spokaneplumb

And accept that there’s a good chance this will accomplish nothing but getting you on their naysayers list.

People can continue behavior where all they really need to do is stop actively harming themselves for no gain at all for years. It’s bizarre to watch from the outside. In the best cases they haven’t roped anyone else into their delusion-bubble.

People breaking the first rule wasn’t enough for me to crack into the scene. The weird two-paid-services thing required to use it effectively—a search service of some kind, and your actual content provider—and the jankiness of the software and sites involved were enough to get me to give up, after spending some money but making no meaningful progress toward pirating anything.

I started my piracy journey on Napster. I’ve done all the other biggies. I’ve done off-the-beaten-path stuff like IRC piracy channels. Private trackers. I have a soft spot for Windowmaker and was dumb enough to run Gentoo so long that I got kinda good at the “scary” deep parts of Linux sysadmin. I can deal with fiddliness and allegedly-ugly UI.

Usenet piracy defeated me.

The Trump campaign could only deploy the "Trump is for you, Kamala is for they/them" slogan because Kamala herself, in 2020, felt the need to conform to then-prevailing winds and declare that she would fund gender-change surgeries for prisoners from taxpayers money.

She was asked a question about it once by Fox, because Trump had brought it up, and answered that yes, she would follow the law and not deny medically necessary gender affirming care, and noted that the Trump administration had also followed the law in the same way. It was a response to an unfounded fact-free attack, prompted by a question from an unfriendly network. She didn’t bring it up again.

You have not found an example of a leftist politician chasing barely-existing things in this example—the opposite, in fact, she was playing defense to right wingers trying to make something out of nothing at all.

Do prominent democrats do this, on some topics? Probably! But they don’t have a media machine and strategy structured around that as a core activity.

[edit] I mean, they do this because it works, of course. Look at the thread on PG’s piece, and this one. It’s clearly working to get people riled up and shift the zeitgeist, reality be damned. “Welfare queens”, that was a fun one, and so successful that I bet 35+% of Americans who’ve heard the term still think it was an actual problem. Some fizzle (“they’re eating the pets!”) but they’re not punished for those instances, so why not endlessly throw out BS and see what sticks? Some of it does, and then we’re all talking about a bunch of basically-fake grievances instead of anything that matters, and they may even use the BS to advance positions that do affect things that matter. It’s so very tedious to deal with.

I think every time I’ve been (or even been moving toward) excellent at something, it’s because I found very little or none of it boring. Even very-focused drilling and such, or studying “boring” material (it wasn’t, to me—I didn’t have to deal with boredom to progress!)

Office work and dealing with bureaucracy stands out as something that lots of people find themselves doing and almost all of them find unpleasant, including experiencing tons of it as very boring.

No personalized feed driven by anything other than user selections. User identities downplayed. Profiles, but barely. Can’t “follow” people.

If HN is social media, the term’s being used so broadly we’ll need something other term to refer to the kind of thing that Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et c, are.

Those two things already barely exist. I’m skeptical it’s possible, in a nation of hundreds of millions, to get them much closer to not existing than they already are.

So if those are the parts really bothering people… it sure seems like a case of looking for something to be upset about, in which case attempting to address their grievances won’t help. Or, a case of being told by people who are exaggerating the situation that these are actually really big deals, then not bothering to check whether that’s true. And in that second scenario, I don’t think making reality even closer to what they prefer than it already is will convince them of anything, so again, why bother to try to address their concerns?

Their perception is out of phase with what’s actually going on, that needs to be fixed before any useful discussion about some nugget of a point they may hypothetically have or helpful nuance their perspective might provide can meaningfully be engaged with.

Is there some kind of reader-mode filtering site one can put a URL in to get a version that undoes this extra effort to remove capital letters? From what I’ve gotten of this piece I think it’s up my alley, but reading it is unpleasant.

[edit] incidentally, if this fad doesn’t burn out soon we’re going to need a setting to fix it under the heading of accessibility. I expect there are several categories of people for whom this is even more annoying than for most of us, and who can’t just get over it or re-train their brain to do better without the very-useful cues provided by capital letters, notably dyslexics.

