tinsmith

It's not just opinionated. The article is straight up gaslighting.

Historically speaking, tech is relatively unregulated and protocols are all over the place. I'd say it's a safe assumption.

In Jupiter, then.

My problem is time and being in the right headspace. Between family, work, and a plethora of other hobbies that get neglected, not to mention often crippling anxiety, it is astoundingly difficult for me to work up posts on my project blog simply because I am either too busy or not where I need to be mentally to write due to general and pervasive exhaustion. I have been trying to kickstart a space where I can talk about my projects and repairs/restorations for years, but never quite found the secret to balancing life and writing.

I have the Bangle.js V2 and can confirm, it is a slimmer and slicker overall design, feeling more like a Fitbit Versa. Honestly, it's been a boredom breaker since it's relatively easy to dump new code on to it. My only complaint is the vibrating motor is almost too weak for me to feel when sleep, and as such, is not a reliable silent alarm, so I swap back to my OG Pebble at night.

I did enjoy r/itsaunixsystem on Reddit for many years. A website that collects and maybe analyzes these scenes would be fun.

https://www.reddit.com/r/itsaunixsystem/

People with a lot of money can "fight," at least in terms of throwing everything medical science has to offer at it. I suspect that's where the narrative originated, then took on the mythos that it was somehow sheer will.

Meanwhile, the rest of us ride on pure luck as we watch cancer destroy our loved ones. They gave my dad a month with a glial blastoma. He lasted about 6, most of which the dad I knew was not present for. Tbfh, I feel like he would have rather gone quick, not enduring the twisted shit we watched him go through.

Anthropomorphizing nature is an easy trap to fall into largely because the electric hams in our skulls is programmed to reach conclusions as quickly as possible for the sake of evaluating our reality, and we tend to put a lot of trust in that. Applying human traits to a non-human entity is just one of the many shortcuts we take to reach said conclusions.

While what you quoted is not incorrect, and worth pointing out, the analogy stands. In AA, you only get the chip if you abstain from drinking. The chip (a little coin) is an all-or-nothing deal.

In AA, we do get people attending who just want to control their drinking. They're usually sent by the courts (in the US, at least) due to some misdemeanor they commited while drunk, as though those of us battling ourselves are supposed to teach some 20-something how to be responsible adult because their parents failed them. Sometimes one of those court-sent people finds out they have a real problem, and end up sticking around. However, for the most part, the rest are there for a few weeks because they have to be, we sign their slips, and never see them again. We don't give out chips for that.

The common thread between the two is calling consumerism an "experience." This isn't a theme park. The server, retail worker, or whomever is not an actor in a costume there for the amusement of the customer. They work for their employer, carrying duties that allow that employer's business to profit, and therefor, should be paid by the employer.

And yes, this is a distictly American issue, and needs to be abolished. In the US, I worked as a bartender for $2.65 an hour in 2005. Basically, my employer payed me nothing, since that was just covering taxes, and each customer that ordered a drink from me was my main source of income. It irks me to my core when people wave this off as some normalized "part of the experience" and not a problem of greed that requires correction.

They aren't, and I wish we'd stop regurgitating this idea because restaurants use it as a justification to get out of paying servers proper wages. The person at the checkout at my local grocer is just as much "part of the experience" when I buy groceries, but their employer pays for them to be there, as opposed to expecting me to do so. This gaslighting of consumerism as an experience is damaging, and allows the greedy to foist the cost of doing business onto the customer more and more.

I mean, humans do that. We are remarkably contradictory when expressing ourselves, generally speaking, often without realizing it because we'll change our thinking in the moment to fit the current narrative or circumstance. LLMs just put that on blast.

they felt ... threatened

I'm going to sit on that particular hill and see what happens. Even if DoNotPay's AI is not ready to do the job, the idea that AI could one day argue the law by focusing on logic and precedent instead of circumstance and interpretation is exceedingly threatening to a lawyer's career. No offense intended to the lawyers out there, of course. Were I in your shoes, I'd feel a bit fidgity over this, too.

Am I the only one who likes it better this way?

This is fun, really appreciate the share. My son is heading to Rome to study as he wraps up culinary school, and he loves food history. I'm always looking for things to learn about with him.

This is a remarkably good take that just didn't dawn on me until I read your comment. Even if ChatGPT had a lesser quality than the current iteration, the fact that they had a way for anyone to easily interact with it really was a homerun, snd can be for any software, really.

It should be pointed out that, for some of us, talking to someone and hoping for change is the only option. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't have that much PTO, and taking 3 weeks of unpaid leave would financially destroy me. Trust me, I wish it were different, and a lot of people in my position either have to suffer through the burnout, or often end up changing jobs to try to deal with it.

I'm in the process of starting a webspace where I can both blog and write short fiction. So many people have tried to push me toward Substack instead of building my own space, but like you, Substack just looks too ephemeral for my taste. It feels like the hot new platform that everyone talks about migrating to, might try it for a month or two, then goes back to whatever they were doing before. Maybe I am wrong?

This seems like a remarkable oversite on BofA's part. I'm with a comparitively tiny US credit union, and even their app demands a pin code to return to it if I switch to another app mid-session.

but I haven't opened a computer magazine and said...

