Good. Can my Watch Later list please be the most important item I see when I go there?

It’s reminiscent of Lovecraftian monsters but it isn’t “literally” one. That word is so fucking overused.

I wonder if “human BS” is just the frustration that real human communication is less convenient and demands more attention than the other forms of communication we’ve gotten used to.

When Americans of all political stripes finally wake up to global realty, they’ll most likely do it lying on a sidewalk, naked in the rain, with their fingers in their ears saying na-na-na-na-na-na…

People will eventually have to face that the economic golden age of the 1950s and 60s wasn’t a normal state we can return to if greedy billionaires just let us. The rich definitely grabbed the biggest share of the prosperity, but that brief era of prosperity wasn’t normal, it was entirely abnormal, and it’s been over for quite a while. We’ve been fooling ourselves and keeping it going for the last half century by living on credit, and that’s about to end. I don’t know what new era is about to start, but the American era is over.

“OMG it was supposed to take out my LEFT kidney! I’m gonna die!!!”

“Oops, the surgeon in the training video took out a Right kidney. Uhh… sorry.”

I will support this by continuing to be apathetic toward (and in fact ignorant of) the game known as Subnautica 2.

In the most absolute historical sense all borders are arbitrary made-up lines on the ground.

Sounds like an argument that would take at least two meetings and a dozen emails if this were done by a company lol.

Depends on how you take it. When you say anyone who doesn’t have a neurological disorder can do something it puts a negative light on people who haven’t done it. Not being multilingual is a common negative statement about Americans, for example, always comparing them with Europeans. But most Americans don’t live close to multiple places where different languages are prevalent, as in Europe, so their only reason to learn other languages is purely academic. Similar to the average person’s motivation to learn calculus. I think I framed it pretty realistically - certainly with more brevity.

IDGAF if it’s the best (mint), it was easy to install, easy to transition to from Windows, and in 6 months hasn’t given me any trouble. I just wanna use my computer.

Heyyyyyyyyy Yaccarino!

TBH that sounds like saying anybody can become “fluent” in calculus if they just apply themselves. In my experience that’s just not the case. People have different aptitudes. You might be right that with sufficient motivation and unlimited time, anyone without a neurological disorder could theoretically learn a language, but in a real-life context where people have a lot of other concerns and responsibilities going on, I think it’s much more reasonable to say “probably but it depends.”

Unfortunately Firefox is a product whose job is to show ads for profit, so the only way to “donate” to it is to click ads.

Ingenious name. I feel like Bitchat should be connected somehow with PenIsland.

Back in the 1990s I did a thought experiment using 1990s industrial cost figures and production volumes I found online. Turned out Americans could save the Amazon rainforest by cutting our beef consumption by 10%. I don’t have the math on hand but the gist was that if demand for beef in America dropped 10%, so would demand for cattle feed, which was mostly corn. Reducing corn production by that much and devoting the land to hemp cultivation (which would work) would produce enough hemp fiber to replace all the wood pulp being imported from Brazil to make paper. At that time most trees being logged in the Amazon region were being pulped and exported to the US. So boom, demand for Amazon pulp logs drops to zero, rainforest saved!

Admittedly this was simplistic and did not account for pulp producers selling to other countries that may have been competing with the US to buy the pulp. But they would have to compete with whatever other pulp sources those customers already had. Anyway, just the fact that the numbers worked out so well helped me understand how a trend in one area can affect seemingly unrelated areas. Like, I dunno, people buy fewer Barbies and the price of air conditioners goes down. I’m sure some people make a lot of money by figuring out stuff like that.

Insightful. I think what happened with tuition was that universities were actually undercharging until around 1980, when they realized they could charge a lot more and people would still pay it, so they did. In America there’s a prevailing mindset that the economy boomers grew up in was normal, and today’s economy is stunted. The economy of the 1950s and 60s was actually an anomalous boom, like a bumper crop. Today’s economy is what it would have been decades ago if the business world had risked charging higher prices and paying lower wages back then, instead of waiting for an excuse like COVID. Kind of a harsh realization.

Shifting personnel to grocery duty during work time to handle a surge or whatever is fine. Asking them to volunteer their free time is bullshit. I might do it if Bezos volunteered to come clean my house.

For clarity, Mozilla isn’t one thing. There’s Mozilla Corporation (profit) and the Mozilla Foundation (nonprofit). Firefox is a product of Mozilla Corporation. And yes, the need to make a profit is a bug not a feature.

I’m just amazed it apparently took two people to think of taping 4 air filters together with a fan on top.

Great interview! The whole proof-of-work approach is fascinating, and reminds me of a very old email concept he mentions in passing, where an email server would only accept a msg if the sender agreed to pay like a dollar. Then the user would accept the msg, which would refund the dollar. So this would end up costing legitimate senders nothing but would require spammers to front way too much money to make email spamming affordable. In his version the sender must do a processor-intensive computation, which is fine at the volume legitimate senders use but prohibitive for spammers.