stu2b50's recent activity
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Comment on fxgl/steamac: Valve's official ARM64 SteamOS in a lightweight VM on Apple Silicon in ~games
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Comment on 2026 United States midterm elections megathread in ~society
stu2b50 LinkNah Republicans are cooked, looks like there's a 3-4 point polling error in favor of democrats. If you're worried, you can go to sleep resting easy. South Carolina going to Democrats is atrocious...Nah Republicans are cooked, looks like there's a 3-4 point polling error in favor of democrats. If you're worried, you can go to sleep resting easy. South Carolina going to Democrats is atrocious for Republicans.
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Comment on The American suburbs are better than you think in ~life
stu2b50 Link ParentWhy not? I lived for a while in Shanghai, and not only does it have (IMO) the best public transit system in the entire world, but because of local laws, you can't even drive your car half of the...Given a fair fight I don't believe people would pick cars at all.
Why not? I lived for a while in Shanghai, and not only does it have (IMO) the best public transit system in the entire world, but because of local laws, you can't even drive your car half of the time (it's changed with EVs, which are allowed to drive all the time, but the city government restricts if you can drive based on the last digit of your license plate).
And I STILL knew plenty of people who had a car. And you can see plenty of them on the road.
It's purely a defense of suburbs.
That's because it's to an audience that's very inherently hostile to suburbs, which is not a popular stance nation-wide. Also, it says plenty of negative things about suburbs, because of the author, and the political coalition they are in, is generally negative about suburbs. Examples:
I love living in dense, built-up urban areas, with great train systems and tons of restaurants and shops. Japanese cities are the best in the world, and I’ve written plenty of posts about what makes them so great. But you don’t have to be Japan in order to create amazing metropolises — New York City, Paris, Istanbul, Seoul, London, etc. are all excellent places to live.
That doesn’t mean cars are better than public transit. Cars cost more, and they require a lot more land to move the same number of people. But because they take you directly from point to point, instead of making a circuit and stopping periodically, they get you there faster.
Low-density sprawl is very expensive to maintain. It tends to make people less healthy, because they walk less. It reduces variety among restaurants and brick-and-mortar retail outlets, because it’s harder to cater to niche tastes when you don’t have a critical mass of people nearby. Those tradeoffs shouldn’t be ignored.
Nor should we accept that the current suburban form is the optimal one. A lot of American urbanism has focused not on Manhattanizing urban cores, but on giving suburbs a few more of the benefits of cities — creating “gentle density” with rowhouses and duplexes and small apartment buildings, allowing retail in residential areas, adding bike lanes and commuter rail, and so on. This should all continue.
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Comment on The American suburbs are better than you think in ~life
stu2b50 Link ParentI feel like you're reading too much into it. For context, the author is very much a city-slicker urbanist. They are part of the neoliberal YIMBY group that heavily proposes upzoning and denser...I feel like you're reading too much into it. For context, the author is very much a city-slicker urbanist. They are part of the neoliberal YIMBY group that heavily proposes upzoning and denser urban development and espouses cities like Tokyo for their efficiency.
The second one is that it seems his central thesis relies on a steelman argument that urbanists think that we should demolish all suburban neighborhoods and turn them into super dense mixed use zones.
No, there absolutely are people who think that we should demolish all suburban neighborhoods. The author likely sees more of them because twitter/bluesky/mastodon are full of deranged people who like to tweet at semi-well known people with deranged opinions.
Basically, the point of the blog post is to
a) argue against the people who think that we should demolish all suburbs
b) assuage the fears of subarbanites who like their suburbs that urbanist YIMBYs by and large are not trying to demolish their suburb
No more, no less. If you're not in one of those two camps, then the blog doesn't really need to succeed or fail, since your opinion is more or less aligned with theirs already.
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Comment on The American suburbs are better than you think in ~life
stu2b50 LinkI recently visited my parents who live in a suburb recently and one thing I noticed was that there was a much bigger push on mixed-use development, with walkability as an advertising point. There...I recently visited my parents who live in a suburb recently and one thing I noticed was that there was a much bigger push on mixed-use development, with walkability as an advertising point. There is now a significant number of what are basically malls, but centered around a walkable street, with grocery shops and restaurants and apartments and townhouses. As an example that isn't too close to me (so as to not doxx any relatives), you have https://experienceavalon.com/.
So there does seem to be a shift in thinking in suburbs as well. I think people in more affluent suburbs have realized that they do like walkability, they just don't want to walk next to black people (or, at least, poor ones). So as long as the latter isn't a concern, they're game for walkable mixed use zoning.
