corrral

I gave up on this years ago when I realized the only valuable things coming to my email were transactional emails, anyway. The rest is... newsletters and shit.

If you're only checking your email to use the "search" function for something very specific, or to find an expected transactional email sent within the last minute, there's not much reason to bother setting up filters.

Text is probably the best way for non-friends to get through to me, because I mostly ignore email and calls since they're overrun with crap, though the current campaign season is really trying to make text useless, too. So many damn fundraising texts, usually from candidates in other states entirely.

Doctors and soldiers get such cool uniforms, but us programmers are just business casual.

Programmers' uniforms are excessively-expensive hiking clothes, or selvedge jeans with flannel and full-grain leather boots, ideally in a work- or jump-boot style.

Yeah but we can't expect them to be able to handle a problem that ( checks notes ) many other kinds of business have been solving since the earliest days of commerce.

I'd be more sympathetic to this argument if all that info weren't a couple subpoenas or search-warrants away at most—in fact, the government can often just pay for access to these things, usually with the implicit threat that if access isn't granted at a reasonable rate, the business may find itself in some trouble. Like, if we banned private parties from collecting tons of info about us, then maybe that concern would have some merit, but we don't, so it doesn't.

Point is, they don't need a national ID to pin you to some cell phone records that place you at location X at time Y, to get your CC usage data, to find out pretty much anything they like, to connect that to a license plate, to snag toll and other photo records of the vehicle from various sources, et c., and the only reason there are any restrictions whatsoever on that ability isn't because we don't have a national ID, but because we're not yet living under a tyranny. Difficulty IDing people isn't the limiting factor.

The public-private hybrid ID we have now is terrible and also carries all the same risks under tyranny as a national ID, which is at least not-terrible.

It's not like having a national ID would mean all the spying-data companies collect on us would automatically be shared with the government—more than it already is, anyway. It'd be the same as now, except with fewer ID-related problems for people.

If you want anyone to find your project, you're gonna need to at least mirror on GH regardless.

This is a difference in attitude between Americans and French when describing their countries: the French tend to regard overseas territories as more vitally part of their country than Americans do. Not sure why, possibly it was a deliberately-cultivated attitude by the government at some point, or maybe the difference arose organically. Meanwhile I think a lot of Americans kinda-unconsiously barely even consider Hawaii and Alaska really parts of America, let alone the numerous non-state territories.

Actually, now that I think about it, the sense of "Metropolitan France" is very similar to the term "the continental United States"

Toys—even Lego—are damn near free if you aren't picky and will accept whatever you can find used. Often they're literally free. Kids often outgrow toys before they're worn out or broken, and for some reason people hate giving used toys as gifts so there are just tons and tons of them always being dumped on the used market, with relatively little demand.

You could set out with a $20 bill and outfit a 6-year-old with a totally adequate set of toys, from scratch, by just walking a neighborhood on a yard sale day.

I don't get it either. Every single non-Ikea flat-pack thing I've assembled has had much worse instructions than Ikea. Plus usually been more expensive and lower quality than the Ikea equivalent.

An aid for anyone else who found the usage "knowledges" unfamiliar and distracting:

Knowl"edge (?), n.

2. That which is or may be known; the object of an act of knowing; a cognition; -- chiefly used in the plural.

There is a great difference in the delivery of the mathematics, which are the most abstracted of knowledges. Bacon.

Knowledges is a term in frequent use by Bacon, and, though now obsolete, should be revived, as without it we are compelled to borrow "cognitions" to express its import. Sir W. Hamilton.

To use a word of Bacon's, now unfortunately obsolete, we must determine the relative value of knowledges. H. Spencer.

- Webster's 1913

I figured it was some probably-from-critical-theory-because-aren't-they-always liberal-artsism, but looks like it's just an unusual-bordering-on-archaic sense.

In fact, they (partly) ate passenger pigeons out of existence.

Mann's 1491 suggests this may be a myth, as passenger pigeon remains are nearly non-existent in native refuse piles, so they don't seem to have been a normal part of their diet (at least, before contact). Rather, he paints both their incredible abundance and subsequent demise as consequences of contact with Europe: the boom in the passenger pigeon population may have been a sign of an ecosystem experiencing a catastrophe, resulting from large areas of cultivated land falling out of use as entire cities were depopulated by disease, causing a temporary but enormous increase in easy, available calories for animals positioned to take advantage of it, and of course their decline and extinction is entirely a post-contact event.

[EDIT] I misread you as having written that the native people contributed to the demise of the pigeons, but I think the info's still broadly relevant so I'll let the post stand.

Lakka boots Linux on an RPi and loads a (DRM—not X or Wayland) GUI in under 5s. Off an SDCard, at that.

