

My commute to work includes a main city road with two lanes each way and a turning lane, and sometimes there is a school bus that stops.


My commute to work includes a main city road with two lanes each way and a turning lane, and sometimes there is a school bus that stops.


Structurally, I don’t think anything is stopping a conservative safe space community from being spun up on one of the more neutral instances. But if conservatives have mainstream safe spaces already on x, Facebook, reddit, and smaller more extreme places like patriot.win, why would they come to lemmy?
“Conservative” can mean a really wide variety of things to people who identify that way. Like the other reply to you, I am not sad there aren’t lemmy communities dedicated to celebrating bad things happening to brown or non-Christian people. But it does seem like a hole to be missing discussions of fiscal responsibility (actual responsibility, not the “two Santas” scam) or how to effectively increase the proportion of children in two-parent households (actual increase, not the “redirect welfare money from poor people to middle-class marriage counseling”).
US conservatism broadly used to have policy pieces I agreed with, but the fake implementation in the times and places they have had power has made me really disillusioned.


It worked to keep gun sales hugely high volume and high profit for decades. “The dems are about to take away your right to buy guns, go buy them now while you can! We’ve said this every election for the last thirty years, but this time it’s serious!”
It sucks so bad that it’s such a long-term effective strategy. Fighting it would mean figuring out how to regulate both social and traditional media to reduce engagement bait lies, but I don’t know if we have a path to that.


In first-past-the-post election systems, campaigning on fear is well established as the winning strategy. In this case the fear the D candidate is playing on - loss of health care access - is more fact-based than the fear the R candidate is playing on - xenophobia - but both campaigns know fear-driven turnout is the only way to win.
I hope ranked choice voting makes more inroads. I am under no illusion it would break the two party system (Australia has used it for eighty years and still has two main parties), but by making second choices relevant it gives a winning election path to a pro-cooperation, get-things-done style of campaign.


You see the same effect in person, too, with HOAs being the most notorious example. But there are many volunteer-based organizations that do incredible good work. Power tripping is a thing to watch out for and build guardrails against, but thankfully it’s not universal.


The website revamp was part of a larger overhaul of BoM’s IT systems dating back a decade that has cost taxpayers $866m after a 2015 “serious cyber intrusion” exposed vulnerabilities in its systems.
You threw out four years as an estimate of the time period involved, but if I am reading the article correctly this was more like ten years.


If the government procurement person doesn’t really understand the deep technical requirements, they are likely to choose the bidder who also doesn’t really understand the deep technical requirements, and is the low bidder because they don’t realize what they are getting themselves into.
By the time everyone realizes how much more is really required, they are already halfway through the project. The government could have saved money by choosing a more realistic higher bidder to start with. But once they have half a program from the low bidder, throwing that away and starting over doesn’t save any money. Better to just finish with the team that’s invested with the project.


I work at a large company that is critically dependent on VAX software written in the 1980s for almost every aspect of functioning. This was recognized as a problem. A replacement coding and testing team was established. It included a full-time team of contractors - a handful US based and I believe dozens located in India - along with a few full-time dedicated employees and maybe a dozen each of people brought part time out of retirement (the people with the 1980s knowledge!) and people with other main jobs who had to start dedicating significant time to support.
It ran for two years, then two more years, then another year. Very much a case of “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know” in that the more functions were programmed and tested, the more edge cases and sub-function requirements were uncovered. This program has been upgraded in pieces by so many people for so many decades that no one realized how hugely complex it had become, and what an enormous undertaking it would be to replace it. But after five years - more than double the original two-year projection - it was coming together, more things being really finalized than new needs being uncovered.
And then the software that the replacement program was being written with lost support. It was too old. Documents were written to try to give some future team a better chance of success, and everything was disbanded and shut down.
Being peripherally involved in that really made me more sympathetic to fiasco large tech projects.
The navigation update-to-car limitations are a big reason Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are a thing. Externally provided services you have to connect to your phone for. Car features work on the car. This seems ok.