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Comment on Is there a decent brand of USB-c earphones that wont break after 2-3 years but also doesnt cost hundreds of dollars? in ~music
stu2b50 LinkApple's USB-C Earpods. Definitely the best mic quality of any wired headphones I know of at that price point.Apple's USB-C Earpods. Definitely the best mic quality of any wired headphones I know of at that price point.
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Comment on Alphabet shares tumble in $500bn rout [as AI-mode search threatens advertising profits] in ~finance
stu2b50 Link ParentThe smarter thing you can do is insert ads into the ai summary. Eg, when you google plumber, the highest bidder will be suggested to the user. I’m sure they’ll build it out one day but the more...The smarter thing you can do is insert ads into the ai summary. Eg, when you google plumber, the highest bidder will be suggested to the user.
I’m sure they’ll build it out one day but the more important thing is for the ai summary to exist to avoid losing market share.
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Comment on Reddit will require you to be logged in in ~tech
stu2b50 Link ParentNah this makes sense. Reddit has been investing in their app significantly and it’s paid dividends in their user metrics. It’s not the kind of thing that would appeal to people who go on tildes,...Nah this makes sense. Reddit has been investing in their app significantly and it’s paid dividends in their user metrics. It’s not the kind of thing that would appeal to people who go on tildes, but people who go on tildes aren’t a very numerous nor lucrative market, so it doesn’t really matter.
It also puts a lot of pressure on search engines. Google’s AI answer is heavily dependent on Reddit data. The more Reddit locks down their data, the more they have search engines like Google over a barrel. I suspect the next time their deal renews it will be very much more expensive for Google.
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Comment on Alphabet shares tumble in $500bn rout [as AI-mode search threatens advertising profits] in ~finance
stu2b50 Link ParentThe key thing is that no one wants to be Nokia or Blackberry. Those were big, big firms, dominant in their slice of business. Then, Apple came along, and just absolutely destroyed them by...The key thing is that no one wants to be Nokia or Blackberry. Those were big, big firms, dominant in their slice of business. Then, Apple came along, and just absolutely destroyed them by outflanking their entire business model.
No one wants to be in that position. Companies are eager to over-hedge in stemming risk from being outflanked, because the downside could be the complete destruction of your company.
When ChatGPT first started gaining steam, and people started asking it things, Google immediately had a code yellow. This was the result of it.
What they were hoping to happen is that in case AI really took off, which to some degree it did, with ChatGPT being the fastest consumer product in all of human history, they're still in a position to compete in terms of userbase. Which they are.
It's definitely not optimal for their business, but they'd nonetheless prefer it over a timeline where people talked about Google the same way people talk about Yahoo and everyone uses ChatGPT and Claude to get information.
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Comment on Manifestos, fear, and ‘loser thinking’: inside Proton’s AI reckoning in ~tech
stu2b50 Link ParentIs he? What did Pichai do?Google's CEO is also an asshole.
Is he? What did Pichai do?
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Comment on Discoverable servers on Discord will have summaries, public messages will be open for search indexing in ~tech
stu2b50 Link ParentWho, discord? Discord is always keeping logs of your messages. Even when you delete them. That's not even necessarily out of malice. The golden rule of prod data is: never delete anything. Only...there's a huge difference between some folks keeping backups of chat logs, and a giant social media company doing it.
Who, discord? Discord is always keeping logs of your messages. Even when you delete them. That's not even necessarily out of malice.
The golden rule of prod data is: never delete anything. Only tombstone.
That's just operations. This doesn't change anything about whether or not Discord is storing and saving your messages.
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Comment on Europe's first deportation center for failed asylum seekers to open in Rwanda in ~society
stu2b50 LinkIt seems like developed countries have all converged on a strategy to deal with refugees, which is to ship them to some random 3rd party country. The US has of course been doing this in the Trump...It seems like developed countries have all converged on a strategy to deal with refugees, which is to ship them to some random 3rd party country.
The US has of course been doing this in the Trump regime to various unrelated latin american countries.
Australia sends refugees to Papa New Guinea and Nauru.
Now Europe is shipping them to Rwanda (which, afaik, the UK has already been doing).
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Europe's first deportation center for failed asylum seekers to open in Rwanda
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Comment on Landmark study finds three in four NFL players die with chronic traumatic encephalopathy in ~sports.american_football
stu2b50 LinkIt'll be a hard sell, but honestly we should ban contact football in school. The body of science that indicates that many small head injuries also cause CTEs is hard to ignore at this point. The...It'll be a hard sell, but honestly we should ban contact football in school. The body of science that indicates that many small head injuries also cause CTEs is hard to ignore at this point.
