tal

Weirdly enough, I got a long blocklist of communities in languages I don’t understand, mostly German, those often showed up while I browsed [all].

You can exclude German in your language preferences.

More information than just the clip:

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/national-international/dog-blown-out-to-sea-in-inflatable-kayak-saved-in-touch-and-go-rescue/3902523/

Meta's you kind of expect. They're cranking down R&D on VR and up R&D on AI in their research wing, and while maybe some people have enough overlap in skillset to retain, a lot are going to be specialized.

I'd also add that I think that's probably a good move. They'd caught a lot of flak for a long time over the potential returns on VR being limited, and by this point, they've lost a lot of money on it. I don't think that there's a clear path to a point where their Metaverse stuff takes off.

No, as there's customary international law protecting vessels in international waters.

Cables in international waters have only weak legal protection from an elderly treaty (and most countries are not party to that treaty).

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

The Convention for the Protection of Submarine Telegraph Cables is a multilateral treaty that was signed in 1884 in order to protect submarine communications cables that had begun to be laid in the 19th century.

Parties: 36 (as of 2013)

Pipelines in international waters don't even have that.

Countries kind of started building out submarine infrastructure without a legal basis for protecting it.

Now, in practice, if someone decides to openly sail a ship through the Baltic Sea, North Sea, English Channel, and Mediterranean Sea while dragging a cable cutter, I'd say that it's pretty good odds that it's gonna be stopped on some pretext and that various countries involved are going to have ways of making their displeasure known. But from a legal standpoint, not a lot of levers.

These water bodies are more susceptible to short-term pollution events linked to heavy rainfall or drought, particularly during summer.

Pretty much all of Europe is going to have combined sewers somewhere. If you have combined sewers, you're gonna have raw sewage in your waterways if you get enough rain.

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

Combined sewers can cause serious water pollution problems during combined sewer overflow (CSO) events when combined sewage and surface runoff flows exceed the capacity of the sewage treatment plant, or of the maximum flow rate of the system which transmits the combined sources. In instances where exceptionally high surface runoff occurs (such as large rainstorms), the load on individual tributary branches of the sewer system may cause a back-up to a point where raw sewage flows out of input sources such as toilets, causing inhabited buildings to be flooded with a toxic sewage-runoff mixture, incurring costs for cleanup and repair. When combined sewer systems experience these higher than normal throughputs, relief systems cause discharges containing human and industrial waste to flow into rivers, streams, or other bodies of water.

It's expensive to replace those, so I'd expect them to be around to some extent until sewer systems need to be replaced.

I don't really have any personal intrinsic issues with Palantir, but every time I see it, it still boggles my mind that they chose that name. Like, from a branding standpoint, just why?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBMiyEzOJmI&t=110

Gandalf: "You know this?"

Saruman: "I have seen it."

Gandalf: "A palantír is a dangerous tool, Saruman."

Saruman: "Why? Why should we fear to use it?"

Gandalf: "They are not all accounted for, the lost seeing stones. We do not know who else may be watching!" He throws a sheet over the palantír, catching a momentary glimpse of Sauron's eye and recoiling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palant%C3%ADr

The stones were an unreliable guide to action, since what was not shown could be more important than what was selectively presented. A risk lay in the fact that users with sufficient power could choose what to show and what to conceal to other stones: in The Lord of the Rings, a palantír has fallen into the Enemy's hands, making the usefulness of all other existing stones questionable.

I mean, yes, I like Tolkien too, but for fuck's sake. Just pick some sort of suitably-bland name that, oh, alludes to "insight" or "data" or "analytics", like "Deepsight" or something like that.

Hansburg said if cities don’t update zoning and permitting rules to let developers build more apartments, townhomes and condos, workers earning around $100,000 per year will choose to look for cheaper housing elsewhere.

Or instead of just hoping that cities will change, just have the state disallow municipalities from doing things like height restrictions in zoning. We know that NIMBYism is a problem

people who will agree that something should be built will still oppose having it built near them. If people in an area follow that mentality and pass laws restricting more housing from being built, one winds up with housing shortages. Ergo, you don't want to permit local restrictions on construction to be passed. Or at minimum don't want to permit it if housing prices exceed a certain level.

