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What browser should I use then? I quit chrome in a futile attempt to be tracked less. They killed support for my adblocker.

Librewolf

Would any of these soft forks survive without Mozilla working on Firefox?

Depends, will I win the jackpot?

The forks do not currently have the manpower to take up the full maintenance of a browser but that does not mean it's impossible that they'll be able to rally enough developers in case Mozilla implodes. A lot of people want a truly free browser to exist. Currently Firefox (barely) manages to fulfill that role and keeps many of those people from spending their time/money on alternatives.



Brave. It's a Chromium fork with a built-in ad blocker that's equivalent to uBlock Origin. It works great on Android too.

It is sad that the choice is either an AI browser or a Blockchain browser

fwiw I've been running brave for the past 5 years and it seems fine, they put a bunch of weird shit in it you need to turn off, but otherwise it...browses the internet well?

very interesting. Can I control these with home assistant?

I already have a wind down dimming schedule on my entire home. It changes brightness and color temperature gradually over 2 hours. How do these bulbs compare with philips hue?


Yes, the bulb can be controlled with a smart dimmer like the Leviton model we sell on our site, or the Lutron Caseta plug-in dimmer.

These bulbs are not smart and do not have a full RGB array. But what you gain is way higher color quality even at low color temperature (1700K), much lower flicker, and infrared.

Atmos is a smart lamp, and we will get our Matter certification in early 2026. This one is also not RGB, but it has extremely high color quality in the whites and no blue spike. Flicker is lower and at a way higher frequency (32 kHz). We haven't updated the specs on the site yet as we are wrapping the calibration, but the CRI is 98 on the Atmos lamp.


Real infrastructure and housing

Investors don't want 5x revenue valuations, they want 30x growth.

Make 'real infrastructure' and 'housing' companies attractive products for investors to buy and they'll buy. (No idea how to do that, don't ask me! :))


No.

We need to kill the idea that a) this is what investors should be looking for, and b) it's even possible aside from a 1 in 1,000,000,000 fluke.

All of these economic instruments are supposed to be there to serve the needs of real human people, not just to make the wealthy even wealthier. We need to break this cycle of ever-escalating capital chasing capital, and get investment in things that will actually make people's lives better.


That's the thing. You have to remove the unsustainable nonsense that looks like 30x growth in order for investors to be willing to invest in 5x revenue valuations.

(If you have real things that are actually producing 30x growth then that's fine, obvs.)


Maybe markets that optimize for capital growth are just a bad way to allocate resources?

Why did we decide that return on capital investment is the metric to optimize for, at the expense of everything else?


capitalism is kinda-sorta weaponized greed, but in a way that tries to promote competition and thus create actual value. IMHO blaming regulators for not nudging capital in the politically desirable way is appropriate: either they shouldn't be regulating because they don't know how, or they're regulating according to a hidden policy instead of whatever they say. (cue 'why not both'.)

> capitalism is kinda-sorta weaponized greed

There is no need for hedging language, it is entirely weaponized greed.

> but in a way that tries to promote competition and thus create actual value.

No, its in a way which tries to remove constraints from the power of the capitalist class, and full enable their dominion over society -- that's what drove it and how it evolved from prior systems.

The assumed existence of competition (along with other assumptions) making it optimal was a much later, after the fact attempt at rationalizing it in response to criticism, and actual attempts to promote competition were later yet reforms limiting capitalism, not part of its essence.


> capitalism is kinda-sorta weaponized greed, but in a way that tries to promote competition and thus create actual value.

In practice, capitalism itself doesn't really promote competition, but rather competition is an externally-enforced situation required to keep capitalism from going off the rails. IMHO, capitalism naturally evolves towards monopoly (otherwise antitrust laws would be unnecessary).


Most investors have more money invested in their house than stocks.

Maybe investors shouldn't treat inversion like casino gambling. With their capital, they could make inversions (or even their own businesses) that grow slower but steadily.

I think housing might have some potential with federal subsidies, particularly in the container scale pre-fabricated home market.

Tax incentives?

What is "real infrastructure", exactly?

Are you being deliberately obtuse? In case you aren't, the answer is roads, bridges, public transportation, electrified rail, grid modernization, utility-scale storage and solar. We need these things desperately, and instead we're going to get sheds full of video cards from here to the horizon.

If you want to spend your money and time building bridges for electrified rail, go ahead. Nobody is stopping you. Other people clearly feel they have enough of that and would rather invest in datacenters. Who are you to say they're wrong?

This kind of absolutist individualist argument just rings more and more hollow as we see the very real consequences of that philosophy for our society.

Who am I to say they're wrong? A human being, that's who. A human being who lives in a modern society that does not have to prioritize the whims of the wealthy few over the needs of the many. We can choose to set stringent requirements on people who have that much money, and therefore power, and that is not evil. Indeed, it is the furthest thing from it.


And what happens when those people don't want to have your requirements "set" on them? Do you force those peaceful people to do your bidding with violence? Would that not make you the evil ones?

Look at the reply from the guy I was questioning. It took just two or three mild questions for him to go full Hitler, talking about how his comrades will have to "discipline" a whole generation of "oligarchs" (i.e. anyone who makes things he doesn't personally prioritize).

