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JuniperMesos commented on Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]   youtube.com/watch?v=1fZTO... · Posted by u/joelkesler
analogpixel · 8 hours ago
Why didn't Star Trek ever tackle the big issues, like them constantly updating the LCARS interface every few episodes to make it better, or having Geordi La Forge re-writing the warp core controllers in Rust?
JuniperMesos · 6 hours ago
Man, I should hope that the warp core controllers on the USS Enterprise were not written in C.

On the other hand, if the writers of Star Trek The Next Generation were writing the show now, rather than 35-40 years ago - and therefore had a more expansive understanding of computer technology and were writing for an audience that could be relied upon to understand computers better than was actually the case - maybe there would've been more episodes involving dealing with the details of Future Sci-Fi Computer Systems in ways a programmer today might find recognizable.

Heck, maybe this is in fact the case for the recently-written episodes of Star Trek coming out in the past few years (that seem to be much less popular than TNG, probably because the entire media environment around broadcast television has changed drastically since TNG was made). Someone who writes for television today is more likely to have had the experience of taking a Python class in middle school than anyone writing for television decades ago (before Python existed), and maybe something of that experience might make it into an episode of television sci-fi.

As an additional point, my recollection is that the LCARS interface did in fact look slightly different over time - in early TNG seasons it was more orange-y, and in later seasons/Voyager/the TNG movies it generally had more of a purple tinge. Maybe we can attribute this in-universe to a Federation-wide UX redesign (imagine throwing in a scene where Barclay and La Forge are walking down a corridor having a friendly argument about whether the new redesign is better or worse immediately before a Red Alert that starts the main plot of the episode!). From a television production standpoint, we can attribute this to things like "the set designers were actually trying to suggest the passage of time and technology changing in the context of the show", or "the set designers wanted to have fun making a new thing" or "over the period of time that the 80s/90s incarnations of Star Trek were being made, television VFX technology itself was advancing rapidly and people wanted to try out new things that were not previously possible" - all of which have implications for real-world technology as well as fake television sci-fi technology.

JuniperMesos commented on Benn Jordan’s flock camera jammer will send you to jail in Florida now [video]   youtube.com/watch?v=qEllW... · Posted by u/givemeethekeys
programmertote · a day ago
I generally don't like the idea of relying on one private company to track private individual citizens' movement. So, I have an issue with this punishment (although I see that allowing that would also make it harder for automated toll charging systems to collect tolls).

On a related note, when I lived in FL, I often saw cars with this opaque plastic cover on number plates. I think these are installed by the drivers so that they can avoid paying road toll (FL has many road tolls). I also noticed that these drivers tend to be more aggressive in driving than others (that's how I noticed their license plates are covered). Will the same punishment be applied to those drivers?

JuniperMesos · a day ago
I'm not sure how the cameras used to take pictures of car license plates so that the driver can be identified and required to pay a toll for use of the road, is meaningfully different than a camera used to take pictures of car license plates (and other things in the scene) for the purpose of detecting crime. It's still the government running a camera in public to take pictures of things, including cars with clearly-visible license plates, and then knowing that the car was at a specific location at a specific time.
JuniperMesos commented on Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental   lwn.net/Articles/1049831/... · Posted by u/rascul
wewewedxfgdf · 4 days ago
Oh dear can you imagine the crushing complexity of a future Rust kernel.
JuniperMesos · 4 days ago
The Linux kernel is already very complex, and I expect that replacing much or all of it with Rust code will be good for making it more tractable to understand. Because you can represent complex states with more sophisticated types than in C, if nothing else.
JuniperMesos commented on How private equity is changing housing   theatlantic.com/ideas/202... · Posted by u/harambae
hypeatei · 4 days ago
Part of building more is getting government (mostly) out of it so that things like zoning laws don't hamper new development. Obviously that is very hard to do at a local level when incumbent homeowners' housing values would be cut in half overnight.
JuniperMesos · 4 days ago
Actual NIMBY/YIMBY fights look like one level of government representing a lot of people who can't afford a primary residence fighting against a different level of government representing a lot of incumbent primary residence owners who are concerned on a personal level about the negative externalities of more people being able to live in their neighborhood. Government is happening no matter what.
JuniperMesos commented on How private equity is changing housing   theatlantic.com/ideas/202... · Posted by u/harambae
danesparza · 4 days ago
"how would anyone rent a house?" From a private owner

"How would home builders build model homes?" - This is a great point. I should have said "after the home is built"

"How would Trusts manage real estate" - for residential real-estate, they wouldn't. An individual would. But I just want to point out that I never said that corporations shouldn't own real estate. I said they shouldn't own residential real estate.

It's only as complex an nuanced as we make it. For most of history, individual people owned real estate. Only recently did we manage to screw that up. We can unscrew it.

JuniperMesos · 4 days ago
> For most of history, individual people owned real estate. Only recently did we manage to screw that up. We can unscrew it.

Corporate ownership of real estate is ancient - read about the land rents (and in-kind labor rents) that early Christian monasteries were entitled to in late Roman/early-middle-ages Europe, or how Buddhist monasteries have been funded from local levees for thousands of years. Or how the British crown as a corporate entity currently vested in Charles III still owns substantial chunks of British real estate. History is long and for most of it it was not the case that ordinary middle class people even existed, let alone owned houses.

