Thinking of it in terms of namespaces might help; it's not that the drive is special, it's that there's a view that starts from / and one disk filesystem happens to be dropped there and others are dropped elsewhere; with something like initramfs there aren't any drives on /, just a chunk of ram, though you usually pivot to a physical one later (many linux-based embedded systems don't because your one "drive" is an SD card that can't handle real use, so you just keep the "skeleton" in memory and drop various bits of eMMC or SD or whatever into the tree as-convenient.)
The point is that any filesystem can be chosen as the OS’s root.
The root of all other filesystems - there could be multiple per drive - is where you tell the filesystem to be mounted, or in your automounter’s special directory, usually /run/media, where it makes a unique serial or device path.
I feel like there is a huge difference between a shared kitchen and a shared bathroom. I'm fine with the former, and I would personally take that if the price was right.
It doesn’t need to be. I had shared bathrooms in college dorms and in a European facility for unmarried adult asylum seekers and in various hostels and they were absolutely fit for purpose.
The bathrooms at my workplace are fit for purpose too, but that doesn't stop people with bad hygiene from leaving a line of fecal matter at the rear of the seat (where the cheeks meet) and not wiping away sweat, lint, and hairs, or prevent them from missing and peeing on the floor.
I feel like a toilet, shower, and sink could be added to an efficiency apartment for 3m².
If people want to see how small a room could get, see ships, especially crew quarters. I could probably design something with a kitchen, bathroom, washer and dryer, bed, desk, and storage for 15m².
Speaking as someone that communicates primarily through text (high likelihood of Autism) the internet was the first chance a lot of us had to ... speak.. and be heard
People have a need to be heard and understood. That’s half of what we are doing here posting.
Many (“not disabled”) people don’t fit in with their local peer group / society. The internet gave them a way to connect with other like-minded individuals.
Do I need to give examples? Let’s say: struggling with a rare disease.
There are far, far too many people who genuinely think disabled people should just disappear or die for it to be "safe" to be facetious about that without a clear sarcasm indicator.
Not much has changed, only people get diagnosed now. I think GP makes actually a good point that, with all its downsides, there are also net positive upsides to the internet.
there are upsides but I dont know if its net upside. In this particular example, communicating by text - letter writing has existed for millenia and has arguably degraded considerably in this age of instant messaging
Sorry, i know it's a bit "flavour of the month" but I mentioned it because I have a difficulty communicating face to face, which is common amongst a certain group of people, and I figured that mentioning it would help people understand my thinking.
Ah yes, the perfect world we had when governments could get away with anything because the press was not enough to showcase their attrocities. A beautiful, perfect world, with rubella and a global population living in extreme poverty close to 50% (compared to today's 10%).
I see this mentality almost exclusively in americans and/or anglo people in general, it's incredible... if you're not that, I guess you're just too young or completely isolated from reality and I wish you the best in the ongoing western collapse.
(... I actually wish you're joking and I didn't catch it, though).
last sentence in your first paragraph has nothing to do with the current state of the internet and certainly not AI. first sentence? turns out governments can still get away with pretty much anything and propaganda is easier than ever.
It is so much harder now. There are people who are willfully ignorant now, almost proud to be; snooty about it. But it's impossible for governments and institutions to lie like they used to be able to. People are trading primary source documents online within the day.
It's why the popularity of long-ruling institutional parties is dropping everywhere, and why the measures to stop people from communicating and to monitor what they're saying are becoming more and more draconian and desperate.
beyond irony that you pose as some tech optimist while also mentioning “western collapse” and then speak about a uniquely American pessimism, a nation that is presently under the thumb of a government that does not respect the rule of law and actively manipulates capital/big business.
and you cannot simply hand-wave away the massive acceleration of the surveillance state and characterize it as a tool of the “institutional parties”
> Ever since I got my hands on my first computer as a kid, I've been outsourcing parts of my brain to computing so that I can focus on more interesting things. I no longer have to remember phone numbers, I no longer have to carry a paper notepad, my bookshelf full of reference books that constantly needed to be refreshed became a Google search away instead. Intellisense/code completion meant I didn't have to waste time memorizing every specific syntax and keyword. Hell, IDEs have been generating code for a long time. I was using Visual Studio to automatically generate model classes from my database schema for as long as I can remember, and even generating CRUD pages.
I absolutely agree with you, but I do think there's a difference in kind between a deterministic automation you can learn to use and get better at, and a semi-random coding agent.
The thing I'm really struggling with is that unlike e.g. code completion, there doesn't seem to be a clear class of tasks that LLMs are good at vs bad at. So until the LLMs can do everything, how do I keep myself in the loop enough that I'll have the requisite knowledge to step in when the LLM fails?
You mention how technology means we no longer have to remember phone numbers. But what if all digital contact lists had a very low chance of randomly deleting individual contacts over time? Do you keep memorizing phone numbers? I'm not sure!
Your website might want to present a different interface for people using mouse and keyboard than for people using tiny touch screens? Even if the number of pixels in the browser window is otherwise the same.
I think Wikipedia redirected based on user agent, but yes, whatever, point is if you're a developer you can use the browser devtools to simulate whatever you need.
I think this is pretty easy to explain psychologically.
The first time you see a dog that can make pancakes, you’re really focused on the fact that a dog is making pancakes.
After a few weeks of having them for breakfast, you start to notice that the pancakes are actually kind of overcooked and don’t taste that good. Sure it’s impressive that a dog made them, but what use are sub-par pancakes? You’re naturally more focused on what it can’t do than what it can.
Closed verilog I can accept. But in general firmware is also software, for example it has become quite popular in the recent years to execute firmware on an embedded riscv cpu. And move more and more functionality to that kind of firmware.
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