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Any AI app worth its salt allows you to upload a photo of something and it processes it flawlessly in the same amount of time. This is absolutely worthless teather.

It’s not the time that’s the friction. It’s the choice. The student has to actively take the picture and upload it. It’s a choice. It takes more effort than reading the autogenerated summary that Google Drive or Copilot helpfully made for the digital PDF of the reading they replaced.

It’s not much more effort. The level of friction is minimal. But we’re talking about the activation energy of students (in an undergrad English class, likely teenagers). It doesn’t take much to swing the percentage of students who do the reading.


Are you really comparing the energy necessary to read something to taking a photo and having an ai read it for you. You are not comparing zero energy to some energy, you are comparing a whole lot of energy to some energy.

The quotas for summarising text and parsing images and then summarising text aren't the same. As you surely know.

Who’s paying for that? Certainly not the users (yet).

Educate us, tell us when did we vote for the commission and the likes of von der Leyen. (If your answer is "you didn't vote for it, but you voted for someone who voted for someone who voted for it in a secret ballot" I am going to chuckle)

Do Americans vote for the supreme court or the chair of the fed?

And when did Americans vote for the director of FBI? Chair of the Fed? The local judge who can sign a warrant permitting the police to rummage your house?

> Educate us, tell us when did we vote for the commission and the likes of von der Leyen. (If your answer is "you didn't vote for it, but you voted for someone who voted for someone who voted for it in a secret ballot" I am going to chuckle)

Voters place their trust in representatives who then act on their behalf during the EP voting process and other legislative matters, such as electing the President of the European Commission


Even that would be wrong. Von der Leyen was strong armed into her position by Merkel and the other heads of states, overruling Timmermans nomination.

By that logic the president of the USA is also "not elected"

Why is that useless as opposed to what most of us do for work? I think you guys have a weird sense of how useful the average job is, or how much the average job contributes to society at large. At least this made a lot of money I guess.

You can create a lot of profit for your employer whilst contributing nothing to society or even be detrimental to it. Money has no bearing on that.

They can take the skill to any other employer and improve performance for others elsewhere. Think of all the seconds you could get back to do more meaningful things if more websites were fully optimized. It may sound silly but it snowballs into minutes, hours, and days.

I think most jobs contribute positively to the society. Not much, for sure, but they contribute.

Is the cleaner regularly removing poop stains from the personal toilet of a big and rich Google shareholder more useful than the qualified Google engineer working hard so a big number is very slightly bigger on one the shareholder’s list of numbers? I think the cleaner has more impact.


Yeah this is no different from someone optimizing literally any other performance bottlenecks in ANY other web project.

Yea, and the scale of impact on the economy of those micro seconds is probably huge

Why does that anger you? Democracy is fundamentally unable to solve such issues.

Nearly every democratic country in the world is a counter example to this, what do you mean exactly?

Not true. Organized crime operates largely where people have money, i.e. in Europe, it's mostly UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Sweden...etc.

I’m no expert on global crime stats, but it feels like organized crime used to be way more 'in your face.' Back in the day, the countries you mentioned including Eastern Europe, you’d hear about car bombings, public shootouts, and blatant protection rackets. Doesn't the relative disappearance of that kind of chaos suggest things have actually improved? Look at the UK, for instance the fact that average police officers patrol without firearms feels like a pretty strong indicator of a more stable society, doesn't it?

Organized crime doesn't like publicly visible violence. That's bad for business. They only resort to that when they feel they have no other choice. They do shit like bomb judges and get into shootouts with the police when they have to exert their power, not when they feel secure and business is good.

A better measure of organized crime is the sort of crime they profit from, like the general availability of illegal drugs, trafficked women, etc.


But aren’t car bombs and public shootouts between different crime groups an unavoidable by product of existing organized crime? It seems to me there always be someone who thinks he can get more money by leaving a group and creating one of their own or some other group trying to expand revenue and territory

> aren’t car bombs and public shootouts between different crime groups an unavoidable by product of existing organized crime?

Check out the Japanese Yakuza. Yes, they are in decline, but even at the peak of their powers they didn't really do that sort of thing. Gangsters can be pretty private.

