Imagine being Elon Musk, or Donald Trump, or Boris Johnson. You have more money than you know what to do with. You could literally afford to go to whatever paradise you want and spend the days of your one life doing whatever you please.
They came so tantalisingly close to having more fulfilling and carefree lives than 99.99% of humans who have ever lived, but instead they want the masses to fear and adore them.
And they are utterly miserable, because nothing will fill the void, and the more they try, the more they debase themselves in front of billions, and the people they most need to respect them probably think they’re losers.
Idiots. Fools. Losers.
Musk is the worst of them. Read some Iain M Banks books, didn’t understand any of then, decided to save the world by becoming a solar power and electric vehicle magnate with space colonies.
But instead he is approaching old age as the proprietor of a bankrupt nazi chat room, and none of his kids will speak to him.
How can you have so many advantages and yet fuck up so amazingly completely?
I wonder whether one day we will look back on these people and know that, as well as being shitty as people, they also didn't have anywhere near as much actual money as they claimed; that it was mostly a shell game.
His wealth isn't enough for a personal space program, but it's enough he's free from ever having to worry about money again as long as he doesn't waste it on crap like super yachts. Now he has multiple homes across the world and spends his time travelling and enjoying himself. That's a much more mature approach and I would wager he's far, far happier than Elon Musk will ever be.
I suspect the advantages are part of the problem. They make it hard to see how tough it is for everyone else to do things, and that is easily translated into blaming them for being useless.
I've recently been doing some cognitive behavioural therapy care of the NHS, with a particular emphasis on activation (getting up and doing things) and self esteem. The last session is this coming Thursday. I think it's been net beneficial, in the sense that it's given me space to talk about things and think about things, and acquire a few more tools to manage my mind.
And the past week or so working for Hughes Hall to understand their Linux and database systems has been a big boost; it's clear that I'm actually pretty damn good at doing this kind of stuff and people seem impressed as if I'm working some kind of deep magic. And yet somehow when I'm sitting here alone it all feels like some kind of illusion in the face of that sense of stuckness and uselessness and yearning. Which I know is lies. I can effect change, I am capaable, I am cared about.
Could all be hormones. My tits are aching with another growth spurt.
Finally got myself an official Pi 5 power supply, so hopefully the thing won't just randomly die under load any more.
Raspberry Pi Foundation love making videos about their "not invented here" approach to power supplies, but guys, you actually suck at it and your continued inability to implement USB C Power Delivery (and PoE) sensibly is getting fucking old.
USB C has this annoying rule that the downstream has to ask for power before the upstream provides anything above 100mA.
The workaround that I used with RPi4 was, I'd use some noname Chinese 3A USB 2 charger — USB 2 doesn't really know or care about this particular rule, the cheap chargers just provide 5V at whatever amperage they can put out — and an USB A <–> USB C cable to connect that 5V 3A to the RPi.
Because of the recent developments at the Raspberry Foundation, I don't think I'll be getting any RPi5:s, so I can't test it myself, but I think odds are good that this approach still works.
oooohhh but if we implement USB-PD and use anything >5V then we would have to add another voltage regulation stage and ooooohhh woe is me
i understand their "lets not add cost for a feature only 2% of users might actually want" philiosphy, but yeah no fuck off pi foundation. power delivery is not one of those things worth saving 12 cents a board on
@joshie 🏳️🌈 Particularly because it ONLY works with their PSU. It will boot up massively degraded from anything else, but at less capability than a Pi 4 (like, it will disable USB boot and if you force enable it, it will randomly die from lack of power).
And don't get me started on the PoE hats that scream and function as heaters when the pi shuts down.
I'm sure the person who wrote this caption wasn't thinking of it this way, BUT:
That truck is stuck directly under the main fan blades of a high-bypass turbofan engine, which function essentially as a ducted propeller. They get rotated by a turbine in the jet exhaust and generate much more thrust than the escaping exhaust gasses themselves.
Propeller is a specific thing in aviation, and that doesn’t include turbofans. It does include turboprops, which is why they have “prop” in the name, and not “fan”.
