We as a society have already said that we don’t allow children to make their own decisions, so any trans-related care falls under that banner and is, like any major medical procedure, already incredibly difficult for minors to get approved for. If you feel that we should be legislating beyond the practices of the medical community and the FDC, then yes that will carry a high bar of medical knowledge I’m going to ask you to have, as you are advocating for knowing better than the field of medicine as a whole.

There are still strict medical guidelines that doctors have to follow, even on an individual level. The story I hear over and over again from trans people is “it was a nightmare getting approval for my care and it took years” not “it was super easy”.

My question will always be: why is trans care special? We already have lots of rules around medical care for children. Why does trans care need to be specifically singled out?

If you passionately believe that you should be allowed to make medical decisions for someone else instead of their doctor, that you know better than the medical community, you better fucking be able to answer the precise medical reasoning behind it.

My worldview on abortions and transitioning is easy: that’s a personal choice between an individual and their doctor. It doesn’t affect the health of anyone but the person getting the procedure so I, but anyone else, should have a say.

I don’t need in-depth medical knowledge to defend that position. If you’re position is that we should go mucking about in other people’s care, you do need to know the medical particulars for why you believe that or I’m going to judge you hard.

NVIDIA’s marketing overhypes, but their technical papers tend to be very solid. Obviously it always pays to remain skeptical but they have a good track record in this case.

Precision for what? Knowing their cron job will fire? Knowing what was wrong with the commands they sent? Neither of those are crazy precise or ambiguous statements?

The only highly precise thing that needs to happen is the alignment of the antenna but that system has been working for decades already and has been thoroughly tested.

NASA tends to be pretty straightforward when talking about risks, and if they feel like all the systems are in working order and there’s a good chance we’ll be back in contact with it, I think it’s worth talking them at their word.

Like yeah, it’s impressive they can aim an antenna that precisely, but using stars to orient an object is a very very well understood geometry problem. NASA has been using that technique at least as far back as Apollo

But it can be removed as a possibility by circumstance, which is what this comic is getting at.

Lol. The knee-jerk contrarianism online really gets under my skin, especially when it’s towards experts.

Like yeah, sometimes experts are wrong or systems don’t behave as expected. But framing that as some sort of erudite insight really bugs me.

“I hope the recovery system works!” doesn’t need to be rewritten as “Mmm yes. But what these engineers haven’t considered is the possibility that they are wrong”.

This is one of those things that sounds meaningful, but can be said about literally any problem in any system. Not all knowledge requires the same level of precision for confidence.

If the engineers at NASA who are familiar with the system say this is a known error state that will be fixed the next time the system designed to correct it fires on its set schedule, there’s not a whole lot added by saying sure, but what if they’re wrong?

It’s just restating the table stakes of existence.

Ah, but you have seen of him.

They’re tak-ing. myyy. gills.

At 30,000 employees that’s only $23,000/person. I’m sure payroll alone is well North of $700M per year.

Honestly sometimes just making a show of it not getting to you can get people like that to leave you be. Just start looking get dead in the eye and saying “thanks for the tip. I’ll take it under advisement”, every time she starts doing that to you. Every time. Same inflection. Even if you have to do it 20 times in a row. Even if she gets angry. Don’t say anything else to her unless it’s required to do your job.

Eventually she’ll get annoyed or bored enough to leave you alone and try to bother someone else she can get a reaction out of.

Lol, whoops

Can’t believe Hot Fuzz hasn’t been mentioned yet.

It’s a remake that uses new, higher quality assets though, so isn’t an option in this case.

Bear Head by Adrian Tchaikovsky delves into this kind of psychology from the interesting angle of treating Narcissistic Sociopaths as an alien form of consciousness. It proposes that sociopaths hijack human social interactions, turning others into mere appendages that carry out the sociopath’s desires.

He doesn’t. White supremacists clinging to celebrities they desperately want to believe support their views only to be slapped down in disgust is a tale as old as time.

I seen to remember the documentary about her covering the decision to publicly voice her political beliefs for the first time. There’s this one scene where she’s in a room full of white men telling her not to do it because it would damage her brand and her mom being the only person in the room to support it.

She went against all her business advisors and did it anyway, which should tell you enough about where she stands.

I’m a developer and don’t hate it on its face.

IMO it’s only a problem in the context of iOS not having side-loading. I’m imagining an app that uses an API to block ads and Apple just being like “no” and then you can’t get that app.

Glances at climate change rumbling towards us.

Counterpoint: If I was one of the people in charge of keeping it secret and Trump got elected… I would just “forget” to ever schedule that briefing.

It’s worth pointing out that reproducible builds aren’t always guaranteed if software developers aren’t specifically programming with them in mind.

imagine a program that inserts randomness during compile time for seeds. Reach build would generate a different seed even from the same source code, and would fail being diffed against the actual release.

Or maybe the developer inserts information about the build environment for debugging such as the build time and exact OS version. This would cause verification builds to differ.

Rust (the programing language) has had a long history of working towards reproducible builds for software written in the language, for instance.

It’s one of those things that sounds straightforward and then pesky reality comes and fucks up your year.