I feel this. In my opinion, we have not had a computing magazine worth opening in two decades, at least in the US. I know we can find news and articles relevant to our interests with unparallelled ease on today's Internet, but a huge part of me misses going to a bookseller and picking up that month's selection of nerd rags.

I have always had trouble pinpointing exactly what it is I miss about the magazines of old. Sometimes I feel that it had more to do with how I fit into that world at the time, being a curious teen who loved tinkering with tech, and the future was wide open. Othertimes I think it had to do with the mags being my window to that world, since I had nobody to guide me.

I clicked because I thought it was Fortean Times. Oh well.

When you're actually from the US as a Millennial or Gen Z'er, it's not hard to see what happened. The previous two generations taught us nothing, but expected us to know everything they did, as though by virtue of being a living human this knowledge is just granted. Our parents never had the time to show us how to budget, care for a home, etc, so we had to learn from the Internet.

But why?

I posit that Boomers and Gen X had such an easy go of it, they assumed we would, too. Born to an economy that was thriving, they had to know relatively little themselves because there was always someone else who could do it. In short, that translates, over time, to less value placed on teaching the next generation to thrive and looking at things like school milages as "my tax dollars not benefiting me directly."

These previous generations also operate under the illusion that they somehow had it harder than we do now. This is perpetuated by the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" attitude that most of them seem to have adopted while having to ask for help operating a smart fridge or iPhone. It's really a failure of self-awareness, if we remove all the fictional swagger they've built their lives around, and it has left us a nation that is crumbling under its own ignorance and stupidity.

Now people my age (late 30's - early 40's) are living paycheck to paycheck, trying to figure out how we can afford to fix the problem so our children can do better than us, and we are utterly failing to find a solution because we are operating in a system that was designed to cater only to the selfishness of our parents and grandparents.

What you described should be the industry ideal. I point to my 2017 Kia Niro as a good example of this. For the most part, it offers physical buttons for all common and "while driving" actions, leaving the touch screen to be an effective passive display for navigation. In fact, this is largely why I purchased the vehicle after test driving a few others that had much bigger touch screens, but less physical buttons. The Niro felt the most balanced.

Oddly (perhaps not?), I use this same thought process when shopping for smartphones. One or two physical buttons is not enough, especially with screens being prone to the same failures they were 10 years ago.

There is something to be said for the recovery that comes with just experiencing a place in the world without any agenda or accountability beyond simply being a living being. I'm glad you got to experience that. i've achieved this maybe a handful of times in my life, and it seems significantly harder to do in the US than elsewhere.

"Evolved" is not the word I would use. As the Internet was already showing signs of being twisted by its own mythos in the 1990's, there was plenty of then-obvious opportunity that resulted in the type of profit-driven curation we see today. I remember the Internet then, but I feel a lot of people allow the lense of nostalgia to twist it into something far more wild and pure than it actually was.

There was a lot of revisionist history out there that painted Edison as this great inventor, when in fact, he was just a businessman who knew how to exploit for profit. I lived in the town where he grew up after his family moved from Ohio, and they still laud him here, with zero mention in any of the many museums of the individuals whose ideas he piggybacked, borrowed, and sometimes downright stole. It's almost fitting that Port Huron idolizes such an individual, since the town itself is swathed in a veneer of supposed boot-strap success stories, when, in fact, both politically and socially, it is remarkably backwards and ersatz. Edison sold candy to train passengers, and learned very early how to make a buck. He was a hack, otherwise, stumbling his way through other people's ideas while putting on a show of being some kind of marvel. That's it. That sums up the man's entire history.

In support of this, we can even see the rapid changes in structural demands over half a century in a culture like the US. Suburban sprawl eats up spaces with any viable flexibility in a matter of years, and things like shopping malls fade out of fashion just as quickly as they entered it. In a relatively short time, we are left with brick & concrete hellscapes that are largely being abandoned because developers find it easier (and probably cheaper) to work with fresh land. This Disposable Mentality gets us into obviously environmental and economic messes so often that I am still flabbergasted that the US at large has not adopted a more Reusable Mentality, and incorporated some long-term thinking into their suburban planning.

PoC, baby.

There's still quite a bit on shortwave. BBC World Service is pretty much everywhere, and Radio Habana, Radio Romania, and a slew of other services are still kicking. For SHTF purposes, a good shortwave receiver and a longwire will run you maybe $100 - $150 USD and can be had for less if you buy used.

Harder, but far from impossible. I work with the adult (26+) I/DD population in the US (individuals with developmental disabilities) and one of their biggest challenges is coping with and learning to buffer emotional reactions, while also being able to understand the emotional experiences of others. This often takes years of practice, and sometimes therapy for a neurotypical individual to master. And yet, I see progress regularly enough in the I/DD population that I often wonder what excuse the neurotypical population has when they collectively display a lack of emotional checks and balances, or empathy.

We're reactive, sure, but let's not throw that out there and use it to discount the fact that we can, without a doubt, learn to control those reactions. Social change often moves at a glacial pace because of this attitude, when the reality is that it up to us, right now, to break the cycle or change the pattern.