You may enjoy “Dabblers and Blowhards” from IdleWords, if you’re not already familiar with it.

https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

Reading that helped me come to terms with how most of the time when I read PG essays I was a lot less impressed than everyone else seemed to be, and often (any time the topic wasn’t narrowly tech or maaaybe business) his writing struck me as actually bad—not well-reasoned, not convincing, and giving an impression of his being poorly-informed.

When I experience an author everyone else is praising that way, I wonder if I’m the moron. But, sometimes, maybe I’m not…

Undemocratically, performatively, anointing behind closed doors a weak but social justice signaling candidate to run on the democratic ticket

You’re just stringing together bingo-card words. I don’t think this is going to be a productive exchange, so I’ll leave things where they stand.

Ironically the Wokeness article does what most people accuse "wokeness" of doing, predetermining its conclusion, and then shoehorning in a bunch of loosely connected facts and phenomena to support that assertion.

This basic approach underpins the pop-business and some of the pop-science industry. Plus much of self-help. And a good chunk of popular political books, of course.

It’s a winning approach, lots of folks read that kind of thing and nod along, are glad they paid money for it, and recommend that others do the same.

Even the “good” books in those genres are often guilty of it :-/

Motivated reasoning, cheap rhetorical tricks, and half-fake but digestible and uncomplicated history/facts are how you “win” the war of ideas.

This one’s footnote #2 addresses PG’s definition of “woke”, which I agree is useless (I’d go further: that kind’s so inconsequential that it’s nonsense to bring it up unless you’re using those complaints to attack other actions that do maybe have some justification, using the definition as cover to retreat to if called out; if that’s actually the only part you’re complaining about, just don’t write the piece, everyone already dislikes that kind for the same reasons you do)

Worse, it’s an attempt to get us to agree that humans only do things for profit, in order to advance an ideology and make our thought more malleable when an author turns around and starts writing about public policy and ethics applied to things that actually are about profit.

At least that’s what is going on when the schools of “thought” this kind of stuff comes from attempt it. This particular poster might not be. But usually it’s a cheap rhetorical trick, coming from folks who present themselves as simply following logic. Gross.

Thanks to you and your sibling poster, helpful info!

Two bananas to a potato (I assume we’re talking something like a russet, not a little red potato?) sounds generous to the potato, if we’re talking volume equivalence.

A potato’s a meal. A banana’s a lightish snack.

Restricting who can own what, however… that’s long been fair game.

In my dream world we’d get something like the rules we had, until fairly recently, restricting max broadcast media audience control in a given market for a single owner, but for Web platforms. Don’t like being limited to five million users or whatever? Then use a standard that puts control over curation and presentation in the hands of the user. Want to control all that, like all these awful platforms do? Then live with the limit.

The copy-the-.git-dir trick works for worse issues than can be solved with a single reset --hard. Damn near anything, really, as long as you haven't touched any remotes. It also works if you don't remember/understand how you broke it, where it's broken, or which state you need to try to reset to.

The broader question of why companies are able to keep pushing us ever closer to the maximum we’d conceivably be willing to pay for a given good, is probably best answered with “we stopped trust-busting a few decades ago, so competition sucks and keeps getting worse”.

Good lord. He put a bunch of things in that that he'd use in Twin Peaks: The Return. Wild.

I'm about 95% sure that if I ask my two school-age daughters if it's weird to address girls and women as "bro" or "bruh" in informal circumstances, they'll say no. Since I hear them do it with some regularity.

I've been using Git for almost 15 years, and have twice built programs/products that use Git internally to achieve certain results (that is, the program/product itself uses Git for things, not just using Git to manage the source code for the program/product) and... sometimes before doing something a little gnarly in Git I'll still just do "cp -R .git ../git-backup" or something like that, so I can replace my entire .git dir with an older copy if I screw it up too bad. It's a ton faster than figuring out the right way to un-fuck any particular operation or set of operations.