I wish I could figure out the secret handshake that gets you hired to one prominent, presumably high-paid, spitballin' and chattin' and "idea person" role after another, despite a track record of apparent mediocrity in actual results. Seems like it'd be really fun and—plainly—not very hard work.

Whereas I now struggle to find pictures I took 7 years ago.

The only reasonable solution today with the current volume of photos is to put them all in some service and let it use machine learning to auto-tag everything for you, and compile highlight reels, organize things by person/location/event, et c.

As with everything else, the only solution that doesn't eat tons of time (so, will actually be accessible to most people, who'll neglect hand-organizing thousands of photos) is turning out to be search, and letting AI find the important stuff.

I took it as:

Prove (?), v. t.

1. To try or to ascertain by an experiment, or by a test or standard; to test; as, to prove the strength of gunpowder or of ordnance; to prove the contents of a vessel by a standard measure.

Thou hast proved mine heart. Ps. xvii. 3.

(Webster's 1913)

Which makes sense to me. Try something you think might work, then test it—is just plain old experimental science.

The new ones are much clearer than they used to be in the 80s and 90s.

I'm convinced the old-style ones were the reason I buried the needle the one time I was given a cognitive test that specifically tested spatial reasoning. The old sets' instructions were basically 3d spot-the-difference puzzles, in which orientation might even change between states, so they were pretty much training for that kind of test.

The new ones have a little of that, but a lot more arrows pointing things out, little insets highlighting important parts, et c. Plus they put the pieces in numbered bags so you don't have them all out at once, for medium-sized or larger sets! Much, much easier than they used to be.

Flip side is the old ones used larger pieces, on average. The modern sets are all fiddly, tiny bricks, which does make them a little harder to assemble (and much harder—nearly impossible—to repair from memory if they're damaged during play)

Worst-case for both as far as the effect of seeing the image(s) per se is very similar, which is that maybe you have an image in your head you wish you could forget. OK, not ideal, but also not the end of the world, and sure, the two are similar in that regard.

The difference is that images of violence aren't as strongly associated with things like sharing of personal images that haunt a person later, with really disgusting and effective forms of bullying, or with efforts to get kids to do something harmful IRL. Could they be? Can I concoct such a scenario? Sure, but these other things are in-fact happening a lot (ask any teacher or other person who works with kids ages ~12 and up)

That's why specifically when it comes to Internet messaging services and kids, nudes are a bigger problem than images of violence. I agree with you more broadly, but the context is important here, and is why in this narrow case the two things are meaningfully different, and nudity is the bigger problem.

There is now a feature that scans every photo you receive. There previously was not something scanning every photo you receive.

1) Seen the automatic-text-recognition-on-images features in recent iOS? It's already scanning ~every photo you look at, and not just in iMessage. If you put an image in Photos, it's also doing some object recognition on it (which you can see if you search for e.g. "books" or "chairs" in Photos). Dunno if it does that elsewhere, but the text-recognition thing, yeah, that happens all over the OS in all kinds of apps. Maybe (probably) you can turn that off, but this feature folks are complaining about is opt-in so that shouldn't be relevant for this line of reasoning.

And furthermore:

Messages uses on-device machine learning to analyze image attachments and determine if a photo appears to contain nudity. The feature is designed so that Apple doesn’t get access to the photos.

2) If you don't like this because you don't trust this statement to be true, then I have some bad news for you about who writes the entire closed-source operating system that runs on iOS devices and are the only ones who can deploy any code they like to them, basically at any time.

Right—I'm for it if we had universal free national IDs and services to ensure everyone had one. It'd actually solve a ton of other problems, too, so yes, please, do that and then check IDs at the polls all you like.

But that's a topic the Democrats are very divided on, and the Republicans really don't want, so it's never gonna happen. The result is that I'm not against IDing voters in principle but am in practice, given the current political situation and lack of demonstrated urgency or need that might justify the down-sides of doing it absent universal national IDs.

Don't make me come over there again. I swear, I will turn this car around and no one's going to Disney World!

- The USA.

(I kid, I kid—I know we always just show up late then claim all the credit)

I was about to explain, but from my selfish POV it's actually better if you keep posting like this. So... carry on.

It's not obvious to me that a system that raises the experience for mean, or even the bottom end, of the distribution would be a good thing for me in many respects

Ah—I usually assume the Rawlsian "Veil of Ignorance" POV when it comes public policy issues, personally, as I think is fairly common. Sure, if that's your perspective, literally nothing matters except how a policy affects you, personally, right now, so my analysis may not hold—but that's not an especially useful perspective from which to consider public policy when discussing it with strangers, and I'm not really sure why you'd even engage on this in public if the only thing you care about is whether a policy is good for you, right this second (circumstances are subject to change, after all)

At least you're up-front about it, rather than hiding it. I don't mind that when it's made explicit—I just also, again, don't get why you'd engage, and wonder whether you might have guessed in advance the sort of more-typical POV I was taking, so really could have understood what I meant by "good effect" without my needing to explain it. What were you trying to accomplish here?