Besides, gangsters are not stupid. By now, Hollywood has produced tons of material about the rise and fall of criminals, with increasing realism; effectively, they educated the newer generations into not being as stupid as Tony Montana.


Not necessarily. Intra-gang violence can be done in more private ways, public terrorism is a choice but not an inevitability. Gang splits are also less likely to occur when the government is corrupt and working with some gangs but not others; the intra-gang violence can be disguised as law enforcement action and the overwhelming power of the government makes them a powerful ally that deters competition from even trying.

Interesting take. I think I have lived in an environment that makes it harder for to imagine stuff like that can happen

Hell, Belgium is basically a narcostate at this point.

If you think Belgium is a narcostate - oh my :)

People lose touch with reality when life becomes too rich and comfortable, and they become too focused on security. You miss all the other corrosive influences on society.

I've travelled the entire United States, multiple times over, and seen quite a bit of Europe and South America, and I'm in Colombia now.

Latin America, and Colombia in particular would be far more of a "narcostate" according to the popular Northern definition - but perception often isn't reality.

I've never seen the gripping poverty and desperation that's common in the United States anywhere in Latin America; even the poorer communities here tend to be vibrant and well functioning, with families and little farming communities everywhere that are living life well. The fabric of society functions pretty well - health care and healthy food is far more available, far less conflict with government apparatuses (try walking into a DMV anywhere in the states, vs. walking into a government office in Latin America - I think you'll find it enlightening).

The security-obsessed mindset in the United States and Europe leads people to want to stamp out the mafia and cartels, but if you look at the actual outcomes I think it's pretty clear that that approach fails in the long run. Look at Mexico for the worst example of what can happen - being next to the United States the pressures have been high, and it hasn't worked, and cartel violence is absolutely ludicrous.

When people have more of a "live and let live" approach, things tend to stabilize in unconventional arrangements that are on the whole much less toxic to society. So Colombia, which does have cartels, doesn't have the same level of warfare or violence that affects the average person as Mexico does - where you'll regularly see a half dozen army/swat guys on patrol in a pickup with M-16s. Even so, you don't feel the same level of tension about that in Mexico vs. seeing a LEO presense in the United States, where that often means outright harassment for the populace.

There's a lot more to having a functional society than just eliminating elements that run contrary to "popular order".

And Belgium is great :)


> I've never seen the gripping poverty and desperation that's common in the United States anywhere in Latin America; even the poorer communities here tend to be vibrant and well functioning, with families and little farming communities everywhere that are living life well.

with all the respect but what a naive paragraph. i suggest you to go away from touristics places or get into a poor part of any big city in Latin america. the stuff is nasty. what you are comparing is relatively stable rural families that would be an akin to a rural medium class on the USA... you can almost say in 100% of the cases a medium class North American is equivalent of someone from the upper class here. in term of goods/comfort, not work. and if you still romantize as a traveler these poor communities on the backcountry, i suggest to try a week or 2 of their work. just take the routine of a +40 y/o man to check what being 'medium class' is about. being on the hunger line with a bare house is poverty and Latin America has many examples


Have you seen the poorer parts of the United States? Or walked around the Tenderloin? Or seen what meth has done to parts of the rust belt, and the farming communities that have been hollowed out and eviscerated across the midwest?

Ever been to a reservation?


you are comparing a marginalized demographic against people who belong to the middle class on Latin America. it's totally out of sense. we also have cracolandia and favelas and people dying of diarrhoea and dying of hunger in some regions.

please, don't visit a country with probably tourist type of visit and sum up a whole continent on socioeconomics or whatever category your empirical sociologic observation was

edit: since ur in Latin America and if ur not reading anything, i recommend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Veins_of_Latin_America


Ok, if you're actually from Latin America, I should apologize - I don't mean to say that those kinds of issues don't exist (and actually, I have seen some - Honduras) - I often assume I'm talking to someone from the states, and Americans have gotten insular and really out of touch, and most have no idea how much things have changed over the past 50 years.