I wasn’t on Usenet back then, as I was still in elementary school rather than university. But I heard the story later in the 90s. On the radio. I guess that last part makes me old after all.
Was on Usenet (rec.aviation mostly) through most of the second half of the 80s. Left the job that gave me that access in 1990 and had only limited (and pay-per-minute phone call) access for a few years (CIX and Compuserve, don't remember the order) so just used email a bit until a few years later and came back to a very different Internet.
This is not the future we thought we were building in the 90s tech industry. We thought we were going to help people. What we built could have been used to help people, but it’s not. It’s being used as a misery amplifier on a massive scale.
It's pretty frustrating for me. I twigged to the Californian Ideology pretty early; pointed out often that anything which empowered the grass roots also empowered the powerful, if they were smart enough to leverage it. Which they were. I saw no evidence people were actually using the net to do the empowering things they said they wanted to do, but people were too happy to roll their dice on dotcom payouts. I got a career out of it so at one level I guess I shouldn't complain.
@FeralRobots I was 21 and being "on the grid" meant using payphone, realistically. The internet at that point was pre google, and the idea of just being able to use a satellite navigation system, text messaging and email when out and about seemed utterly transformative.
> I pay a small fortune to streaming services and there’s nothing fucking on.
I feel your frustration. Having said that, I've been enjoying New Amsterdam over the past few days. Plus I finally gave Star Trek Prodigy another go and it wasn't bad. Aspects of it were pretty good.
Things I've enjoyed recently: Slow Horses on Apple Fargo s5 on Prime Percy Jackson on Disney Kin and The Tourist on iplayer True Detective s4 just started this week and looks very promising
Asked in an interview with the BBC if he had complete confidence in Boeing's quality control processes after the incident which saw a part of the aircraft's fuselage fall off, the Ryanair boss said "no".
I was today years old when I worked out that Trading Places with Eddie Murphy is literally an adaptation of Pygmalion/My Fair Lady, and I feel very slow on the uptake.
Oof. “We find it hard to see why the defendant's legal liability should turn on the court's impression of whether or not the facts of the case fit the dramatic pattern of a Greek tragedy.” I do love a good judicial putdown. (From Paul & Anor v Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust [2024] UKSC 1 bailii.org/uk/cases/UKSC/2024/… )
Except, in the salient aspect, that the events described *don't* really follow at least the strictest, Aristotelian criteria for Greek tragedy, where the tragedy takes place in a single place on a single day.
The original Cocklecarrot mentioned "Sophoclean" (great word). Now, dragged up in a Secondary Modern, I'm not an expert on such things, but Oedipus Rex and Antigone follow the unities, iirr?
So it was a weirdly specific (-ly wrong) analogy to use to extend a single event to 36 hours and the length of the M1.
After the point UK law diverged from EU law, EU regulations became UK law that could be modified. So now, if I’m talking about Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (aka “the GDPR”) I need to clarify that I’m talking about the UK’s fork of the codebase. Can I find a standard way of doing this? Can I bobbins. If legislation was in git I’d just cite the commit ID and annoy everyone.
Some months ago, I asked about trans women who were long term post op and who have had dental implants with bone regeneration.
I am pleased to report that at my 3 1/2 month appointment to place the healing abutment, I have had more than satisfactory levels of bone regeneration. The procedure worked really well!
2mg estradiol, oral, twice daily, FWIW. I also supplement vitamin D3.
Reddit mods embrace the fact that nobody has time to give a shit about your special snowflake arbitrary community rules novel when you are just one of thousands of subreddits and this is social media, not a job application 2024.
Reddit is tens of thousands of communities each run by someone for whom working as a petty bureaucrat with no oversight somewhere in the Iberian peninsula is their dream job.
TAP’s refunds department are incompetent rather than malevolent. They made the news for accidentally giving a full seat price refund for a baby that was on a lap so hadn’t had a ticket in the first place.