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

Don't agree. Often someone's problem can be resolved by just doing something else. That doesn't mean lecturing, but I've seen many, many times where someone was having trouble because they were going about something in the wrong way. Sometimes the most-useful help is to step back and say "you may not want to be doing X, and may want to be doing Y".

They do still have some time to pull back up.

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

The Basic Law and the Federal Election Act [de] provide that regular federal elections must be held on a Sunday or on a national holiday[c] no earlier than 46 and no later than 48 months after the start of a legislative session. The 21st Bundestag was constituted on 25 March 2025 and has therefore been in session for 14 months. Accordingly, a scheduled federal election would have to take place on one of the following dates:

• 28 January 2029
• 4, 11, 18, 25 February 2029 or
• 4, 11, 18, 25 March 2029

So about two-and-a-half years.

in the 2050s

As long as demand is steady and predictable, I'd expect prices to ultimately be lower, because it reduces the costs for NAND memory makers by increasing their economies of scale. Spreads the fixed costs of manufacture over more units.

That doesn't solve things for those who need SSDs now, though.

I'm also a little annoyed by the fact that people use "algorithm" to refer to a "recommendation system" for social media. "Recommendation system" is really the term that one should use, and on top of that, one should really say that the system as a whole is using a heuristic to come up with the best-possible content rather than an algorithm.

...and looking at the Wikipedia page for "algorithm", apparently they even explicitly point this out:

In contrast, a heuristic is an approach to solving problems without well-defined correct or optimal results.[3] For example, although social media recommender systems are commonly called "algorithms", they actually rely on heuristics as there is no truly "correct" recommendation.

It's probably not going away, since it's entered popular usage, but it really isn't a correct use of the computer science terminology.

It's kinda like someone decided to start calling the cylinders in a car's engine "the metal thing"...which they are, but are far from the only "metal thing" in a car. Then they accidentally messed up the classification and called it "the plastic thing". I mean, yeah, I get what people mean from context, same way an auto mechanic could interpret "the plastic thing" to mean "the cylinders", but it kind of gnaws at my soul every time I see it.

and the whole scrolling window manager thing...tmux wasn't that far behnd

I remember one time reflecting on how many layers I have at which one can expand workspace.

1. Linux virtual terminals. By default, Debian runs 7 login sessions on seven virtual terminals and sticks the GUI (Wayland/Xorg) on the eighth. So Control-Alt-F1 through Control-Alt-F7 will get me a Linux terminal. I can stick more programs on more virtual terminals with openvt. That's the first layer.

2. Okay, so on virtual terminal 8, I've got Wayland running. On that, I'm running Sway. That has an infinite number of workspaces that can be created. Currently, I only have bindings set up for 10 (and I use nonstandard bindings for them, Super-q N to switch to the Nth workspace) because I didn't find myself actually using named workspaces. This is the second layer.

3. Within a workspace, I can have Wayland windows. Say I can have two or three windows reasonably visible. This can be expanded whenever opening a window; for example, Super-t to open a new virtual terminal emulator window. This is the third layer.

4. One of the most common windows I use is a virtual terminal emulator, foot. That can run a program. I typically have it running tmux, which can have its own list of concurrently-running terminal programs (I use Control-O as the tmux meta key). This is the fourth layer.

5. I often use emacs. Emacs has multiple "frames"; one can "clone" the current frame with C-x 5 c. When run in a terminal, this basically acts like another tmux-like layer where one shows one frame at a time. This is the fifth layer.

6. Inside an emacs frame, one can have multiple emacs windows (analogous to what is typically called "panes" in other software) showing various things at the same time. One can open a new window with C-x 2 or C-x 3, cycle with C-x o. This is the sixth layer.

7. Emacs has a list of buffers, any one of which can be shown in a given emacs window. A "buffer" is vaguely analogous to "an open file" in some other programs, but could also be showing a terminal emulator or similar. One can switch with C-x b. This is the seventh layer.

8. Say I'm running a terminal emulator in one running bash (M-x term RET RET). bash has its own job control; one can suspend a running program and bring bash to the fore with Control-Z, list running jobs with jobs, then resume a suspended job in the background with $ bg %1 to background the first or bring a job to the foreground with $ fg %1. This isn't quite the same thing as the other layers, since the screen state isn't maintained for separate programs and restored, but it can reasonably allow one to run simultaneous things and follow each. This is the eighth layer.