That said, I'd rather live in middle lower class Latin America that Estados Unidos any day. The food is probably going to be better - too many places in the States Walmart is the only practical option now - health care won't bankrupt you, and people in Latin America are almost universally better educated and less depressed on social issues.

And I think a lot of that can be traced to a culture that's a bit less authoritarian, because people understand the history of why that doesn't work. Just going to war with the Mafia or the narcos is a trite answer, but it usually doesn't solve things in the long run.

Edit - also, you really should compare the poorer parts of the big cities you're talking about to Detroit or New Orleans or the Tenderloin. In my experience, people in Latin America can also have a skewed perspective. The world is a big place.


Please elaborate I think there’re quite a few examples that contradict this

I understand this kind of people is allergic to “per capita”, but really, showing a list of consumption by region when the regions are of such different sizes is next to worthless.

I'm "allergic to per capita" specifically in cases where it doesn't matter but keeps getting brought up as a bad faith retort.

As an example, it doesn't matter who emits CO2 or where from, since we're all emitting it into the same air, and the only thing that matters is the absolute amount. Similarly, I imagine it's cold comfort for domestic animals in subsaharan Africa that their torturers, rapists, and murderers are marginally less prolific than those in other regions.


Per capita would be great. The absolute numbers are still mind boggling.

It's so bad that phones come with a "Samsung Global Goals" app to push the UN ideology.

>The Samsung Global Goals app is a, CSR initiative partnering with the UNDP to promote 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, fight inequality, and fix climate change by 2030.


>to push the UN ideology

I think you fell into the wrong rabbithole somewhere

Such virtue signaling by app is lame and hypocritical, but the UN is far too divided to be pushing anything.


The wrong rabbit hole of finding a pre installed app pushing politics to be icky.

I honestly don’t know what is political about saving resources and our planet. The details on how to do it are potentially politics, but that’s not what the SDGs are about.

It's a 42 day old account that complains about "UN ideology". Just flag and move on.

I don't know why you rightoids have fixated on the UN 2030 thing. I had to do endless projects about it (SDGs and similar) in college and it was just the most milquetoast, unrealistically hopeful thing ever.

I don't really know what the big deal is.


Exactly. It’s his parents fault.

Crazy to me that someone would run a website where you pay for every request you receive, instead of a fixed monthly rate. It’s an obvious recipe for disaster - crossing the wrong guy would cost you dearly. Or just a crawler running amok.

The tremendously, villainy evil of getting money for a service.

So

- the devs all need to get licesnses and specific hardware to develop for IOS

- They spin up their own servers to manage all the finances coming in

- They work on their payment processing solution separate from Apple. And Patreon still pays some fee to apple over the app.

- the model of Patreon only takes 5% off of creators, so that's not enough for Apple. It also wants a cut at the customers of the website who provide services. Customers not beholden to any one platform.\

- And to force them to do that, they are kicking the other processing plan off as an option, leaving only them to work with.

And it's somehow not evil? If I let a friend sleepover at my apartment, is the landlord in the right to demand a day of rent from them too?


I see you don't have much interaction with landlords and their thought processes.

A service that Apple is mandating everyone to use or else get kicked off their operating system...

This would be an entirely different conversation if Patreon was still allowed to use other payment systems outside of Apple's IAP service. No, this is Apple forbidding competitors on their platform.


Red Hat created hard dependencies on systemd in all of the popular software they develop to ensure its adoption.

I don't get it. If you install openbsd, you get dependencies that openbsd developers has chosen. You can try to remove every aspect of those choices but at some point it won't be openbsd anymore.

Is the claim here that Red Hat is unnecessary coupling their critical parts of the distribution in ways that other distributions would not do? A few examples here would be nice.


OpenBSD is a monolithic system with kernel and userspace developed together. Linux was a bazaar.

So if you don't like that, don't you still have the choice not to use software developed by Red Hat?

They do, they just want to whine about software other people made (that they don't contribute to) doing something they don't like.

Embrace extend extinguish tactics, now celebrated in Linux land.

You had choices before, you still have choices, how is that EEE? There never been more distributions available.