The NFL debate is another thing, but currently many schoolchildren are getting traumatic brain injuries for nothing else but recreational value (at least NFL players are consenting adults, who get paid a lot).
Should be flag football only in middle + high school, and arguably also college although they are nominally adults at that point.
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Landmark study finds three in four NFL players die with chronic traumatic encephalopathy
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Comment on Contender for the most non-viable startup: Reflect Orbital in ~tech
stu2b50 LinkTo play devils advocate, if you think about what lighting looks like in a renewable world, you absorb the energy of the sun with solar panels (at a fairly low efficiency), then store it in a...To play devils advocate, if you think about what lighting looks like in a renewable world, you absorb the energy of the sun with solar panels (at a fairly low efficiency), then store it in a battery (at fairly low efficiency), then pipe it out at night to power LED lights. If you directly reflect from the sun, it skips many of the efficiency-loss energy transformation steps.
Do I think it’s likely it’ll work out? Not really. But they only have FAA permission to launch a single satellite to test engineering feasibility. So it doesn’t really matter either. The only way we get a constellation of these things is if it does work out.
It’ll probably fail and get acquihired by SpaceX or blue origin. That’s OK.
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Comment on Discoverable servers on Discord will have summaries, public messages will be open for search indexing in ~tech
stu2b50 LinkSurprisingly generous imo. People complained all the time about how knowledge moved from discoverable forums (and to a lesser extent, reddit), to discord servers which you have to join to read...Surprisingly generous imo. People complained all the time about how knowledge moved from discoverable forums (and to a lesser extent, reddit), to discord servers which you have to join to read (and aren't indexed by anything else). This makes the latter less of an issue.
Nevertheless, yeah all text on public servers is going to be used for LLM training. It do be like that. But considering Discord could have just sold that information, letting it be public is not a financial move.
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Comment on ChatGPT keeps telling people 404 Media can solve their tech support problems in ~tech
stu2b50 Link ParentTwo things here: 1 is that it's in the end a matter of degree. Most "AI" art is directed by a human, in the end. If a human directs an agent to create a landscape painting with the underlying...Two things here:
1 is that it's in the end a matter of degree. Most "AI" art is directed by a human, in the end. If a human directs an agent to create a landscape painting with the underlying meaning of representing the sorrow of losing their parents, does that not have underlying meaning, injected by the human? Is that art, by this definition?
2 is that again, this is kind of a pointless tautological/pedantic topic. Not even artists agree on whether or not authorial intention is objective - death of the author, and all! Let alone the common use of the word "art".
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Comment on ChatGPT keeps telling people 404 Media can solve their tech support problems in ~tech
stu2b50 Link ParentI mean, yeah, I would, in fact it's happened plenty of times in both of those industries. The path forward is to create a more specific word. For example, idiot use to be a specific psychological...I wonder if you'd expect a lawyer or a medical doctor to similarly abandon their professionalism in favour of "common understanding" or if you'd be more willing to accept their "because I say so".
I mean, yeah, I would, in fact it's happened plenty of times in both of those industries. The path forward is to create a more specific word. For example, idiot use to be a specific psychological condition. Now it's just a random insult.
So your psychiatrist will absolutely not say that anyone's child is an "idiot" anymore. Because they know that that meaning has changed, and that the parents will absolutely misunderstand.
The reality of natural language is that it's not something any one person controls. The reality is that the common understanding of the word "art" includes creations by AI.
The more useful exercise, then, would be to try and popularize a more specific word that refers to human art, if distinguishing the two is the goal.
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Comment on ChatGPT keeps telling people 404 Media can solve their tech support problems in ~tech
stu2b50 Link ParentSo is art only meaningful if it appeals to some set of insiders who knows “what’s what”? The point is that arguments based on presenting definitions of common words which diverge from the...So is art only meaningful if it appeals to some set of insiders who knows “what’s what”?
The point is that arguments based on presenting definitions of common words which diverge from the colloquial, common understanding of them is just kinda pointless.
Even if you establish that in your custom definition of the word art, AI can never make art, does it change anything? In contrast, other arguments against AI art are not nearly as pointless. The common ones like, AI art is built on theft, AI destroys the environment, AI art has difficulty doing XYZ in current state, those all do matter. Definitions don’t.
? Linux is an OS, ARM is a CPU instruction set. Linux absolutely can run on ARM, as it can on most ISCs.