JuniperMesos commented on I wasted years of my life in crypto   twitter.com/kenchangh/sta... · Posted by u/Anon84
kec · 6 days ago
In what circumstance could the banking system collapse but leave the electric grid and all other infrastructure which supports the internet intact?
JuniperMesos · 6 days ago
The internet is more resilient than that. I wouldn't want to live in a country where the banking system has collapsed, and one of the reasons is because I expect that this correlates with unreliability of the power grid; but you can run a lot of useful pieces of software on a computer powered by solar panels and batteries in the wilderness with a satellite uplink, including a bitcoin node.
JuniperMesos commented on The past was not that cute   juliawise.net/the-past-wa... · Posted by u/mhb
Swizec · 7 days ago
Having grown up less-well-to-do and post-communist/socialist, my favorite thing to remind people is that working class women always worked. The idealized past of stay-at-home moms never happened for a large majority of families.

Sure sure my great grandma was “stay-at-home”. That meant feeding an army of ~8 kids and any additional farm workers every day for 60+ years. She wasn’t stay at home, she ran a cantine. And worked the farm during peak harvest season.

I’ll never forget a quote from a BBC documentary (Ruth Goodman I think): ”While victorian science cautioned that weight lifting is bad for women, the women working their kitchens tossed around 100lb pots every day”

JuniperMesos · 7 days ago
Maybe the reason that victorian scientists cautioned that weightlifting was bad for women is because they noticed poor women without better options lifting a lot of heavy weights in the course of their labors, and noticing that this seemed to be bad for their health.

Also, is that actually a claim that "victorian science" made? That weight lifting is bad for women? I'm just taking for granted that the person quoted in this BBC documentary is accurately characterizing a commonly-held view among Anglophone scientists of the victorian era - but I haven't looked into this myself. Maybe this was not in fact scientific consensus of the time. Maybe Ruth Goodman is uncritically repeating a myth about what the past thought, rather than what the past actually thought.

JuniperMesos commented on The Absent Silence (2010)   ursulakleguin.com/blog/3-... · Posted by u/dcminter
simtel20 · 7 days ago
In that context, what leads you call yourself and the rest of humanity primarily "consumers" in response to an essay? I think this has become uncomfortably (to me) normalized, and it begs the same question that Le Guin asks about whether we understand what we are doing when we are defining ourselves. A citizen and a person doesn't have to be defined as what they consume, do they?
JuniperMesos · 7 days ago
A person doesn't have to be defined as a citizen either, even though membership in a community is as fundamental a part of being human as consuming goods is.
JuniperMesos commented on State Department to deny visas to fact checkers and others, citing 'censorship'   npr.org/2025/12/04/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/seattle_spring
KuSpa · 9 days ago
The hypocrisy https://www.heise.de/en/news/How-a-French-judge-was-digitall...

(A french judge was cut off by most US servies, because trump didn't like his ruling. One could say trump.... censored him)

JuniperMesos · 8 days ago
> In Guillou's daily life, this means that he is excluded from digital life and much of what is considered standard today, he told the French newspaper Le Monde. All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, or PayPal were immediately closed by the providers. Online bookings, such as through Expedia, are immediately canceled, even if they concern hotels in France. Participation in e-commerce is also practically no longer possible for him, as US companies always play a role in one way or another, and they are strictly forbidden to enter into any trade relationship with sanctioned individuals.

> He also describes the impact on participating in banking as drastic. Payment systems are blocked for him, as US companies like American Express, Visa, and Mastercard have a virtual monopoly in Europe. He also describes the rest of banking as severely restricted. For example, accounts with non-US banks have also been partially closed. Transactions in US dollars or via dollar conversions are forbidden to him.

I view this as a failure of the cryptocurrency industry to build products that allow people to effectively transact with ordinary businesses in violation of US law, and without using payment processors ultimately subject to US law. Because of course US law includes this detail about being able to sanction people, and people who are sanctioned by US law because they have become an enemy of someone in the US government ought to be able to make monetary transactions in ordinary life too.

I don't have a great solution for Amazon unfortunately, they really do just sell a lot of stuff and they're one gigantic corporation and they're based in the US and subject to US law. Buy from AliBaba I guess? Or for that matter French hotels using Expedia even when doing business in French with other French citizens.

To be clear, I don't think it is good that the US Treasury Department sanctioned this judge. But the US has sanctioned lots of foreigners for their local political decisions as well as many other things, and I don't necessarily trust that all of those people necessarily did anything wrong, or deserve to be cut off from payment rails across the US aligned world.

JuniperMesos commented on State Department to deny visas to fact checkers and others, citing 'censorship'   npr.org/2025/12/04/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/seattle_spring
mcphage · 9 days ago
> The pills originally come from Lewis Carroll, where Alice could change size by taking them.

Wasn’t it a cake labeled “EAT ME” and a drink labeled “DRINK ME” in Alice in Wonderland? I don’t recall them being pills at all.

JuniperMesos · 8 days ago
The famous song White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane uses an extended metaphor based on Alice In Wonderland, and has the lyrics:

> One pill makes you larger > And one pill makes you small > And the ones that mother gives you > Don't do anything at all > Go ask Alice > When she's ten feet tall

I've never read the Alice in Wonderland book, but the Disney adaptation of it from the 50s had cake and a drink I recall, and no pills.

u/JuniperMesos

KarmaCake day351March 12, 2019View Original