it like there is some fake Europe wannabe out there and the poster wanted to make sure people knew he was talking about the real Europe.

The problem is those blocking extensions are based on timestamps. Those timestamps are added by the users, it’s a crowdsourced thing. But the ads a single user will see differ from what another user will see. It’s likely the length of the ads is different, which makes the whole timestamp thing a no go.

Along with the timestamp, there needs to be a way to detect where the actual video begins. That way at least an offset can be applied and timestamps maintained, but it would introduce a certain level of error.

The next issue would be to then advance the video to the place where the actual video begins. This can be very hard, as it would need to include some way of recognizing the right frame in the buffer. One requirement is that the starting frame is actually in the buffer (with ads more than a few seconds, this isn’t guaranteed). The add-on has access to this buffer (depending on the platform, this isn’t guaranteed). And there’s a reliable way to recognize the right frame, given the different encoding en quality setups.

And this needs to be done cheap, so with as little as infrastructure as possible. A database of timestamps is very small and crowdsourcing those timestamps is relatively easy. But recognizing frames requires more data to be stored and crowdsourcing the right frame is a lot harder than a timestamp. If the infrastructure ends up being complex and big, someone needs to pay for that. I don’t know if donations alone would cut it. So you would need to play ads, which is exactly what you intend on not doing.

I’m sure the very smart and creative people working on these things will find a way. But it won’t be easy, so I don’t expect a solution very soon.

Always has been.

And I’ve been using Microsoft since my first computer in 1984. Recently got DOS 2.0 with hacked FAT16 running on my first computer, would have blown my mind back then.

No the “AI” isn’t a threat in itself. And treating generative algorithms like LLM like it’s general intelligence is dumb beyond words. However:

It massively increases the reach and capacity of foreign (and sadly domestic) agents to influence people. All of those Russian trolls that brought about fascism, Brexit and the rise of the far right used to be humans. Now a single human can do more than a whole army of people could in the past using AI. Spreading misinformation has never been easier.

Then there’s the whole replacing peoples jobs with AI. No the AI can’t actually do those jobs, not very well at least. But if management and the share holders think they can increase profits using AI, they will certainly fire a lot of folk. And even if that ends up ruining the company down the line, that costs even more jobs and usually impacts the people lower in the organization the most.

Also there’s a risk of people literally becoming less capable and knowledgeable because of AI. If you can have a digital assistant you carry around on your pocket at all times answer every question ever, why bother learning anything yourself? Why take the hard road, when the easy road is available? People are at risk of losing information, knowledge and the ability to think for themselves because of this. And it can become so bad, when the AI just makes shit up, people think it’s the truth. And in a darker tone, if the people behind the big AIs want something to not be known or misrepresented, they can make it happen. And people would be so reliant on it, they wouldn’t even know this happens. This is already an issue with social media, AI is much much worse.

Then there is the resource usage for AI. This makes the impact of crypto currency seem like a rounding error. The energy and water usage is huge and becoming bigger every day. This has the potential to undo almost all of the climate wins we’ve had for the past two decades and push the Earth beyond the tipping point. What people seem to forget about climate change is once things start becoming bad, it’s way too late and the situation will deteriorate at an exponential rate.

That’s just a couple of big things I can think of on the top of my head. I’m sure there are many more issues (such as the death of the internet). But I think this is enough to call the current level of “AI” a threat to humanity.

And just about anything you try to do to actually read the description would start the movie, including doing nothing for 10 secs (because you are fucking reading the description). Till you hit the back button which just boots you back to the home screen, so you can start the selection process all over again.

Helpfully they do include IMDB scores when browsing for stuff, sadly all their stuff is total shite so all the scores are low. But hey, at least they include them.

The only way to watch anything on Prime is to make your selection in advance somewhere else and then search for it. If you type in the literal title of the movie, it will mostly be in the top 10 of the search results. This includes resuming watching something you were watching, like their hit series Fallout. You would expect the resume watching thing to be proudly the first item on the home page. OMG you actually watched something of ours, we are so happy. Nope it’s buried away on the 5th or 6th line and you need to scroll to get to it. It also happily resumes the previous episode at the credits, without the helpful next episode button. If you do manage to get to the next episode, you will need to watch the first 5 secs of same ad you’ve seen a million times (because they only seem to have the one ad on their platform) before you can skip to the content.

I don’t know what those guys are smoking, but their app is total garbage.

Usually big corps collect all your personal information and tell you it’s a good thing because they use it to make useful recommendations. That way you at least get something out of it. At Amazon they just take all your personal data and when it comes to recommendations it gives you a big middle finger. I don’t know here’s a romcom from 12 years ago, you like that stuff right? Whatever fuck off.

