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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Musk has nothing to do with the woes of the California High Speed Rail project. He’s just commenting from the peanut gallery and getting picked up by the news. He admitted hyperloop was never a serious proposal and it never factored into the actual decision making process for the project.

    The reason the project is so delayed is because of democracy. It’s a long distance route so it crosses many different county lines and properties along the way. Each of those counties have their own municipal governments involved and there are lots of private property holders along the way too. Couple that with the public consultations, the bidding for all the contracts, the environmental assessments (which are the bane of every construction project in California), and the high cost of labour for workers in California (and USA generally).

    All of this comes long after the US had engaged in the process of outsourcing manufacturing and importing (in the form of undocumented workers and other low-skilled migrants) its construction workforce. This has left the US very badly equipped to handle large construction projects even after finally approving them. The US is a very different country, skill- and education-wise, from the New Deal era of the 1930s.



  • To get YouTube to work you need to curate your watch history. Any video you regret watching should be deleted from history so that it won’t be used for recommendations.

    If your history is filled with these bad videos then you’re better off wiping your history entirely. Then start from scratch watching only videos that really interest you and your recommendations will all be based on those.

    Like the internet itself, there is a TON of great content on YouTube. The trouble is finding it! For me, the internet has been gradually reverting to the situation I remember from the mid-90s (before Google existed). There were lots of search engines but they were pretty much all bad. I relied a lot on word of mouth (and site-to-site links) to find things.


  • I find the usefulness of a subreddit is inversely proportional to its size (popularity). There are still some good ones but they are quite small.

    I had hoped Lemmy would fill this void for me but it’s still too small overall such that the smallest communities are barely active at all. Thus I tend to just scroll the feed of everything and see what catches my eye, admittedly a much less useful way to spend my time since I get sucked into ragebait instead of discussing cool hobbies.




  • Academic performance is about performing well on closed book written exams covering narrow subjects. The whole system is designed for 19th century teaching and testing. Using a computer does not help with that whatsoever and may in some cases hurt (by distracting someone who should be studying).

    I tutor high school kids as a volunteer (next year will be my 10th year doing so). Over that time period I have noticed a sharp decline in a lot of basic academic skills: mental arithmetic (without a calculator), spelling, grammar, handwriting. These are the very skills one needs to master to perform well on closed book exams. Your ability to research a topic or get help from Google (incl. spellcheck and grammar check in Google Docs) or ChatGPT is of no benefit whatsoever when all you’ve got is a pencil and a piece of paper in front of you.



  • I don’t even think it’s greed at this point. As far as I know, no one is making money on AI. Even NVIDIA is cooking the books by investing in AI companies and just making them use the invested money to buy graphics cards. They report those as sales but are they really sales if they gave them the money in the first place?

    I think the real reason Microsoft is shoving AI down everyone’s throats is because they went all-in on AI and they’re hoping to keep the bubble going for now and somehow it will work out in the end. It’s literally a fake it until you make it strategy with zero guarantee of making it.

    A lot of it I think is just driven by managers with AI FOMO. They really don’t know what AI is supposed to do but they’re hoping users will figure it out.





  • You don’t have to have nostalgia for the game to appreciate how wonderfully crafted and expansive it is. It has one of the best soundtracks of any game, period, and its art is highly detailed and numerous. It has a ton of secrets (including one MAJOR secret) and a couple of extra game modes that enhance the replayability.

    I would say the game seems to get better every time I play it. Is that nostalgia or something else? There are a lot of games I played before I had ever seen SOTN, yet I don’t feel the same desire to keep replaying them. I think it’s like a piece of classical music or a great movie. The more you replay it, the more details you come to appreciate. The original Deus Ex is like that for me as well.