Collectivist thinking always leads to violence, and eventually societal failure.


There's nothing violent about using elections to make the decision to tax rich people so that we can spend (formerly) their money building roads and bridges. The idea that this is the road to Hitlerism is absurd, and thankfully this rhetorical stance no longer rings the slightest bit true to anyone within earshot of the working class.

Also, as I'm sure you're aware, I was using "discipline" as a term of art to mean "withhold our labor until their profits suffer and they are willing to negotiate". This was the strategy employed the last time we seriously dealt with concentrated capital getting high on its own supply. It is also not a form of violence. What's the alternative? Capital using force to require us to work against our will? Would you call that slavery? Or just serfdom? Which do you advocate?


> There's nothing violent about using elections to make the decision to tax rich people so that we can spend (formerly) their money building roads and bridges

The results of votes are enforced on the losers using the police, who will do so violently if required.

You mentioned the Fordist truce. The unions the auto industry dealt with weren't just a bunch of people refusing to work. They were frequently violent, and they also used stealing other people's property as a standard tactic to prevent anyone else from working also. Those were violent times.


> The results of votes are enforced on the losers using the police, who will do so violently if required.

The whims of the dictator are also enforced on the public using police.

All human rules, laws, customs, and edicts are enforced, ultimately, with violence of one sort or another. There is no way to avoid the threat of violence being the bedrock of the power of the state, and in the absence of formal states the strong would use violence to enforce their desires until they became states.

So if you're an anti-statist, just say so. (So we can all dismiss everything you have to say as coming from a place of absolute ignorance of what's needed to live and operate in the real world. If we were to abolish all states tomorrow, and erase the very memory of their existence from every human alive, by Sunday new ones would have arisen to replace them, one way or another, because they are how humans organize themselves.)


This thread started with a false dilemma: do we spend money on datacenters or "real infrastructure". It's only a dilemma if you assume governments should decide the answer, as ElevenLathe did.

Otherwise there's no need to choose between dictatorship or majority rule via democracy: everyone can spend money on the infrastructure they feel is more important, and there doesn't need to be any losers. Which is mostly how we try to do things in reality.


We can talk about how violent taxing the rich is once we have the first instance ever in history of the police locking up a rich guy for refusing to pay their taxes. Even then, sure, I'm fine with that level of violence. We would live in a utopia if that were the worst kind of state violence we had to deal with.

Go ahead and twist my normal, non-radical politics into whatever shape you want. You're the wing nut, not me. Normal people want normal stuff out of politics: functioning infrastructure, upward mobility, a future. Only the most warped, unreachable paint huffers are willing to throw away all possibility of a normal country for the "freedom" of a few dozen rapacious sociopaths. This means that we will ultimately win. Unfortunately normal people have been asleep at the switch for at least a generation, so you're probably going to be able to drag us through several hellish decades, maybe centuries, until we can right the ship.

I'm sure I'll see you in the camps, so at least we'll have that in common. Have a nice day.


Rich people get jailed for not paying their taxes all the time:

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/23-celebrities-convicted-of-...


Falsifying your tax return statements is not the same as a simple refusal to pay. By doing that, you are indicating that you agree to the legitimacy of the taxes in general, but would prefer to lie about whether you should personally pay them or not. These people were also all given their day in court, and convicted of actual crimes in fair trials where they had adequate representation. If this is your idea of "violence", then I don't know what to say.

People who just refuse to pay on principle do exist:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen_movement

Sovereign citizens also don't agree that the US courts are legitimate, and you'll never guess what happens next:

https://www.cpr.org/2018/05/22/sovereign-citizen-bruce-douce...

He was "was sentenced to 38 years in prison". That's why most tax evaders try falsification rather than refusal.

> At the sentencing hearing in Denver District Court, Doucette fidgeted in his spinnable chair, while chained up in a green jumpsuit. He sat alone because he has insisted on representing himself in this case. Before the hearing, the judge asked him if it was OK to proceed and he said, “I do not consent and never have.”

Note the photo of him wearing handcuffs, surrounded by police.

All law is implemented through using violence or the threat of using it. You can't resolve that conundrum by claiming that holding a vote to tax rich people is somehow apart from using violence. It's just an abstraction over it.

These are basic facts, but a lot of people struggle to understand them because our society likes to pretend that there's nothing underneath the abstraction - that courts and rules is all there is. It helps them believe that if they vote to take other people's stuff, it's white and pure, that nobody is getting hurt. It's a "might makes right" argument pushed at every level of society, because it enables what you're doing here: claiming that "we" should be able to choose what is done with the fruits of other people's labour.


Good news, glad they're safely locked away!

> Collectivist thinking always leads to violence, and eventually societal failure.

This statement is so blatantly, staggeringly false that I can't even fathom how to begin to discuss this topic with you.


I say they're wrong, and I do so in my capacity as a citizen. These large pools of capital should not be allowed to follow the whims of a handful of unelected oligarchs who have clearly lost the plot. In a functioning society, this scale of decision would not be left to the whims of international finance capital, but decided via democratic means. It's unfortunate that the last scraps of the Fordist labor truce are unraveling, because it means that I and my comrades are going to have to discipline this generation of oligarchs just like our grandparents did the last really nasty one.

