Yeah. The original was social commentary on the role of immigration enforcement as a tool of state oppression, with the brutality that sometimes occurs centered prominently and jarringly against video-game pixel art.

This is tech bros recycling the same exact structure but making it about getting billionaires to fund their latest "Uber but for AI-powered false advertising."

It's like if Flock wrote a version of 1984 where the heroic protagonist was trying to rise up against a regime of local activist groups who opposed installing Flock's mass surveillance products.

It also spits in the face of the gameplay side. The whole point of Papers Please wasn't pixel art work simulator, it was the pressure of the timer and being forced with making complex choices of doing helping others, helping yourself, and doing a proper job. Those gameplay decisions further strength the social commentary and how that kind of system is bad for everyone.

It was also about how poverty enables cruelty, juxtaposing your struggle to pay for rent and food with the demands of the state. The incentives are very different from people like Paul Graham and Gary Tan who can flip through a hundred folios without being forced to pick anything. The procedural tragedy of the game is lost if you're Joe Capital with a $3M fund at your disposal.

I think you misspelled "perps"

>University of Michigan professor Jenny Radesky, a pediatrician who has extensively researched screen use among children, said problems can arise when tablets are allowed to serve as a “child’s always-available buddy, meaning it is taken everywhere to help manage the child’s behavior, calm them down, or keep them quiet.”

Yeah, that's the crux of the problem. The goal of parenting is not to keep your kids quiet and calm. That's nice to have, and as someone with a toddler myself I get the desire for it sometimes.

The goal of parenting is to raise a healthy human being. Managing kids as problems to be solved instead caring for them as people to be nourished (not just physically with food, but emotionally and mentally) hardcore misses the mark on a fundamental level, in ways that harm your child directly and society more generally (since it's common for children to internalize and repeat their parents' patterns of behavior).

You're thinking of "South America" (parse as "South America + n", or "from South America").

So what I'm hearing is that when it comes to cheap, clean, consumer-empowering energy, the USA tends to regulate, not innovate.

A lot of people in the U.S. are trying to innovate. I think the problem is the fossil fuel industry has been paying government, probably for decades, to implement legal roadblocks at all levels, from individual homes up to states and regions, to non-fossil fuel energy. I think they've also had a hand, at least at the propaganda level, in pushing back on electric vehicles.

Personally, I'd love to see the United States, and the rest of the world, decrease its reliance on oil. We won't get off it in any of our lifetimes, but we should move in that direction. I like diversifying. Any bit helps. Solar in Australia and Arizona. Maybe less so in northern Maine. Wind turbines where there's wind. I personally don't have any aesthetic objection to them. I think they look kind of cool. And certainly better than smokestacks. And so on.

I've used libraries before, where I call the API surface that they expose based on method names and parameter types, without reading all the source. Generally those libraries don't implement my software's entire problem domain area; they tend to implement things like "CSV parser" or "HTTP server". The important code, that I'm actively reading and writing, tends to be the code around those library calls.

This is different from building a product, which you only interact with via UI buttons/CLI/etc, without reading any code to understand how it conceptualizes that product's problem domain area.

People do that latter thing, and we call them "users", not "developers".

If you believe like some guys do that you can just point a camera at any painting in the world and replicate it, what is the point of painters again?

(i.e. the ability to copy existing things does not obsolete the need to be able to make new things)

Which is why compared to the times before the camera was invented, earning the living as a painter is vastly reduced to a few that manage to make it.

Likewise since digital photography became common, most photography shops closed, those that are around usually barely survive with services like photos for government official documents.

Events photography is also a niche nowadays, as the organisers then sample the photos done by guests on their mobile phones. Very few professional photographers still get such gigs.

>Why would you want this? What's the point of the server if you mirror deletes?

Sharing and backups, with the phone serving as the "source of truth" and the server as a replica that is more accessible to a partner/friend/etc than the contents of your phone's filesystem.

Sometimes, certain processes strongly predict bad outcomes, though.

If someone told me to choose between two barbecue restaurants, where one used an wood-fired smoker and the other used a microwave, my reaction wouldn't be "you really shouldn't judge based on just the process." The microwave is a sufficient indicator of low quality.

Vibecoding (as distinct from using AI as a resource while writing better code yourself) is the microwave: fast, hands-off, low-effort, low-quality.

The one caveat here is that, because Apple only really allows certain apps the privilege of running in the background without being interrupted or killed, I could never get the iOS version of Immich to reliably sync photos without having to manually open it and leave the app open until sync finished.

This was a few years ago, and was one of several "iOS breaks our crucial workflows" problems that motivated switching our last device over to Android, so the situation might be better now...but I've never had that problem with the Android client, so I know it's not an Immich problem.

You don’t need to run your app in the background. You can register your app as some extension to handle photo backups/cloud storage and you just setup a request to upload to a particular url when a new photo is added, iOS will background those requests and retry them and what not.

It works fine! The cost is a notification that the sync is running.