Don’t forget about the MSX, Commodore 128, the Sega Mastersystem and the Gameboy (although that used a custom modified version of the Z80, but very similar)

For those not in the know: The big issue with quantum computers is decoherence. This is (simply put) noise produced in the system, which interferes or overwrites the calculation / signal we want to get out of the computer. A large part of this is thermal energy, all that energy bouncing around destroys any chance of reading out the signal. So the solution would be to cool the machine within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero, which is hard but not impossible. Then there’s also EM radiation coming from all around us (wifi and cellphones, but also things like radio), this is relatively easy to shield against. A bit of a pain, but still something that can be done. But then there’s cosmic rays, there’s a real chance a cosmic ray hits with enough energy to disrupt the calculation within milliseconds. Milliseconds isn’t enough to do a useful calculation, so that’s a problem. Shielding against this is also pretty hard, since cosmic rays can have a lot of energy.

Then there’s the issue of measurement itself, measuring automatically means putting in energy to the system. This means it’s very hard (or maybe even impossible) to read out the results, without destroying them. Even if you get the damn thing stable enough to do a useful calculation.

The more qubits in a system, the more powerful it becomes, and you need quite a number of them to do anything useful with the machine. But the more qubits the bigger the decoherence issue.

This is why some people (me included) don’t believe the current form of quantum computers we are researching can actually work in the real world. We need some kind of big breakthrough on this to create an actually useful quantum computer system. With all the cooling and shielding requirements we certainly won’t be using them at home any time soon.

But of course as with anything these days the marketing department and media runs with everything they can, spouting out nonsense about quantum computers becoming mainstream any day now and all the amazing things they can do. This can make it hard to figure out what the actual level of development is right now. Plus anybody working on this is putting in billions of dollars and sure as heck won’t share anything with anybody. So maybe someone has already made a breakthrough, but I doubt it.

What is the issue exactly you are having? Reading and understanding error messages is part of the learning process. I’d suggest you try to solve it yourself, that way you’ll learn more. If someone gives you the answer, you’ll have a longer road ahead of you, even though you’ll move faster now.

The biggest thing is the UI being completely different. I did use VS Code before, but only for my own projects, not stuff for work. So I did know how to use VS Code, but still it’s a major mental adjustment with everything being in a different place, features and shortcuts working differently etc.

I really missed to Solution Explorer, which is probably my most used tool during work. But thankfully there is an excellent plugin which provides a Solution Explorer in VS Code. It’s a bit different from what I’m used to but it works just fine.

Normally for casual profiling I’d use VS builtin tools. Only switching to something like DotMemory when really diving into optimization. This seems to be missing from VS Code. Probably there’s a plugin to fix that, but I want to keep the number of plugins to a minimum to prevent issues of plugins not being updated or having compatibility issues as much as possible. So now I switched to a different work flow for this to use tools like DotMemory sooner instead of the builtin stuff from VS.

Resharper isn’t available for VS Code yet, but I don’t mind it. Some of my colleagues use it, but I prefer to do everything myself anyways and not use automated tools for code.

I miss the Nuget package manager. Everything can be done using the terminal, both in VS and VS Code, which works the same. But the UI provided by the manager is so nice, it shows all the info you need, let’s you do almost anything with two clicks. I’ve checked out some plugins which are supposed to help with this, but have found none as good as the VS package manager. I’m proficient enough with the terminal it doesn’t really matter, but I still miss the manager and find myself checking different sources manually which used to be a lot more efficient. So I’ve taken an efficiency hit here, but I still can get the job done.

Having everything done in the terminal panel takes some getting used to, where VS often launches different windows to get different kind of outputs. This is just something to get used to and could probably be changed in the settings, but I think it’s fine.

In VS the project is launched as a separate process and then VS attaches itself to the process for debug and inspection purposes. In VS Code it’s a subprocess of the main editor process. This has some implications using third party tools for profiling for example. But I haven’t noticed anything going wrong. I think the way VS does it is better, but it’s probably fine? In theory an application could crash the whole VS Code process. But my code never crashes so I should be fine, right?

Running and debugging is different but fine, with different profiles and debugging flags being managed from the UI and working perfectly. Publishing however is done only using the terminal, not the UI. Everything I need is available, but it took some figuring out how I need to do stuff using the terminal with regards to publishing. I’ve created a page on Confluence for myself with all the different stuff, which flags etc. It took some time but I think I’ve got everything figured out.

For version management we already used a third party tool, so luckily no changes there. I have had to set some new ignores, but other than that no changes.

Creating new projects is something I haven’t figured out how to do. For work I only ever work in existing projects that have been around for ages. I don’t know how easy it would be to create something new with all the required files and parameters so my colleagues can also use it. The other day I wanted to quickly check something in an empty project and I had to reach for VS again (for shame). I need to put in some time figuring this out in VS. It’s probably not complicated, but as I said I wanted to check something quickly so I didn’t have the time.

There are probably a thousand little things I have changed or have to get used to. But these are the main ones.

Just switch to code.

I put in the effort to redesign my work flow from VS (Enterprise license) to VS Code (totally free) earlier this year. I thought it couldn’t be done, but it was easier than I thought. I’m super happy with the result as I hated what they did with recent VS versions. Microsoft just can’t stop fucking up perfectly fine UIs in the name of “progress”.

