tejohnso (u/tejohnso)

tejohnso commented on Creating apps like Signal could be 'hostile activity' claims UK watchdog techradar.com/vpn/vpn-pri... · Posted by u/donohoe

Bender · 39 minutes ago

Governments always focus on the tools and not the people. Troubleshooting and resolving the root cause requires work. They do not get paid to work or care meaning they could sit on their hands and still get paid.

tejohnso · 15 minutes ago

> they could sit on their hands and still get paid

Could? I know of government employees who literally cannot do their job, yet somehow they've been employed for over twenty years. When I say they can't do their job, I mean they have to ask coworkers how to do something that is and always has been a job requirement, and they have to "ask for help" every time. People are actually enabling massive amounts of waste and inefficiency.

Then there are those who don't even have work to do, and will take offense if you ask them to justify their continued employment. As though they are owed a position in the organization tomorrow just because they have a position in the company today.

tejohnso commented on French supermarket's Christmas advert is worldwide hit (without AI) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=Na9Vm... · Posted by u/gbugniot

mytailorisrich · 7 days ago

The ad illustrates the Christmas spirit and fish is a Christian religious symbol and actually traditional at Christmas in some countries and areas. I don't know if they did it on purpose in this ad or just because it would obviously not have worked for the wolf to bring a meat dish.

tejohnso · 7 days ago

I was confused because one of the characters tells the wolf he might have more friends if he didn't go around killing animals all the time. Then the wolf starts making vegetarian dishes, and I thought, okay, they're promoting vegetarianism. Great. But then later the wolf is killing fish, and that's ...okay I guess because they don't talk or walk like the other animals? The speciesism hit hard.

tejohnso commented on The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting kevinboone.me/fingerprint... · Posted by u/ingve

xp84 · a month ago

On articles like this always I see a lot of people bragging about how they’ve pimped out their browser(s) to make themselves “untrackable” (or proposals to make new ways of tracking impossible) but nobody ever brags about how lack of “tracking” has positively impacted their lives.

I do block ads on the web with UBlock Origin because there’s no pay option to opt-out of it and ads ruin the experience. But I don’t give a fig about tracking. Change my mind. Why would the average person enjoy a better life if they became untrackable on the Web?

tejohnso · a month ago

The average person probably won't notice or care otherwise this would be a much more publicized issue. The average person also doesn't care that their refrigerator and television phone home, their calls and data are slurped up by the NSA, and their location can be tracked through their cell phone and vehicle movements.

However, just because the average person doesn't notice and doesn't care, it doesn't mean that their life can't be ruined at some point because of these things. You never know when you're suddenly going to be targeted for something you may or may not have done.

tejohnso commented on Tesla Is Recalling Cybertrucks Again popularmechanics.com/cars... · Posted by u/2OEH8eoCRo0

emptybits · a month ago

I dodged a bullet. I bought into the original heavy stainless steel exoskeleton concept, which they never delivered on. So they had my deposit. Then it took me a year and a half (!!) to get my deposit back from time of request, a dozen documented follow-ups on phone, email, and in-person at the stealership.

Tesla’s excuse: While they were happy to take a Canadian’s money with fully refundable deposit terms, they had not contemplated actually ever refunding a Canadian. The deposit was made by credit card. The only option offered for refund was a deposit to an American bank account.

It seems like no aspect of the Cybertruck project was done well.

tejohnso · a month ago

What part of the stainless exoskeleton did they not deliver on?

https://www.tesla.com/learn/superior-durability-cybertruck-h...

I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if promises weren't kept or expectations not met. This is the same company that has a product called Full Self Driving that cannot fully self drive.

tejohnso commented on Trying two dozen different psychedelics psychotechnology.substack... · Posted by u/eatitraw

cannonpr · a month ago

There is something I don’t entirely understand about psychedelic use. While it might end up being temporary, there is a lot of data that it alters neural structures in fundamental and relatively poorly understood ways. Consciousness itself is very poorly understood. Why take a chemical that is a bit like rolling the dice on how it’s going to modify fundamentally what you are? If you are struggling with severe depression or anxiety or otherwise, I get it… but in most other cases, why? I post this as someone deeply curious about trying them, yet my mind and intellect are things I cherish when it comes to my enjoyment of life.

tejohnso · a month ago

It comes down to curiosity over caution.

