lgrialn

Overall, I prefer my old thinkpad to my old latitude. Typing on it right now. A proper keyboard.

I’ve been having better results with searx than ddg for the past month or two. Especially because ddg seemed to have forgotten what to do with quoted text.

Hurray!

My wish for Ocaml is that it could somehow be popular enough to have more… casual users, let’s say. I enjoy playing with it more than any other language I’ve run into, but everyone else falls so deeply into it that I don’t generally follow their discussions very well. (Maybe I’ll fall in deep myself in time, but it remains to be seen.)

Todd Weaver is such a con artist.

Thank you for this. I’d never looked into this far enough to learn about organizations working to make a difference here.

You guys are probably aware that what you end up with is a safe space for nazis.

I know sometimes on Reddit I would reply to people with something very short when all they’d been getting were lots of downvotes, or even some upvotes, but I felt they needed some support through actual human communication instead of just the blank emptiness of votes, and yet I didn’t have anything detailed to say.

I’m not any kind of downvoter because it’ll take me a decade to have enough internet points to be permitted to contribute in this way.

I like how they get halfway through the article before deciding it could also be a raven. And talk like it would just not be possible to distinguish one from the other.

When I go to youtube, I'm looking for something.

But I will see the front page of crap in my peripheral vision and wonder about the millions of people who click on that garbage. Sometimes I'll even look at the names for a second and think how it's the same few names always, and how crazy that they somehow get all the attention in the world for some nonsense.

For that matter, now I see people use the word "influencer" as if it sounds perfectly respectable to them, and it shocks me every time.

The evil corporation writes the law "requiring" it to behave evilly, and their pet legislature passes it.

It's "drivel". But you're totally right.

What I miss most of all from the Good Old Days was getting as many hits back as I could read.

Rather than being told "No, there are only eight pages of results on anything in the goddamned world. Really. Would I lie to you?"

What I had read was that Cosmo used Mediatek, who was hostile to openness.

This is so fawning and… something like name-dropping.

I had an upbringing where I was very much judged. And even in adulthood, my experience is that I like myself fairly well, but I am well aware that other people do not normally take to me, are not capable of grasping what I’m about or seeing any value in it, etc.

Yes, a realization I came to awfully belatedly. As a kid, all those speeches and essays where I struggled anxiously with topics I didn’t know much about or care much about, and bullshitting is not one my strengths or preferences. Decades later, I’m rather more aware and more opinionated, but my days of addressing groups of people seem to be long over.

It’s so clickbaity I can’t even click on it.

I fully expected there would be a fair amount of discussion of RSI here.

This brought to mind something from Bertrand Russell’s Nobel lecture (all of which is interesting, btw)

"I used, when I was younger, to take my holidays walking. I would cover twenty-five miles a day, and when the evening came I had no need of anything to keep me from boredom, since the delight of sitting amply sufficed. But modern life cannot be conducted on these physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is sedentary, and most manual work exercises only a few specialized muscles. When crowds assemble in Trafalgar Square to cheer to the echo an announcement that the government has decided to have them killed, they would not do so if they had all walked twenty-five miles that day."

The people who buy something are the ones who pay the taxes on it?? Gosh.

I’m surprised no one has been talking about the story itself.

I think I was first exposed to it in Ray Bradbury Theater form, and it’s very much stuck with me, the idea that we in principle could have a better world if we had more hopeful messages and weren’t fed what to think and what to allow and what to feel powerless against by the powerful.

(Although of course my interest is in honest hopeful communication and not fabricated "evidence".)