So, would you say that the money being invested in data centers belongs to the voters?

I would say it should belong to voters (or "society", or "the people", or whatever formula you want to use to express it), in a functioning society. Unfortunately, we're not in a functioning society, and it doesn't. On the other hand, property is socially constructed, so this political economy can be changed, though how exactly is left as an exercise to the reader -- I don't a foolproof answer.

Let me guess: you do not have any significant savings and do not anticipate accumulating any.

I have savings, sure. I need them, because in the current system the alternative is to starve in the street if anything at all goes wrong with my employment, my health, etc. Many others are not so lucky. If you mean this to be a "gotcha" because I wouldn't want my savings "confiscated" to build roads and bridges, then save it. There is a difference between 1) taxing billionaires so that they're merely hundreds of times richer than the average citizen, and 2) stealing my retirement savings and emergency fund without providing any equivalent public safety net.

This is what I meant by real infrastructure.

Other than customers

Bumping this. Mat went through the exact same crazy process with the Revuelto. Audi/Lamborghini overengineers the heck out of these cars its really absurd.

https://youtu.be/m37tN54FdQE?si=zXCnQTCOou13l10O


To be fair it's a lambo, not the pinnacle of maintainability or self repairable


Here is my proposal for AI in schools: raise the bar dramatically. Rather than trying to prevent kids from using AI, just raise the expectations of what they should accomplish with it. They should be setting really lofty goals rather than just doing the same work with less effort.


AI doesn't help you do higher quality work. It helps you do (or imitate) mediocre work faster. But thing is, it is hard to learn how to do excellent work without learning to do mediocre work first.


This is great for a “capstone project” at the end of a degree. But along the way, you have to master sub tasks and small skills in order to build on them later to accomplish lofty goals. So you need to learn the basics first. But AI is really good at helping you cheat on the basics without learning. So we still need to get them to the point of being able to use AI intelligently


Absolutely. I'd love to see the same effect happen in the software industry. Keep the volume of output the same, but increase the quality.


> Keep the volume of output the same, but increase the quality.

Effect of AI applied to coding is precisely the opposite though?


Code quality is still a culture and prioritisation issue more than a tool issue. You can absolutely write great code using AI.

AI code review has unquestionably increased the quality of my code by helping me find bugs before they make it to production.

AI coding tools give me speed to try out more options to land on a better solution. For example, I wrote a proxy, figured out problems with that approach, and so wrote a service that could accomplish the same thing instead. Being able to get more contact with reality, and seeing how solutions actually work before committing to them, gives you a lot of information to make better decisions.

But then you still need good practices like code review, maintaining coding standards, and good project management to really keep code quality high. AI doesn’t really change that.


> Code quality is still a culture and prioritisation issue more than a tool issue.

AI helps people more that "write" (i.e. generate) low-quality code than people who write high-quality code. This means AI will lead to a larger percentage of new code being low-quality.


> Keep the volume of output the same, but increase the quality.

This will _never_ happen. Output will increase and quality will decrease.


that is what they do in the software industry, before it was let me catch you off guard with asking how to reverse a linked list, now its leetcode questions that are so hard that you need to know and study them weekly, and prep for a year, interviewer can tell if you started prep 3 weeks prior


What do you expect to happen with self driving cars? Do they need bright headlights? Do they need high beams?


Great, lets make transmission even more expensive. I can imagine the engineers having a field day maintaining one-off tower designs. How about using a simple white or light blue pole tower that blends in more.

The stag is cool but the bird is not.


> The stag is cool

Yes.

There is some psychological advantage. These ideas might make the overland options more acceptable for the population.

Switzerland and other countries have nice looking (and sometimes expensive) sculptures in traffic roundabouts. For transmission lines, it might make sense, even if it is more expensive. Sure, it depends on the price. But it is much, much cheaper than burring the cables: underground transmission lines are roughly 10 times more expensive, due to cooling mainly (and sometimes this would require converting to DC). So there are three options: traditional (cheapest), such designs (more expensive), or hidden (10 times the price of traditional).


No it doesn't make sense. Transmission lines should be a boring as possible so you're eye is not drawn to them. There is no way to make them look beautiful. Good designers try to make them disappear to the extent possible.


> There is no way to make them look beautiful.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Quite a lot of public art is not regarded as beautiful by everyone either and is certainly not regarded as worth paying for by even more people.

It's also cultural. One of the things that struck me when I visited the US (many times over a twenty year period) was how little public art there was compared to most places in Europe.


For me the point is automation of low value work. I don’t want to press a button. I don’t want to even think about it.


I have a schedule in home assistant for it to run on all weekdays at 1pm, except if my partner is home, it won’t run. She is afraid of robots and i wouldnt hear the end of it if she encountered it and couldn’t disable it. Home assistant knows if she is home based on her phone.

I have been exploring valetudo because the roborock integration breaks pretty often. But it seems like a chore and could brick my robot.


One partner afraid of robots the other roots vacuums. Interesting combo


Same in my house. :D


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