You see, that is another perfect example for why earth has to be flat, anything else just isn’t logical!

Male and female are also insanely large groups but I’ll never understand why the color of your skin is so important in the land of the free.

Which of the following best describes your race or ethnic background?

Seriously, WTF? Why the hell is this relevant? Is this some American thing?

Show the rest of the comic - I dare you!

Actually no, I hated the Vista era UI design. Linux themes were positively garish, add MacOS looked like a candy store. CDE greatly impressed me back then. It looked like it was made by adults for adults. Highly legible, and the pastel colors are being emulated by Solarized.

I’m sure that those UIs were a product of the times. The 90’s and noughties were loud and colorful and exciting and everything looked like a comic. Now that we live in more depressing times, we can look to the science of perceptual psychology.

You see, we have an attention budget, we need to process what we see. Visually complex UIs need to be parsed, and that takes mental effort, and that robs us of mental energy to focus on our work. It’s not a crippling effect, but it’s there.

Look at street signs and corporate logos, they easily lodge in our mind. Effective advertising has a clear and simple visual language, and this is what UIs should strive for.

Just stop!

But what helped me: often smoking is part of a daily routine or ritual, so mix up your routine. Take up a new hobby or take the bus instead of the car. Go for a walk after lunch. Giving up smoking is a big change, so don’t be afraid to make big changes. Get new clothes. Make new friends. You have discarded your old identity as a smoker. Still smoking? Doesn’t matter! You already want to stop - you’re becoming that person already.

And don’t be so hard on yourself if you have a smoke now and then. Be conscious of what situation or routine triggered the reflex, and change it in future. If you have a smoke every few days or weeks, don’t sweat it, you’ve broken addiction as far as I’m concerned!

Just recently saw a video of an experimental self driving vehicle from Bosch - from the 90’s!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTnBiTIvGqY

You could imagine we’d be much further now, considering how far computing power, computer vision and AI have come.

Also not exactly cheap!

Crossing my fingers that Norris gains a spot or two at the start and doesn’t have to deal with Verstappen on track.

The current rules are just a complete and utter disaster. Instead of leaving a car’s width, it’s the car ahead at the apex that gets the corner.

The main problem is that there is no clear idea where exactly the apex is, and which line to draw from that apex. And then you get different rulings for similar actions. See for example Piastri, who got 5 seconds for forcing Gasly off track.

I hate the whole situation. The only way to overtake Verstappen is to not be near him, because he understands the rules best and uses them to his advantage. It’s been like this for years and it’s toxic for good racing.

Could someone eli5 to me old fart why it’s a good idea to restrict content to a certain time? Increase engagement, OK, but why so much effort to create content that disappears after two weeks?

The Internet Archive is being DDOSed for the lulz.

https://mastodon.archive.org/@textfiles/113279179271574005

Im OK with social media as long as it has RSS. But that also means no insta and no twitter.

Keep in mind that that was a demo to sell Copilot.

The issue that I’ve got with GenAI is that it has no expert knowledge in your field, knows nothing of your organization, your processes, your products or your problems. It might miss something important and it’s your responsibility to review the output. It also makes stuff up instead of admitting not knowing, gives you different answers for the same prompt, and forgets everything when you exhaust the context window.

So if I’ve got emails full of fluff it might work, but if you’ve got requirements from your client or some regulation you need to implement you’ll have to review the output. And then what’s the point?

Always happy to see gemini-related posts!

Check out https://levior.gitlab.io/, a http to Gemini gateway. Found it at https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini

Wait, so you think nuclear reactors spew out uranium?

Didn’t say that. But I also don’t think that it magically appears in the plant.

While coal powerplants don’t spew out radioactive coal ash??

Please stop this whataboutism.

Nobody cares to recycle concrete.

Not true. Making concrete creates huge amounts of CO2 during production. Sand is becoming a valuable resource. Recycling concrete for aggregate absolutely is a thing, but that’s a different topic.

I wont talk about storing waste, because I dont know why it is marketed as prohibitively expensive.

Convenient. Then I will because I’m not finished. You have to ensure containment of the barrels for decades, if not centuries. The mine has to be in geologically inactive area, and you have to be certain that no ground water will seep into the mine in the foreseeable future. We don’t want ground water in the mine, its cold and wet and seeps through everywhere.

And you have to figure out how to keep idiots from breaking into the mine in 150 years and using spent rods to heat their homes. If you think that’s far fetched I encourage you to read about the Goiânia accident , one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters. Some kids found the radioactive source of an abandoned xray machine while playing around.

Uranium is a heavy metal and of course its poisonous. Just like lead, but radioactive. Why aren’t we using uranium glassware or uranium paint anymore if it’s supposedly not poisonous?

When was the last time a solar farm or a wind park had a catastrophic accident leading to large parts of land being uninhabitable for decades, even centuries?

Of course they are explodey. It’s a fission reaction that has to be constantly modulated and cooled to not go critical.

The other argument is the cost of properly storing waste and decommissioning the plant, which is often conviently ignored. Not much of a NPP can be recycled, unlike solar.

Like most things with environmental impact, we just let later generations deal with it. Somehow.

Microsoft jumped fully on the AI hype bandwagon with their partnership in OpenAI and their strategy of forcing GenAI down our throats. Instead of realizing that GenAI is not much more than a novel parlor trick that can’t really solve problems, they are now fully committing.

Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, and reactivating 3 Mile Island is estimated at $1.6 billion. And any return on these investments are not guaranteed. Generally, GenAI is failing to live up to its promises and there is hardly any GenAI use case that actually makes money.

This actually has the potential of greatly damaging Microsoft, so I wouldn’t say all their decisions are financially rational and sound.

Nuclear has its advantages, but there is hardly anything as cheap and maintenance free as solar+batteries. Anyone can set it up, and it just runs all by itself for years and years.

In Europe, the price for electricity on the spot market regularly goes in the negative. Jep, you can get paid money to consume electricity because it’s so abundant.

Look at France, their new NPP is taking 12 years and 12 billion euros more than planned. Is it really worth all that financial and environmental risk building something poisonous and explodey that needs constant attention?