At every stage of EEE, you have choices. All but one are made more unappealing as the EEE process progresses.

You had choices not to use $technology that Microsoft embraced, extended and then extinguished, how is that not EEE?

EEE is about taking existing standards/software and making it eventually incompatible with FOSS. That's very different from creating a new thing, and asking people to use that. AFAIK, they're not replacing anything (but maybe I missed something), so I don't see it as the same as what Microsoft did back in the day.

I think it's similar. We have a big powerful company pushing their solution, pushing more and more software to depend on that solution, so people who want to exercise their choice not to have an increasingly uphill battle to do so.

That doesn't seem so different from what Microsoft used to do, as even back then there was always choice if people decided to get together and exercise it, but practically in both cases it's an uphill battle.


Did anything else support cgroups V2?

Which software has hard dependencies on systemd?

Also, it's not just RedHat that's depending on systemd, as if its a conspiracy on their part.

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/26/plasma_6_6_systemd_lo...


Gnome, for example. GDM now needs systemd's userdb.

It is indeed becoming harder and harder to avoid and I understand that this isn't great, but systemd tackles some genuinely hard problems that others don't. Which is to say I don't begrudge Gnome devs for this and personally prefer systemd over current alternatives.


which current alternatives have you tried?

I've looked at OpenRC, RUnit and S6. I haven't recently run any of them "in production", however.

Personally, I am a strong believer that declaring the desired state is a lot easier to get right than actually writing the code to get there. Beyond that, I'm not saying any of these are bad at being what they are, systemd just has more features, some of which I really like. Two examples I'm actively using currently are automount units and socket activation (S6 also has socket activation). I have some remote folders mounted via SSHFS automatically when I access them and this is incredibly useful for my workflow.

Could I find tools to slot into other init systems that do this for me? Probably. But systemd has this neatly packaged up, easy to configure and easy to introspect state.


Runit (not RUnit) seems pretty cool.

It uses a folder with a subfolder for every service. Each subfolder contains a script called run. The system runs the run script. If it exits, it waits two seconds and runs it again. Repeatedly. It's very worse–is–better.

There are commands to control the services and check their status. For example, if a file called down exists next to the run script, it won't run it. This is how you disable a service.

It checks for service folders being created and deleted. New folders are started, and deleted ones are stopped cleanly. They can also be symlinks, so you don't need to worry about deleting a running service folder and you can remove a service from init without erasing the scripts you wrote.

The whole system is useful in many situations and not only as pid 1.

Maybe one day I'll invent a runit–based distribution.


Dependencies may be becoming less properties of software, and more so properties of the distro's systemd wiring.

More and more software will assimilate systemd features. Free distros will patch, shim, emulate, flounder. Or in GPT parlance "Dependencies are no longer intrinsic properties of software; they are emergent properties of a distribution's systemd orchestration layer"

Meanwhile, gripes, fears etc,

'Linux' becomes interpreted vs inspectable.

Requires superfluous new literacy

Convolutes logs, tools Obscures causality

Centralized control above Unix process model

Fair well ps aux, hello systemctl, cgtop, gls

KILL (less lethalized) superceded, replaced by service stop and mask

Surrender chains for events, ie buggy debugging or complexity accretion

General obfuscation beneath the hood

Centralized ... indexed, logs vs text streams

And....

Upstream assumes systemd

Some resist

Costs rise

Optional becomes expected

Accidental incompatibility

And... systemd ingurgitates one by one, policy, supervision, logging, identity, dependency management and the rest of the world... digests it, and from the aether emerges a sweet smiley face, disgorging forth a monolithic mutant avatar, with Linux features.

I'll be quiet happy to be wrong about everything. Feel free to slaughter everything I've written. I don't even oppose systemd - I simply perceive it as a singularity that's drawing everything around me towards it. Wrong would definitely be good, so please don't hold back. I won't seek pardon for the rant though, because true or false, it's honest.

Edit: I was reading through my threads and thought the parent was asking me, though wasn't. I've unintentionally barged in here, but I'll leave the comment anyway, as it references a very big concern of mine.


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