> Journalism would become more thorough and responsible, rather than optimized for outrage and clicks.
For that we would need a new funding model for journalism. Local journalism (i.e. local newspapers, radio and TV stations) used to be financed by classifieds and ads. Classifieds are long since gone off to the Internet and ads have been replaced by Google Maps plus Facebook, so there's no monetary stream - and as a result of that, there's barely anyone left holding local politicians and companies accountable. Yes, some places have "citizen journalists" and bloggers, but these usually do not have the funds to pay for legal teams and court proceedings, so they usually only target government stuff.
Something like taxpayer-paid media is way too easily corruptible by the government, just look at Hungary for the worst possible outcome. "Mandatory contribution" systems like the BBC or Germany's public broadcasters aren't that easily corruptible, but it still happens - just watch the shitshow every few years here in Germany when the contribution needs to be raised.
HDMI adapters are a dime a dozen. Pick some random crap and save yourself the money, as long as they reasonably work they'll "disappear" faster than a crate of beer...
You don't want to risk damaging an expensive phone/laptop/TV by plugging in the absolute cheapest unbranded cables/adaptors etc if there's a trustworthy brand available.
And with some electrical stuff, such as power strips and chargers, there might be safety issues/fire hazards too.
Go does hardcode system call numbers on Linux, but it doesn't on Windows. Instead it follows the normal Windows convention of calling the userspace wrappers from kernel32.dll and similar libraries.
Unlike on Linux, the low-level syscall numbers on the NT kernel are highly unstable across releases, so programs that try to call them directly will generally only work on a very specific kernel version.
I wonder if due to C slowly fading away things like syscall
ABI, kernel numbers, etc, will start getting more stable, not just on Windows but on macOS too
There still needs to be a cause for working directly with the kernel interface instead of going via the userland interfaces (libc on Linux, kernel32/user32 on Windows, macOS frameworks) to justify the required effort, and the use cases are basically only DRM, malware, malware detectors and anti-cheat.
If you think directly calling Windows syscall is crazy, some applications parse binary code from ntdll.dll to figure out what the syscall numbers actually are, since they change across different Windows versions :)
Userland DRMs do all sort of nonsense. Kernel anticheats wouldn't use the syscalls, they're already able to call the kernel routines they want directly.
Wine, from the first moment I saw it decades ago, seems to be all about doing the sisyphean tasks no one else wants to be doing. I'm still in awe how they managed to get Wine to where it is today, so if someone can do it, it's the wine devs :)
> In the pharmaceutical industry, I can guarantee their advertising funnel is much wider than two social media platforms. Think about all the places you see pharmaceutical ads: TV, billboards, even ads on buses, that sketchy doctor’s office full of company swag. That $40 million is not going all to Google and Meta even if the GP comment tried to imply it was.
Having worked adjacent to ads... yes, there is more than social media ads. But the amount of everything not social media has massively shrunk!
Local newspapers are effectively dead except for local businesses (and even these are reducing their spend - especially the food delivery services fully rely on Uber, Just Eat etc) and so is radio, and even TV has been hit hard. You got newspapers and broadcast stations getting hit left and right, sliding into bankruptcy and/or being bought up by larger companies for pennies on the dollar. The fact that all across the Western world government/citizen funded public broadcasts are under attack makes it even worse, the diversity of media and, most importantly, the amount of people holding government accountable is collapsing as we speak [1].
Globally, Google, Amazon and Meta suck up over half of the global ad spend and it's not going to look better [2].
The idea is to use that as a marketing ploy on all sides.
On one side, paying high wages is marketing on the employment market - enticing people to work at Ford's rather than somewhere else.
Then, you got the government side. A factory providing a town with a lot of high quality employment leads to a lot of purchasing power from the employees and thus to a growing city. Wolfsburg in Germany, the best example, literally was founded by/for Volkswagen. Being respected by local politics for that growth, in turn, leads politicians and city management to... be lenient in enforcing regulations impeding the business. The best example here is Tesla in Brandenburg near Berlin. With any other company in any other place in Germany, they would get hammered with fines. Tesla in turn set up shop in a destitute area, so politicians bent over backwards and looked aside despite numerous violations and transgressions.
And finally, you got the customer side. The story of a quality product, made by well-paid domestic workers, was as powerful a story as it still is today, at least in affluent circles.
Every accusation is a confession, rules for me not for thee, it's been like that for many years. Hell, 'member Clinton and the blowjob? The problem wasn't the blowjob, the problem was that Clinton let himself get caught and exposed.
Or, specifically to the situation at hand, there's yet another famous quote applicable: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
It's completely obvious what ICE and the ordinary citizens of all blue regions are, respectively.
That's just like hiring McKinsey et al - the true value isn't the advice itself, it's probably been written down by some poor intern working 80 hours a week yet billed to the client as "director" time, the true value of why these consultants still get hired despite their truly abysmal track record is that management can use that "external advice" to cut through red tape and plow over internal resistance.
LLMs however... they give part of this power to lower levels as well. After all, what is an LLM other than the condensed knowledge of humanity? (Partially /s)
The Atlassian stack is particularly bad to extend IMHO given that there are sooooo many API endpoints that their UI calls and most of them are dog slow.
That is something you can reasonably do, but it's only useful in winter.
> or using high power appliances more during the day
Well, given that people have to work during the day, I doubt that that will work out on a large enough scale. And even if you'd pre-program a laundry machine to run at noon, the laundry would sit and get smelly during summer until you'd get home.
The only change in patterns we will see is more base load during the night from EVs trickle-charging as more and more enter the market.
I've got solar. We switched things like pool pump, hot water and so on (things already on timers) from night to day.
Dishwasher can also gave a programmed start, so that can also shift from after-dinner to after-breakfast.
I also work some days from home, so other activities can be moved from night to day. We use a bore-hole for irrigation, laundry in the morning etc. Even cooking can often be done earlier in the day.
Aircon is the least problematic- when we need it, the sun is shining.
So yes, habits can shift. Obviously though each situation is different.
At least in the US there is a push to make electric appliances smarter already. So for example, the electric hot water heater responding to the strain on the grid. The same could happen for AC, heat, EVs and other higher load appliances. At scale that can help out the grid immensely either in times of peak load or dip in demand.
I do not see a point of smart appliances besides electrical car. 10 KWt-hour battery will cover all the needs to smooth the demand from all home appliances and costs below 1K usd. It will allow also to significantly reduce maximum power that has to be supplied to a house while allow to increase peak consumption while heavy cooking/AC/heating.
At least in the US most of this is still on the research phase but if you can get a standard adopted for all new equipment you can easily adjust these high draw appliances to act as a virtual power plant. It would be a trivial implementation compared to getting batteries in homes.
For that we would need a new funding model for journalism. Local journalism (i.e. local newspapers, radio and TV stations) used to be financed by classifieds and ads. Classifieds are long since gone off to the Internet and ads have been replaced by Google Maps plus Facebook, so there's no monetary stream - and as a result of that, there's barely anyone left holding local politicians and companies accountable. Yes, some places have "citizen journalists" and bloggers, but these usually do not have the funds to pay for legal teams and court proceedings, so they usually only target government stuff.
Something like taxpayer-paid media is way too easily corruptible by the government, just look at Hungary for the worst possible outcome. "Mandatory contribution" systems like the BBC or Germany's public broadcasters aren't that easily corruptible, but it still happens - just watch the shitshow every few years here in Germany when the contribution needs to be raised.
It's an all-around mess.
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