@timberwraith I imagined they won a really impressive bowl, you know, like on Mastermind, a super bowl.
It turns out big Mercian Football games are known as bowls after the first such, The Rose Bowl. Which is named after the Rose Bowl Stadium which is kind of bowlish tbf. It looks like the superbowl trophy is a weird, phallic trophy somewhat resembling a prostate stimulator, so not at all bowlish.
21st century capitalism, for me, has as its salient feature the flight away from quality. There is now an inbuilt acceptance that everything will just get slowly worse. There are now entire areas of commerce where you simply cannot buy a well designed high quality product, when you used to be able to. Everything is a race to the bottom.
This is most exemplified in my mind by the way Telsa enshittified DOOR HANDLES.
If you’ve never used the door on a Tesla, the thing is that you cannot close and latch the door if you’re holding the handle. Holding the handle means that the latch is disengaged.
Which means you have to slam it.
Whoever designed this must never have lived anywhere windy.
Earlier I posted about what I want in a car, and how it’s getting harder and harder to buy one that isn’t an SUV/iPad crossover. They look great, but are just dreadful from an ergonomic and safety point of view.
And they’re getting worse. There have been a few joyous years when you have been able to use the satnav system on your phone f
... show more
21st century capitalism, for me, has as its salient feature the flight away from quality. There is now an inbuilt acceptance that everything will just get slowly worse. There are now entire areas of commerce where you simply cannot buy a well designed high quality product, when you used to be able to. Everything is a race to the bottom.
This is most exemplified in my mind by the way Telsa enshittified DOOR HANDLES.
If you’ve never used the door on a Tesla, the thing is that you cannot close and latch the door if you’re holding the handle. Holding the handle means that the latch is disengaged.
Which means you have to slam it.
Whoever designed this must never have lived anywhere windy.
Earlier I posted about what I want in a car, and how it’s getting harder and harder to buy one that isn’t an SUV/iPad crossover. They look great, but are just dreadful from an ergonomic and safety point of view.
And they’re getting worse. There have been a few joyous years when you have been able to use the satnav system on your phone for directions via CarPlay or the Android equivalent, instead of the dreadful shit the manufacturers include.
They’re now moving away from letting you connect your phone. In the future, not only will we be forced to use their dross; we will have to pay a monthly subscription for it.
Sorry to change the subject slightly, but another area is furniture. Almost all my furniture is pre-1990 stuff that I got second-hand. I threw out all my new IKEA furniture after they begun failing within 3-12 months of buying them. I thought I'd found a quality furniture store recently, but it turned out their furniture was second-hand. I've become convinced that it's not possible to buy quality, first-hand furniture anymore.
Suitcases too: I have a suitcase from the 70s that my dad gave me, saying "you can dump it". Is he nuts? It may look old-fashioned, but made of proper leather with metal clasps. I'm over 30, but am sure that suitcase will outlast me. Compared to suitcases made these days, which will last 15 years if you're lucky. I hate the concept of planned obsolescence so much!
@llwynog I have the same experience when it comes to clothes and textiles from the parents' or grandparents' generation: clearing out my parents' house I remember handling old clothes (coats, blouses, shoes, gloves and scarves), and the realization on the first touch: "Wow, this such a great, thick and built-to-last quality of textile!" This was clothing that was 50 to 80 years old.
I wasnt used to feeling that kind of quality in my clothes lifetime. Mindboggling. Sad.
Capitalism does to products what it does to everything else: the wealth gap, here visible in quality and price tag.
The midrange products are kinda gone or turned to shit. We now have a lot of shitty cheap stuff (getting less cheap by the day in many cases) and very high end quality stuff, unaffordable by most.
On top of that, all the crap technology now allows like subscriptions to be able to use the hardware we paid for are not prevalent.
Regarding cars, if I was on the market for one, I would look into the Hyundai Kona (or Kauai or whatever it’s called in Portugal to avoid the c word). It’s a bit SUVy so you probably won’t like it, and I’m not sure about the enshittification factor. However it seems to be the car that usually gets higher ratings on range per kW second only to the fascist EVs (and I’m almost sure the battery has active cooling).