In part, I think it's one of the ways he mimics the form of books like Beowulf or Gilgamesh or other works of that sort—that kind of thing tends to be full of digressions and whole scenes that simply seem like mistakes—dragging down the "momentum", not "advancing the plot"—if you're going by modern very-focused standards of what constitutes acceptable plotting, which of course is the kind of thing most people are used to reading/watching.

Does that answer your question?

Ha! Yeah. At least you're consistent :-)

Lynch fills his works with characters and scenes that are—at best—plot-adjacent, whimsical/incongruous/uncanny, and full of often-unexplained and apparently-metaphysical mystery or magic. He's as likely to let mood or theme drive the content of and editorial-decision-to-include a scene or a shot or an entire character(!), as plot. It makes sense you'd dislike his stuff if you don't like the Bombadil section of LOTR.

(this is not intended as some kind of judgement, to be clear, I was just curious if works with similar qualities had the same effect for you, or it was something specific to that kind of element being in LOTR in particular, maybe because of the context or something)

I wrote a lot longer explanation but deleted it. Suffice it to say other systems are good enough that functionally no-one wishes they had the US system instead, and it'd sure be weird if every single other OECD state had been relying on price controls this long if they weren't having some beneficial effect.

My short-version argument would be—and I'm a little annoyed at having to explain this, because I've been explaining it to people on the Internet for 20 damn years, it's so not-hard to find this info that it's kinda difficult not to have been exposed to it, and it seems like it should be common knowledge at this point and like some folks are going way out of their way not to understand it—that the "good effect" is precisely that the US spends 50-100% more than any of these countries, per capita, and does not smoke the rest on practically every metric, instead doing a little better in some areas, a little worse in others, middle-of-the pack on others still. It sure as hell looks like we're paying a huge premium for similar outcomes, which also explains why there aren't a lot of people in other countries begging their governments to adopt a system like ours (a fact one has to explain when cherry-picking metrics to make the US look good—OK, so why aren't others rushing to copy us? At least some of them should be, if we actually do have an unambiguously better system).

The "good effect" is that other health care systems spend far less, and also don't bankrupt people over medical bills, while achieving roughly comparable results.

If I came to you and told you I had a process to produce a Tesla knock-off that produced a car a little better in some ways, a little worse in others, but pretty damn comparable, at 50-70% of what it costs Tesla to produce a car, and then showed you dozens of factories I'd already built that were demonstrably doing exactly that, you wouldn't ask me how I was defining "good effect" when I used that to describe the results of the One Weird Trick of my process. It's obvious.

Were you not aware of the vast differences in costs & accessibility between OECD healthcare systems? By which I mostly mean between the US and everyone else.

Notably: plot isn't the only factor at play in a novel (or film, et c.). At least in the good ones.

How do you feel about the works of David Lynch?

Not just Europe—price controls (de jure or de facto, the latter via e.g. establishing a monopsony) are, as best I can tell, the main unifying factor in healthcare systems in the entire OECD except the US. Those systems differ a lot, but at some point and on some level, they all fall back on price controls, apparently to good effect.

People also move a lot more than they used to. That could be part of it. Who gives a shit if anyone else likes the kitchen color scheme that you love, if you're going to be in the house 20+ years? If you're only going to be in it 3-5 years, though....

Yep. Currently reads like they're going to propose... something (marriage?) "in August ban on lawmaker stock trading". Problem is that phrases like "August ban" are common in headlines, but that's not what's intended here—it's not saying "the ban that happened/will-happen in August", as in "alleged mob boss nabbed in August sting operation", but describing when they'll propose a ban.

A fix could indeed involve commas:

House Democrats to propose, in August, ban on lawmaker stock trading

I think this is part of it. I don't think people (in real life, not in magazines) cared as much whether something "went with" the rest of the room. Like, I'm sure some people did, but it wasn't a normal thing for middle class folks to care much about, as far as trying to make their own house look that way.

There's, relatedly, probably some effect from all those home makeover & house-buying shows, which constantly push "any 'weird' color is bad, and any room without great color coordination is bad, and it's not OK not to mind it". There's a Mitchell and Webb sketch about this, in which two home-buyers on such a show are presented a bathroom with avocado fixtures, and the host berates them over multiple takes because their initial reaction isn't as negative as it ought to be. Fiction, but there's definitely a kind of same-ness to people's reactions to any but a few acceptable colors on those shows.