I’m really sick right now and this makes me miss my boy so much.

Had a traumatic life event a couple months back and I’ve had to move far away and could not take him. I’m confident he’s in good hands, but it’s hard.

One time I got ready to head for grad school just like any other day and right before and I realized I forgot to close my shirt drawer and was like huh, I’ve never forgotten that before. Nine or ten hours later I get back home and Buddy has not come out to greet me, instead I see our other cat Oceanborn, who is quite antisocial. I walk into the bedroom and Oceanborn paces in front of the dresser meowing and my heart sank into my stomach when I realized what I had done. For just a moment I felt so awful but opening that drawer just to see him do an enormous yawn and then a stretch and then jump out all happy, there’s something to be said for moments of terror for someone’s well-being that instantly turn to pure comedy when you realize they’re fine.

Black cat snuggled up in my black shirts. Later that evening I saw him use his paw to open the dresser drawer and hop in again, so it turns out he had just taught himself a new trick without having the decency to inform me about it.

When I got my first cat about ten years ago I was young, naïve, and stupid enough to think paying monthly for pet insurance was a good idea and when she developed asthma two years later they said it was a pre-existing condition so they wouldn’t cover any treatment. Ended up giving her up since we were barely getting by as-is, I still feel ashamed.

Never watched the channel, but I would guess that being tech-themed makes it a worse look that they promoted it for so long before catching the issue, so they were worried it would cast doubt on all other endorsements and tank the value of advertising with them.

Hijack, but clementine used to have a “remote” available on fdroid where I could manage clementine on my pc from an android phone connected to the same local wifi. Is there anything analogous for strawberry?

If you’re looking for a “something that’s explained oversimplifiedly then a lot of people say they get it (and are wrong)”

I studied math and my first thought here is Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.

One Christmas when I was like seven years old, my great aunt Ruth stayed with our family. She was a nun and for some reason this meant that, on principle, we had to attend Christmas mass at the proper time (Christmas morning) and we were not allowed to open any presents until mass was over.

The sermon was over three hours, I had a cheap casio watch and was timing it.

I was trying to use an example from personal experience to illustrate the benefit, but my point is that immediate answers wasn’t an option not too long ago, so curiosities you actually did want answered would necessarily have that delay. Being able to learn things well in spite of this shift is becoming a skill not everyone has. It’s something that needs to be nurtured, and it’s now easy to neglect, which really can affect everyone, although obviously some attitudes and lifestyles will be hit harder than others.

Something of a tangent but honestly I hate the way academia works here in general and I resent my role in contributing to math being used as a barrier to a better life. Unfortunately, I do need a career of some sort and there are worse things I could be doing. So I play by the rules well enough to keep my job and just try to do my best to be understanding.

I didn’t even enjoy math myself until I took an analysis course because I thought a math minor would help with job prospects. I always had an easy time with math and when I took analysis I got a D the first time and barely scraped by with a C the second. Math is actually interesting when you feel there’s creativity required in problem-solving, but it’s not reasonable to demand that in a lower-level math course because it doesn’t mesh well with a course existing primarily as a roadblock for students.

A hardworking student might still struggle to develop that creativity quickly enough to get through the course unscathed, which is fine if you’re enrolled because you just want to learn, but not fine for students trying to get good grades or at least pass everything to get through as quickly as possible. A student might have the crazy idea that failing is a financial hit or something. The result is you’re simply put through a grind until you voluntarily take on a course beyond the calculus sequence.

What I’m getting at is that I think your complaints all stem from the fact that, in spite of what we’re all forced to pretend, education is not the main purpose of academia.

I think there are many questions where it’s very easy to convince yourself the solution is obvious after you’ve been shown it, but it’s less obvious for someone who is taking the time to try to figure it out on their own.

I teach college math courses (usually around calculus-level), and for every exam I give I will write a practice exam to post online a week before, and I’ll devote the lecture prior to the exam to reviewing those problems. I try to make every problem that appears on the exam very similar to one that was on the practice. The students who attempt the problems before the review session, even the students who get incorrect solutions in the process, will bulldoze their exams and will say it was essentially identical to the practice, while the students who just watch me give the solutions and copy down what I’m writing will tell me the practice was easy but this was barely similar at all.

