I wish some entrepreneur had instead created an amazing fucking Mastodon instance and put all that marketing and engineering dollar into the platform. But you can’t own Mastodon so you can’t ever sell Mastodon so those types of folks will never invest in Mastodon. We could just say “fuck ‘em” but they have done a serious job of monopolizing the time of all the talented people who know how to make something like this go.

Surely that could never happen again though! /s

We sense less and less as we get older. I’ve learned this from observing my kids and seeing them react to things like needles and spicy food with such greater sensitivity than me. I can remember being like them, too. But I just plow through experiences now with less sensation of them. Part of it is that my senses are physically more dull, but also important: my cognitive filters are much more established and sensations that are outside of them get little notice. Meanwhile my kids are like raw nerves at the mercy of every experience that comes their way. Bubble gum probably doesn’t blow your hair back anymore either but I bet it was awesome when you were a kid.

Yes this truly is the weakest bullshit I’ve ever seen. Obviously, it’s just in-client blocking with zero support from the back end. Pathetic.

I guess it all depends on the physical layout but this seems like a very complicated way to get material downhill.

The title is a little clickbaity though that is frankly the state of YT as a whole these days. Given the rich information in the video and the high effort put into the explanations, let’s allow it.

so trying to be healthy is pointless

No one said anything about pointlessness.

Strictly speaking, the video does a quality job of showing how true democracy is a unfinished science and far less intuitive than most people suppose when they haven’t thought about it much. However it repeatedly makes the same point you do, that some systems are better than others.

I heard this comment in Guinan’s voice.

Why only for the presidency? The principle seems the same at any level.

This interesting video details some of the problems with various vote counting systems, including ranked choice. Turns out that formulating the perfect democratic process is something people have been trying and failing at for centuries.

It doesn’t sound particularly good, either.

I found this video on the mathematics of democracy fascinating. It’s not some accident that third parties hurt the party they’re more aligned with: it’s inevitable under first-past-the-post. Really, the only reason to start a third party is to influence one of the other parties, and even then it’s a dangerous game because your spoiler effect may create backlash, drawing people away from the ideas you want to promote. The older I get, the more I see that you can’t win the game without playing it.

Orange tabby: “pick up your head and feed me, hooman” LOL

It’s not just random that you roll over and then fart. You have uncomfortable gas buildup and when your body feels uncomfortable you shift positions. In this case your body is succeeding in finding the right position to relieve the pressure, via farting.

Gas is a nuisance but sleep disruption is a serious health risk. It will reduce your quality of life and cognitive performance in every measurable way and shorten your life.

So it’s time to address the root cause: the gas. It is not inevitable to have extreme gas. But you are going to have to do some work and accept some changes if you want to fix it. The easiest thing you can do is modify when you eat. Stop eating after 5pm each night and see what happens. Delay your dinner until 8pm and see what happens.

If you cannot find better timing then you must look at what you are eating. Eliminate beans/lentils and see what happens. Eliminate brassica vegetables (broccoli, brussel sprouts, cauliflower) and see what happens. Then cabbage. If none of that helps then look at eliminating carbs after 12 noon. See what happens.

May your farts and sleep improve.

I don’t really care what’s installed on my work computer, which I use solely for work purposes. Should I?

Solar has become price competitive largely because of innovation and commodification in Chinese manufacture of solar panels. Their centrally managed economy prioritized this when their major cities became engulfed in deadly clouds of air pollution from coal plants. The CCP understand that human labor is their primary resource. They don’t protect people out of caring, but out of self preservation.

Well we may just have to disagree. Even your definition requires that everyone be happy, and cooperating. I think that goes against your earlier contention that regardless of what people want, utopia has an objective definition.

It is what people want it to be, and people want different things.

It’s probably worth asking “what are the next steps for citizens of Portugal to stop the destruction of Palestine?”

Or Honduras or Australia or South Korea or Madagascar.

Because it’s now the same answer. You can do whatever you as a private citizen can do. Our friend’s dad travelled to Palestine and rode in on a boat loaded with construction supplies, sort of “throwing his body” in the path of the IDF to directly physically help Palestinians (he’s Jewish, btw).

Of course this was before this full scale war. I wouldn’t recommend this action now. Send money to aid groups. Whatever you could do from the suburbs of Cartegena, that’s what you can do as an American.

You can’t do anything about the policy from the top now. That’s a sealed envelope.

Haram!!

It’s so Papa John’s to support only one browser.

Sad saga, but here we are. I remember when Chrome was new and brought much needed speed and low resource usage to the browsing experience of the day. I even got email from a Chrome engineer once about a bug I mentioned in a forum, asking me for more information.

Google was already an ad company by then so anyone could have looked forward to this inevitability. Some did. Most of us did not.

Chrome has just always been there for some younger people but it will now live in my memory as a fully encapsulated end-to-end enshittification experience that I really should have always expected.

And just like it used to be with Internet Explorer, I am forced to use Chrome at work all day because thats the IT & security approved / enterprise-managed browser.