I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar...
@@shezza_t Here in the western Algarve we are 10 years into a drought. We are now in a situation of essentially having to abandon our reservoirs because it looks like they will never actually fill up ever again.
So, out of interest (I drive a Nissan Leaf, which is in many ways my ideal car, but they’re EOL), what car is available today that satisfies the following:
Battery EV
Not an iPad/SUV crossover
Hatchback with decent boot space (previous comment about not an SUV still applies)
Intelligent cruise control with lane following
If Nissan updated the Leaf to have CCS2 and an actively cooled battery, it would be just perfect IMO, but instead they scrapped it and replaced it with the Ariya, which is an SUV/iPad crossover and they broke one of the Leaf’s best features (e-pedal) in the process too.
@swaldman I think every single one of those lacks physical climate controls - suggesting they've falled into the trap of normal driving operations requiring unsafe interaction with a touch screen. And potentially significant interaction if you need to switch away from and then back to CarPlay/Android Auto being used for navigation.
@Zoë O'Connell @Simon Waldman Yeah. It's like they got the people in who vomited up (I refuse to use the word "designed" here) electric oven and hob controls.
@zoe Yes!! I have a touch-button hob for the first time in my current place and I am screaming "why? Turning knobs was perfectly good, and you made it worse!". Though it is easier to clean.
@zoe they all have big touchscreens, but I don't think any / many of them are free of buttons in a Tesla way. I think most of the things that would usually be on the wheel or stalks are still on the wheel or stalks. (though the ID3 and Born have been criticised for making the steering wheel buttons capacitive...) @goatsarah
@zoe Also, "You put something down on this cold and not-in-use cooking surface? I will BLEEP AT YOU INCESSANTLY until you move it or turn the power off".
@zoe also, in modern planes, a lot of serious experimental science has gone into UI design (because of its importance, as you note). Although what is best for pilots who train on that specific aircraft type may not be what is best for car drivers, I guess. @goatsarah
@mastodonmigration I am willing to bet it would actually be cheaper for manual knobs. Added complexity of software and computer control can only add price over time. The internal mechanisms are the same.
@chris Don't think so. The ergonomic engineering of controls in cars is one of those things that looks seemless, but is the result of lots of design expertise. The controls themselves are quite expensive because they have to work reliably in temperature and environmental extremes. Sticking an iPad on the dashboard is relatively inexpensive. It is also a safety nightmare, but hey its so cool 😎.
@chris @mastodonmigration I reckon touch-only is cheaper nowadays. Touchscreens are cheap commodity items, note that the CPU behind them is nearly always underpowered and the UI poor, the assembly cost is less than lots of buttons, and it's identical for all versions regardless of features.
Hyundai's design team have stated that they plan to stick with buttons. But they don't really have a Leaf-sized hatchback (maybe Ionic 5, but I think it's bigger, and the looks will be marmite)
Conversation with the wife now about why the angry Christian types don’t froth about Dan Simmons’ Hyperion/Endymion series.
I mean, it’s literally about the second coming of Christ, sent by god to die a horrible death so that humanity can be redeemed, only god is us, if we heed the message, sending said sacrifice back through time, and she’s a teenage girl because apparently the carpenter from Nazareth had one job (apart from the carpentry gig), which he fucked up, so she’s sent to do it properly, and it’s the Catholic Church which tortures her to death this time round.
Anyway, the conclusion was that they aren’t upset because the books are longer than their attention spans.
Sarah Brown
in reply to Sarah Brown • •🏰Christophe S.❄IceEnchanter🦢
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •🏰Christophe S.❄IceEnchanter🦢
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown likes this.
Sarah Brown
Unknown parent • •Nikkileah 🎮🚄🏳️⚧️🇬🇧
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown
in reply to Nikkileah 🎮🚄🏳️⚧️🇬🇧 • •Nikkileah 🎮🚄🏳️⚧️🇬🇧
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •