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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Immich user. I do miss the memories thing from Google photos but I expect it’s coming eventually. All the data is there at the foundational level.

    My only real immich complaints are

    A. The android app gets chonky slow when you have a huge library.

    B. S3-like storage isn’t a supported config, meaning you have to manage your storage size somehow. I want to point immich at a Hetzner object storage bucket, arrange mirroring that to another s3 like cloud service, and then forgetting about storage forever.







  • Let me share my Xbox experience? I’m mid-40s. Owned Xboxes since literally the OG Xbox 1.

    I originally bought this thing to play with my brother split screen. Nowadays I want to play split screen with my son.

    Yet somehow there’s no fucking split screen games anymore. The last two or three AAA games I purchased I played for a few hours and then never loaded again.

    And the other day when I loaded up call of duty Black ops 3 to play zombies (this is like a 10 year old game now) I found that because I let my Xbox Gold live whatever the fuck subscription expire, I can’t play “online” and use my unlocked items even though I’m doing local play.

    So from this guy what in the fucking fuck xbox. This is some kind of device designed to clean out my wallet for eternity and not deliver what I actually want.

    I pretty much exclusively use my Xbox as a YouTube player now.




  • UBI is probably a good idea but it’s coming too slowly for anyone to rely on. Even if UBI is fully implemented, I suspect it will be life sustaining but not a life fulfilling. So humanity still needs to find purpose.

    It’s hard to imagine a scenario where someone cannot be trained to do something new. Isn’t that a core feature of humans?

    Next, how shall we define value? I argue that humans can always create some kind of value that machines cannot, even if only because a human is involved.

    We still value actual art over AI generated art. We value uniqueness and rarity. We value the faults that are inherent from things that are natural and organic.

    Tons of the jobs people did a hundred years ago in developed countries are now gone or have been streamlined down to require fewer people. Yet there are more people on earth now than there ever have been before and arguably worldwide hunger is at its lowest point. So somehow we have figured out how to survive despite vast amounts of automation already. It seems unlikely that our new “AI” tools are going to somehow dramatically disrupt this balance.







  • “Ever” is a long time. Human progress seems to come and go based on need and economics. At the moment we seem pretty distracted by local problems and I don’t think any of us will still be around by the time humans kill the Earth, so it doesn’t seem all that pressing.

    But someday the technical issues will be solved and a sustainable habitat will be able to coast through space for however long it takes to travel beyond Mars to somewhere else interesting. When it’s possible, I think some people will do it, perhaps a lot of people.

    It’s a worthy goal. As a human I feel some motivation to ensure the continuation of our species so I would lean towards any efforts that involve sending some backup copies of our DNA to some off-site storage.


  • I remember that IBM was famously missing the trend in the late 80s/90s and couldn’t understand why regular consumers would ever want to buy a PC. It’s why they gave the PC clone market away, never seriously approached their OS/2 thing, and never really marketed directly to anybody except businesses.

    Microsoft really pushed the idea that regular people needed a home PC which laid the foundation for so many people already having the hardware in place to jump on the internet as soon as it became accessible.

    For a brief moment it looked like a toss up between Microsoft IIS webservers serving up .asp files (or coldfusion .cf - RIP) vs Apache pushing CGI but in the end the Linux solution was more baked and flexible when it was time to launch and scale an internet startup in that era.

    Somebody else would have done what Microsoft did for sure, had they not been there, and I suppose we could be paying AT&T for Unix licenses these days too. But yeah, ultimately both Gates and Torvalds were right in terms of operating systems and well timed.