But I think your concern about negative fundamental modification seems higher than the reports suggest it ought to be. There are thousands upon thousands of people who've used these drugs without serious consequence. I'd say that in general they're less of a concern than alcohol.

Here's one link I found supporting my intuition: https://www.psypost.org/scientists-say-psychedelic-drugs-lik...

tejohnso commented on Beginner-friendly, unofficial documentation for Helix text editor helix-editor.vercel.app/s... · Posted by u/Curiositry

linsomniac · 2 months ago

Does Helix have no way to go back to the last editing position when re-opening a file? Similar to: '" in vim? That is going to be a deal-breaker for me. One reason I use vim over many other options is that I jump in and out of files a lot, having to find my last position in many cases is a chore.

tejohnso · 2 months ago

I gave helix a serious shot for a week, converting shortcuts and adapting to helix's way. In the end I couldn't find any advantage to it over my vim setup. It was not plug and play it was not configuration free, it was not noticeably faster. It was just full of negatives. Little gripes like the one you mention. Vim just seems to do everything better with fewer popups and selection flashes.

tejohnso commented on New South Korean national law will turn large parking lots into solar farms electrek.co/2025/11/02/ne... · Posted by u/thelastgallon

testing22321 · 2 months ago

It doesn’t matter. I’m in Canada in a tight valley where it snows a ton and my rooftop solar makes $1000 of power a year. Solar is so cheap now, and still falling, it makes sense literally everywhere.

tejohnso · 2 months ago

Why aren't new developments including rooftop solar as a standard selling feature? If it makes sense it should be a no brainer right? Your new $800,000 home comes with a solar installation so you never pay for heating, cooling, power supply.

tejohnso commented on Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas propublica.org/article/el... · Posted by u/maxeda

maxeda · 2 months ago

> “Environmental regulations are, in my view, largely terrible,” he said at an event with the libertarian Cato Institute last year. “You have to get permission in advance, as opposed to, say, paying a penalty if you do something wrong, which I think would be much more effective.”

This quote is particularly telling of a billionaire's mindset when the fines are too small to matter.

tejohnso · 2 months ago

Yeah, of course you'd rather pay a fine when your net worth is thousands of times more than most people's, and the fines aren't scaled according to net worth.

You see this from time to time with headlines like "$CORP fined fifty MILLION dollars for ..." And then when you look into the details the fine turns out to be about one week of revenue and the offense resulted in early death for thousands of people over the past five years.

tejohnso commented on Notes on switching to Helix from Vim jvns.ca/blog/2025/10/10/n... · Posted by u/chmaynard

jbrooks84 · 2 months ago

Vim is life, no need to change

tejohnso · 2 months ago

I just heard of Helix and decided to take it for a spin. I'm not sure why I'd use it instead of Vim.

For all the Vim similarity, inverting the do-this-to-that seems like an arbitrary annoyance that I don't understand. Why go from "change this word" (cw) to "I want to change this word, so I'm going to select it first, then change it" (wc). I mean, it's not a big deal, especially if you're not already using Vim, but why THAT of all things? The difference is [explained] but the reasoning behind it is not.

Also the docs mention zero configuration but the first thing I had to do was find out why the LSP wasn't showing any information and then create a config file to fix it because the default behaviour doesn't show anything from the LSP, which makes it seem like it's not even there.

And there's no :help command.

Maybe it's a great editor, but I guess they're not targeting existing Vim users for conversion.

[explained]: https://docs.helix-editor.com/from-vim.html#migrating-from-v...

tejohnso commented on The AI bubble is 17 times the size of the dot-com frenzy and four times subprime morningstar.com/news/mark... · Posted by u/speckx

tejohnso · 2 months ago

> ChatGPT-3 cost $50 million, ChatGPT-4 cost $500 million and ChatGPT-5, costing $5 billion

Is that actually true? And is most of it because of the compute requirements of the models or scaling cost due to exponential growth in usage?

I hope it didn't actually cost ten times more to create ChatGPT-5 than it did ChatGPT-4.