Oooh, this is like a rebirth of YouTube Time Machine, which went defunct awhile back. Ads end up being my favorite... they're such a weird bit of the zeitgeist: prices, style, attention seeking techniques... so interesting.
Readit Newsdisillusioned commented on My Retro TVs myretrotvs.com/... · Posted by u/the-mitr
IMO it's far too early for "AI" to have had a meaningful effect on Software company hiring. A more plausible explanation for me is that between roughly 2012 and 2022, there was a tremendous increase in the supply of SWE talent (via undergraduate CS programs massively increasing enrollment, boot camps, immigration, etc), fueled primarily by ZIRP. On the demand side, ZIRPy VC funding primarily went to bullshit Crypto and (to a lesser extent) bullshit Metaverse companies, most of which have not panned out, meaning there is a dearth of late stage and newly public companies to hire said talent.
I agree with all of this, coupled with a decent amount of layoffs from the Mag7s, though I'm not sure how distributed those were in California, necessarily.
disillusioned commented on Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy theguardian.com/film/2025... · Posted by u/nemoniac
I feel like we've had at least two lost decades of good content. It's probably somewhere, I just haven't found it yet.
In my humble opinion, some "good content":
Netflix:
* Dark
* Fisk
* Adolescence
* Ripley
* The Queen's Gambit
* Ozark
* Baby Reindeer
* Easy
Apple TV:
* Black Bird
* The Studio
* Severance
* Shrinking
* Ted Lasso
HBO:
* The Wire
* Oz
* True Detective (S1 at least)
* The Sopranos
* Big Love
* Rome
* In Treatment
* Succession
* Deadwood
* Insecure
Misc:
* Colin From Accounts
* Black Sails
* Mad Men
* Breaking Bad
* Better Call Saul
I don't know, there's plenty. It just absolutely gets washed out with a lot of chaff.
disillusioned commented on Marines now have an official drone-fighting handbook marinecorpstimes.com/news... · Posted by u/Gaishan
Also, drones are currently being flown by soldiers in fpv goggles so swarm is not very practical. It will change once we have swarm software and there is a need for it.
Or just extend the logic to materiel instead of personnel, like Ukraine did with the airbase attacks earlier this year: for the price of a few dozen < $1k drones, you can eliminate $50M-$150M+ aircraft? The asymmetry is insane.
There's also nothing that practically stops those same tactics from being aimed at other soft infrastructure targets: electrical substations, telco facilities, water treatment facilities... the nightmare scenario is taking down transmission lines and switching stations outside, say, a large nuclear power plant during a heat wave. The nuke itself is hardened, obviously, but who cares if it can't transmit the power it's generating to the people that need it?
disillusioned commented on Marines now have an official drone-fighting handbook marinecorpstimes.com/news... · Posted by u/Gaishan
If you have seen videos from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, especially over time, you can see the evolution of tactics.
For example with tanks, they...
- strap artillery shell to the drone and fly it into the tank
- drop a standard grenade into the hatch after the crew has fled
They don't need to drop munitions like cluster, they strap several on and drop them one at a time. They have become quite skilled and accurate, even from 100+ meters up in wind
There are places in Ukraine where it looks like giant spiders live there, due to all the fiber optic cables from drones left on the battle fields
The fact that we have not yet seen a high-profile political assassination by drone, particularly from the "death from above" method, absolutely _boggles_ my mind, and I don't think we get out of this decade without that occurring, and I'm not particularly sure what sort of counter-measure you could reasonably put in place to stop that. The 2030s are going to be messy.
disillusioned commented on Create personal illustrated storybooks in the Gemini app blog.google/products/gemi... · Posted by u/xnx
Not to sound hyperbolic and this is really just the beginning of significant AI, but will there be anything left for humans to do or create when all this is done?
Will there be humans left when all this is done?
disillusioned commented on Robot hand could harvest blackberries better than humans news.uark.edu/articles/79... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
This doesn't appear to be a product yet.
"Could" doing a lot of lifting here.
disillusioned commented on Shallow water is dangerous too jefftk.com/p/shallow-wate... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
Arizona was a stand in for "any place that doesn't have direct access to a large body of water." Even if Arizona has large retirement communities rich enough to have pools in most homes, my point stands.
Man, this is just not an accurate stand-in, though, _because_, well, Arizona has literally over 500,000 residential pools. It's actually one of (if not) _the_ highest pool-per-capita rates.
And because of that, drowning is the leading cause of death for children 1 to 4 years old in Arizona.
As a result, parents here are fairly fastidious about early childhood swim lessons. It's a _big_ deal for us. We've had both of our kids in lessons as early as a year, but a lot of folks start at 6-9 months.
If anything, the distributed nature of the many many many many _small_ bodies of water makes the drowning problem more pervasive and dangerous. An ocean is... well, an ocean: its availability for extremely small children is limited by geography, and many areas where you might take small children are policed by professional lifeguards. Backyard swimming pools, on the other hand, can be a lurking danger literally over your neighbor's wall. My parents had a neighbor one house over who had a 4 year old drown in their pool... from one house further over. He had stacked chairs against the cinderblock wall and climbed over while his grandfather was watching him but dozed off. Even if you don't have a pool in your own backyard, it's a risk here in Arizona.
disillusioned commented on My Family and the Flood texasmonthly.com/news-pol... · Posted by u/herbertl
Being there is a powerful and supportive thing. Yes, it is incredibly hard to deal with the loss of a child, we lost one, too. Having someone there is a help and a support, we didn't really get from others.
I'm truly sorry for your loss.
disillusioned commented on My Family and the Flood texasmonthly.com/news-pol... · Posted by u/herbertl
Having children makes me feel vulnerable. They’re like extensions of myself — if they feel pain, I feel it too. To imagine one of them dying… this story broke my heart.
My wife had been pushing me to try for kids for, well, a couple of years, and I was finally getting there. I always knew I wanted kids, or figured I did, but then reality comes: can we afford it, shouldn't we enjoy what we have a little bit longer, are we sure we want to do this, etc.
Then, my friend messaged me one night and asked me to join him at the children's hospital to take a few photos as they were saying "goodbye." His 18 month old had been fighting cancer, and it was 1 in the morning and my melatonin-addled brain thought "oh, they must be taking him home."
It wasn't until I walked into the room with my DSLR that I realized what he meant. In fairness, he had prefaced the request with, "do you mind if I ruin your night?"
I am not even close to a professional photographer. But I tried to take as many pictures as respectfully as I could of the literal hardest moment any parents could ever hope not to have to go through. At a certain moment, it became time, and I found myself... stuck, in a sense. I was the only other one in the room aside from the parents, but I didn't feel like I could abandon them, and so I sat there as they disconnected the machines keeping their son alive. It was the most awful two minutes as the attending sat there with a stethoscope against this tiny chest.
I waited until an opportune moment, and then hugged them, quietly took my leave, went home, edited the photos as quickly as possible, uploaded and sent them, and then bawled for an hour or so.
Needless to say, this set back our efforts at even _trying_ for kids by about 2-3 years. Because I just was stuck by this all-encompassing thought: you can't lose what you don't have. You simply aren't open to that sort of vulnerability if you don't have children. It doesn't exist, until you form it into being. And that thought haunted me. Just like it haunts, well, every parent on some level.
And to clarify: this didn't even _happen to me_. It happened to _them_, and their son. But it was a defining moment for me that made it really tough to overcome.
Eventually, we did have two kids (after a miscarriage, of course, because isn't that how it goes), and they're sitting behind me watching a movie as I type this. But these sort of thoughts are always there in the background. And yeah, reading a story like this one about the flood just spears you in the soul.