yeetaccount

You make HN interesting. Reminds me of slashdot 20 years ago.

Simpsons did it first. Homer had an illegal bar set up in the tree house and when it started burning he told the patrons “By leaving the premises you agree not to sue!”

IIRC, the famous "Good Friday" psilocybin experiment had some people from the control group believe they were not in the control group.

I can find a few people right now that believe that Lord of the Rings is a historical account of medieval Europe.

Part of it is due to monetary incentives of businesses that now own the media outlets. Part of it is due to what the general public has interest in and will pay for.

This should be an entire discussion thread. Even scrupulous journalistic outlets have to stay competitive on the business side. And people don’t want facts, they want a story; something to spawn feeling instead of thought.

Books sales are sales of anything with an ISBN. This includes adult colouring books, which I’ve heard is responsible for possibly all the sales increases in the past few years.

Well you don’t have to listen to me, the X maintainers have said Wayland is the way forward and they’ve stopped developing X as of several years ago. It’s silly this is still an issue.

The problem is that X was created over decades for very different eras of computers and it doesn’t really make sense to keep modifying it — there are design limitations to it, and the accumulated complexity has made it unmaintainable. X maintainers have abandoned it and told people to migrate to Wayland. Sometimes you just need a clean slate.

X is like trying to fly modern rockets with Apollo-era computers. The computers will work, until they don’t. In which case the only people able to fix them are retired and you have to salvage parts from aerospace museums. Over the years the cruft of replacement parts has accumulated and no one person can really understand the whole thing anymore, and entire sections are not understood and nobody remembers why they’re there or really what they do (but if you get too close to it the lights go off in certain important corner cases).

Wayland is the shiny new SpaceX module that brings a lot of improvements but needs to have its toilet fixed.

Yeah but watching Bezos turn into a household joke is worth it.

We’re seeing a comparable decline in birds that depend on them for food, so probably not.

That said, it’s fun to imagine that we just selected against insects that hang out by the highway.

If you can find a link to that Captain Planet story I’d like to read it. It sounds totally plausible.

I once donated a few Bitcoin to a free software project. At the time 1BTC cost about one tank of gas. I sold the remainder when I doubled my investment and thought I walked away lucky. Now 1BTC costs more than the car I’m putting the gas in. Oh well.

x-raying people

mmWave or X-ray?

If the police unions don’t like your laws they don’t enforce them. If they really don’t like you, they don’t show up at your house when there’s an intruder. If they really really don’t like you, they are the intruder.

They let the homeopathy shit fly, not sure why they’d get involved in this. Nuke it all from orbit IMHO.

For someone to find the wiki, read it and then attempt to solve their problem in a rudimentary fashion gets you towards the tail end of the bell curve. They might even follow up with you if you have questions.

All this just makes it clear to me that we need a time standard which addresses all the problems and of ISO8601. It’ll be painful until it’s universally adopted, but once it is we’ll be in timekeeping heaven.

It doesn’t take long to get used to the basic format. 20211024T090755, etc.

More effort was put into expressing meaning when people weren’t constantly stimulated. There’s still meaning today, but I can’t help but feel it’s shallow and unappreciated by reader and writer alike.

I don’t really understand the whole trans thing and why it’s suddenly become the job of the whole world to reinforce someone’s self conception. Lots of people have body dysmorphia and think they are morbidly obese. Some will even go so far as to buy XL clothing and larger toilets because they think they need them. But they aren’t obese, and nobody is expected to treat them like that.

For the sake of one group, we’re expected to accept an ideology and we’re now supposed to use language to fit within the boundaries of this ideology. Anyone who expresses skepticism can expect to be fired, harassed or simply brow beaten into lip service on the premise that being skeptical is hateful and bigoted. This isn’t how you gain acceptance, it’s merely compliance. It creates a culture of lip service, resentment and subversion.

I don’t hate the trans crowd. I simply think the notion of gender is baseless and the tactics many of their activists use are misguided and obnoxious.

Same reason we don’t have stone masons in every town nowadays. Too much time, too much material, not enough customer volume. Can’t operate with today’s (lack of) disposable income and material availability being diluted by an increasing population.

The standard of living has gone up IMHO bc of increased efficiency in the face of dwindling resources. We don’t all live in stone mansions with servants, but a nice apartment built to code as cheaply as possible with electricity, AC and a roomba is by some measures a better life than anyone on the planet had 100 years ago. As a builder, you make more money too.

Or investors are trying to mitigate potential damage to share prices if Tesla doesn’t improve their image.

Reminds me of Philip K Dick being told by a pink beam of light that his son was seriously ill and needed to go to the hospital right away. In one version of the story I heard, he told the doctor exactly what was wrong with him when there was realistically no way he could have known.