When you see an obvious solution immediately, you completely bypass seeing potential stumbling blocks which might have tripped you up.

I read somewhere that the existence of the internet massively stifles our ability to reason. For every question I have, spending a few minutes to ponder what the most plausible answer is provides a small workout for my brain. If everything I’m curious about is answered within seconds, I don’t get those mental workouts.

In the primary the Trump campaign had a couple noteworthy attack ads against DeSantis, like the one that had no mention of policy and was entirely focused on the reports that multiple people witnessed DeSantis eating a cup of pudding with his fingers. I’ll also mention that the attack ad put out by Trump’s campaign like an hour before DeSantis did a twitter event with Elon Musk to announce his candidacy will be a topic of great interest to future historians trying to understand our culture.

My thought is that if Trump has any area of expertise at all, it’s being petty towards haters and losers. If there were any position under him where that man could actually discern between a sycophant and a competent employee well enough to make firings based on poor quality of work, rather than based on not kissing his ass or simply needing a fall guy, it would be this. A position like attack ad concept design, where the most crucial skill is your ability to talk shit about someone you hate.

I’m really skeptical he makes meaningful decisions or does much of anything anymore, he seems like he’s stopped caring and we’d probably be seeing discussion of mental decline if we hadn’t had such a long period of Trump being totally overshadowed by Biden’s extremely conspicuous mental decline. With that said, the culture around his campaign was formed well before this election.

Looking at this now, you are correct, and while I wasn’t proud of myself for having thought the song titles were funny, I feel a bit more embarrassed now than I did two minutes ago before looking it up. Edgy teenagers were clearly this band’s target audience.

It didn’t make sense to me either until I realized that cleaning your house is probably also gay if you’re not expecting visitors.

Tarja-era Nightwish is so good.

I haven’t thought about this in like 20 years but when I was in middle school late 90s some kid had an album where one of the songs was titled “You Rollerblading (f-slur)” and I remember thinking it was the worst music I had heard in my life. 90% sure it was grindcore music, I didn’t know what grindcore was at the time but my memory of the sound kind of fits that mold and the album had like fifty tracks and every single one of them was like 10-15 seconds long.

Using the phrase “serious question” or “honest question” will make me immediately assume your question is the exact opposite of that. Probably I’m overreacting, but expecting that anyone might respect that declaration you’ve made about your own question, that gives me narcissist vibes.

She looks adorable. What was her name?

I only discovered encabulation is a thing like a month or two ago and it’s been life-changing, I’ve seen the original paper but finding videos on youtube is like a treasure trove. The Chrysler version is probably my favorite I’ve seen, entirely because of the tech guy that the video switches over to for the second half.

The SANS ICS HyperEncabulator video is also really special. The throwback “I don’t understand you” scene at 1:53, I can’t even make out most of what he’s saying but somehow the delivery and the grin get me every time I watch it.

There’s a lot of variability. We got Roto-Borola after our old cat Buddy passed. Buddy was the best pet I’ve ever had and I miss him with all my heart, but he was dumb as rocks, which produced some good stories.

Roto-Borola immediately showed he was a quick learner and it was immediately infuriating. He realized very quickly that if he chews on my electrical wires I’ll tell him not to do that, so in a situation where he comes up to me for attention and I try to calmly explain that I’m working on something urgent for work right now and he should wait half an hour, straight to chewing on the wires so that he will have my attention. He almost never does this when he’s not actively interested in redirecting my behavior. One time, he was probably a little less than a year old, I tried giving him twenty minutes of cage time to discourage the chewing and as soon as I let him out he sprinted back to chew on them again, like now it’s not about making me play with him it’s about punishing me for the injustice I have committed.

Currently have a makeshift setup where all the wires behind my desk are blocked off by large cardboard pieces with a tiny hole cut underneath so they can run along the floor. I’ve done an extremely poor engineering job on this - it works perfectly for its intended purpose of not having my wires eaten, but anytime I need to change a cable a one minute task now takes like fifteen unless I’m willing to cede ground in our battle over eating wires.

As a very stable genius, I completely agree with this.