Is boarding at Moynihan what another poster is alluding to with the possibility of avoiding the choke-point boarding by simply not using the main waiting area? Or is that considered a separate stop, possibly requiring a different ticket (and, worse still, maybe being bypassed by certain trains)?

I have minimal familiarity with NY and none with Penn, but will be Amtraking in and out in a couple weeks.

Some of the people who returned for it died not long after it wrapped. The "Log Lady" might have died before it wrapped, even, can't recall. Miguel Ferrer wasn't around much longer. Even with Lynch living a good while past it, it'd have been far more limited production if it'd started even a couple years after it did. They already had to do without Bowie and a few others that it seems Lynch might have liked to use (given what he did with the season), like Frank Silva (BOB) of course, and notably Don Davis (Major Garland Briggs).

James-hate is common even among the more devoted fans of the show, I think.

https://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/why-we-hate-james-hurl...

I think about the "Watching Twin Peaks" comic around 2/3 down that page pretty much every time he's on screen. "Ugh yes please go," indeed.

Oddly, I liked him in The Return.

It's OK to just not care for things. Sometimes those things will be good. It's still OK to not care for them.

It's also OK to like bad things. I like lots of bad things.

I appreciated the change to make Chani fill a role like Sherif Ali in the film Lawrence Of Arabia (the book Seven Pillars of Wisdom, if not the film, is plainly a huge influence on Herbert's Dune, and it's probably impossible for a director to film so much as a scene set in the desert without thinking of Lean's film).

So much of Dune takes place inside people's heads that it's basically unfilmable if you don't make some changes. Plus, even with five hours of film, you're going to be cutting whole scenes from the book whether you want to or not. Lynch's solution was to make it a more straightforward hero's journey—and given the length of his film, and no expectation of sequels, I can't really blame him. Villeneuve had more space and so could tell a darker and more foreboding story, closer to the original, but still needed to externalize some of that internal struggle and foreshadowing, for which he used, especially, Chani.

[EDIT] Oh and as for this:

I know its nerdy but I absolutely hate when movies of classic books think the story needs to be changed

Every now and then such a deviation ends up being excellent as its own way, while still benefitting from the connection to the original and being better as an "adaptation" than an independent property. Verhoeven's Starship Troopers would be one of the more extreme examples of this kind of outcome. A gentler one might be Kubrick's The Shining.

Last few episodes are great again, and then we got Fire Walk With Me which is awesome. Also check out the feature-length The Missing Pieces composed of scenes cut from Fire Walk, if you haven't.

Frankly I find even the "bad" stretch of S2 better than more than half of allegedly-good TV, anyway.

My biggest problem is I'll finally get a chance to sink enough hours in to start something AAA, do maybe 4-10 hours over two or three days, and then have life get in the way and not touch it for a month or more... and completely forget how to play and WTF I was doing.

Some of my favorite UX features in newer games are automatically and contextually reminding you how the controls work when you pick it back up after a while, and quick story recaps or quest reminders on loading screens. I like to label those games "parent-friendly".

I kinda think that way when buying. The Nintendo console is the Nintendo console. If you want what they do, you're buying it. The other two are where the competition is and where there's a decision of which one, not buy this single product or don't. They're much closer to being interchangeable than the Switch is with either of them.

Not gonna happen.

I’ve had insight into a bunch of businesses in multiple industries putting stupid money into trying to find a use for this, caught up in the hype and worried about falling behind. While also being sold AI features by every vendor, who’re all doing the exact same thing.

Every single one is floundering and very unlikely to think this was a good use of resources a couple years from now.

LLMs and associated tech are here to stay, just like search algorithms and autocomplete and machine translation programs, and the clone tool. The hype will fade, though. They’re neat tools but, no, turns out we’re not on the verge of inventing Skynet, we just fooled people into thinking we were because a prominent hype-man/grifter was saying so as a sales tactic (Altman) and because the output is human language instead of numbers or whatever.

The government’s banned owning media with too much reach before, placing limits on audience size per owner.

We no longer know how to actually govern the country, but it used to be entirely possible.