We did not reach out to Flock for comment on this article, as their communications director previously told us the company will not answer our inquiries until we “correct the record and admit to your audience that you purposefully spread misinformation which you know to be untrue” about this case.
Consider the record corrected: It turns out the truth is even more damning than initially reported.
Burn.


Amazing work by these reporters. Removing the plausible deniabilty around the stalking being done is valuable for public discussion, and hopefully informs vulnerable figures on the importance of taking precautions like leaving the phone at home in the fridge when having an informant or organizing meeting.


The current iteration of agentic AI technology used by Logitech is little more than a glorified note-taking bot capable of summarizing meetings and “generating” the occasional idea.
Given that most humans hate note-taking and avoid it, but it has a lot of value as a meeting output, getting a machine to do it makes sense.
I also heard a podcast where a consulting company couldn’t get their client contact to make any decisions because he wanted his CEO to review, but she had a busy schedule and was never available. The consultants trained an AI on this CEOs writings, and presented it to their client contact. The model was convincing enough the client felt comfortable making decisions. I thought that was interesting, and this article refers to something similar with models of stakeholders.


Lumafield scanned 1,054 batteries – around 100 from each brand – and found 33 of them had a serious manufacturing defect known as negative anode overhang. The defect “significantly increases the risk of internal short-circuiting and battery fires” and can reduce the overall life of the battery,” according to Lumafield. All 33 of the batteries with the defects came from the 424 sold by low-cost brands or brands selling counterfeits…
For two of the counterfeit brands that were reporting impossible specs, the percentage of tested batteries from those brands that were found to have the defect were even higher – upwards of 12 and 15 percent. None of the name brand OEM batteries were found to have any problems…
Defects like negative anode overhang and bad edge alignment don’t mean an affected battery is guaranteed to explode or catch fire, but they can increase the risk of those incidents occurring, particularly when combined with other factors such as being left in a hot car or an accidental drop causing additional damage.


I have read some analysis that right-wing propaganda gets the most engagement when there are liberals in the community to provide the “liberal tears”. Yes, there is a core group happy to be in an echo chamber with only imagined liberal tears, but the majority find substitutes unsatisfying. Potentially the diminishing of non-right content volume will also diminishing the right content by making the comments less interesting.


Thanks for sharing. I’m glad you are feeling less miserable now.


Automation replaced hand knitters, and people in that career suffered for a generation, but most people now value mass produced socks more than they value paying a premium for hand knit. Automation replaced telephone operators, and people in that career suffered for a generation, but no one now wants their phone call to be manually switched by a person.
The pain of automation is real and lasts the length of the career of everyone impacted, but the societal benefit lasts many generations. More support is needed for people who are displaced, but I don’t see fighting the technology as the effective way to achieve that.


I hope the AI-chat companies really get a handle on this. They are making helpful sounding noises, but it’s hard to know how much they are prioritizing it.
OpenAI has acknowledged that its existing guardrails work well in shorter conversations, but that they may become unreliable in lengthy interactions… The company also announced on Tuesday that it will try to improve the way ChatGPT responds to users exhibiting signs of “acute distress” by routing conversations showing such moments to its reasoning models, which the company says follow and apply safety guidelines more consistently.


I’ve occasionally been part of training hourly workers on software new to them. Having really, really detailed work instructions and walking through all the steps with themthe first time has helped me win over people who were initially really opposed to the products.
My experience with salaried workers has been they are more likely to try new software on their own, but if they don’t have much flexible time they usually choose to keep doing the established less efficient routine over investing one-time learning curve and setup time to start a new more efficient routine. Myself included - I have for many years been aware of software my employer provides that would reduce the time spent on regular tasks, but I know the learning curve and setup is in the dozens of hours, and I haven’t carved out time to do that.
So to answer the question, neither. The problem may be neither the software nor the users, but something else about the work environment.


The skills of both writing useful minutes and prioritizing actually sending them out are frustratingly rare. An average meeting with five or six people has even odds of not including someone with both of those skills. I can see where reliably having a mediocre AI summary might be an advantage over sometimes having superb human-written minutes and sometimes having nothing.
It prevents AI summaries of the video from including all the video content. Obvious solution: remove the information missing from the summary from the video itself. Now they match! /s