Would really depend on the version of MP3. The first versions had some major issues with artifacts being introduced. People probably listened to that and concluded all compressed music must be shit. Later versions were much better, even though I would think 128k is probably too low and would be noticeable with some effort. I agree, starting at 192k and people can’t tell anymore.

Does anybody use MP3 anymore? I don’t really know to be honest.

Even a human with very good hearing and knowledge of how a song is supposed to sound cannot tell the difference between CD quality audio and 256k AAC like iTunes uses.

Don’t believe all the nonsense audiophiles keep spewing out. Human ears suck. If we hadn’t had our giant brains to compensate, we’d be practically deaf.

The fucking sad thing is, when they did it 20 years ago Internet Explorer became the gold standard. Now they are pushing super hard, annoying users, killing competition and they have a tiny market share. They aren’t getting anywhere, just being assholes because they don’t know how not to be.

The boring company is a scam. They don’t do anything new or better and in many ways are much worse.

They took the costs of major tunnel projects, calculated the costs per meter of diameter, scaled it down to their max diameter and compared the two. Then they say OMG WE ARE SO MUCH BETTER! Well sure, because that’s in no way a fair comparison to make at all. Let alone the fact that comparing budget to actual costs is a no go, it’s not possible to just scale the costs.

If you want to make a small narrow tunnel, for example to connect two existing buildings on a existing manufacturing site with a small diameter to for example run some infrastructure and a servicing tunnel, you don’t use a tunnel boring machine. You just get out a digger, dig a big hole, drive the digger down the hole, dig forward, brace, dig forward, brace etc. It doesn’t cost much at all, doesn’t require many people or special equipment and goes pretty fast.

If you want to make a big ass tunnel, for example for a road or a railroad, you might want to use a tunnel boring machine, but mostly traditional digging is preferred. We’ve gotten pretty good at creating tunnels using diggers and explody stuff and have been for thousands of years. When it’s figured out a tunnel boring machine is actually the best option, you need a company with a lot of experience and equipment to get the job done. When you are at that point, money is mostly a non-issue and time becomes the main limitation. These projects take a long time and the public or company providing the funding needs it done, they don’t mind paying if it’s done as fast as possible. And experience is the key to getting huge projects like that done on time.

The costs come mostly from all the red tape, safety provisions and pure manhours getting it done. The costs of the machine is so much a non factor, there are times the machine is custom built for a project and a lot of it is left there because taking it out isn’t worth it. Cutting on red tape isn’t possible, regulations are regulations and they are strict for a reason. Cutting on safety is a Elon trademark, but in a lot of places you can’t get away with that. And doing that within your own company is one thing, but if it’s a job for a client, the client might not be inclined to agree to something like that. The manhours can be minimized with a super efficient setup and you can count on companies having done a lot of projects over the decades know how to do it as efficient as possible.

And on the safety point: The only tunnel the Boring Company has ever built would not be allowed to be open to the public in most places. And it actually isn’t really open, you have to sign a waiver beforehand and only certain personal is allowed in the tunnel and only with their Tesla cars. It’s only barely large enough for a car and would be considered way too small for an actual road. Real tunnels need stuff like emergency exits, guardrails and a walking space behind the guardrails to get to the emergency exits, a lot of safety infra, monitoring, ventilation, air inputs and outputs, fire safety etc. You can’t even drive in their tunnel with regular cars, the fumes have nowhere to go. And the day one of their cars catches fire in that tunnel is a dark day indeed. I’m not sure the driver can even open the doors and for sure emergency services can’t get to it. They’ve made a concrete hole and called it a tunnel, that’s not what a tunnel is.

I’m not sure what the point of it is, it’s probably an economic vessel of some kind to shift some money around. They haven’t accepted any orders and have only done that shitty Vegas thing. They say they are going to do more in Vegas, but I’ll believe that when I see it.

No it’s literally a subway system. Putting trains in tunnels isn’t something new or revolutionary, that’s literally what subways are. And we’ve been doing it for over a hundred years.

People seem to be locked in on examples in the US of bad subways to mean subways inherently suck. But there are plenty of examples of perfectly working subways, which are highly efficient, comfortable and get you from A to B fast.

There are even places with subways that currently suck, but used to be very good. But car culture has meant rich people use their car and sit in gridlock, while the poor use the subway. This lead to a class difference and the richer class in power gutting funding for public transport. That is what makes it suck, not the principal of the thing.

Everything Elon says is new or revolutionary, usually isn’t. The hyperloop (or vacuum train) concept isn’t new either, I remember reading a book in the 80s where they had vacuum trains. And there are examples of the idea going back a hundred years or more. The hyperloop idea is so dumb, it can be debunked in a couple of minutes with some back of the envelope calculations. The power requirements alone would be huge. But hey slap some solar panels on that bad boy and it regenerates it’s own power right, cause that’s how anything works.