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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Being combatitive with them, deserved or not, will result in them being combatitive right back. Being gracious when they admit they aren’t on the right track might mean they’ll be more open to listening next time around. And, more importantly, it might mean being able to solve this current issue.

    You’re right that it’s bigger than the next 4 years. But it’s bigger than the GOP, too. It’s the latest iteration of a conflict that’s been going on probably since before recorded history: some people want to control and rule everyone else, some are OK with it (or even support it), some want to prevent those people from gaining control and seek that power to keep it out of their hands (and in many cases end up becoming what they wanted to avoid), and others just want to be left alone to do their own thing (which might not hurt anyone or might make life worse for anyone around them). I don’t see any end to this struggle, the only thing that changes is who has power right now and how hot is the conflict.







  • We don’t absorb everything completely, so some passes through unabsorbed. Some are passed via bile or mucous production, like manganese, copper, and zinc. Others are passed via urine. Some are passed via sweat. Selenium, when experiencing selenium toxicity, will even pass through your breath.

    Other than the last one, most of those eventually end up going down the drain, either in the toilet, down the shower drain, or when we do our laundry. Though some portion ends up as dust.

    And to be thorough, there’s also bleeding as a pathway to losing nutrients, as well as injuries (or surgeries) involving losing flesh, tears, spit/boogers, hair loss, lactation, finger nail and skin loss, reproductive fluids, blistering, and mensturation. And corpse disposal, though the amount of nutrients we shed throughout our lives dwarfs what’s left at the end.

    I think each one of those are ones that, due to our way of life and how it’s changed since our hunter gatherer days, less of it ends up back in the nutrient cycle.

    But I was mistaken to put the emphasis on shit and it was an interesting dive to understand that better. Thanks for challenging that :)


  • I believe there were also files like “yoursong.mp3 .exe” (not sure how this will render, but lots of spaces before the .exe so it would be hidden by the UI even if extensions weren’t hidden).

    Custom icons didn’t help either, since they could just use the default icon for the spoofed file type. Though using a different program that changed the icon would negate that and make any of them obvious.

    Also helps to use a method other than double clicking the file to open it, like drag and drop. Which was my usual flow with mp3s anyways because I generally added them to my massive playlist and double clicking risked replacing my playlist (that might have not been saved in forever) with a playlist with just that single song.

    I liked it when winamp added the media library. Took me forever to rate my songs, but eventually my “new song flow” was move the new album folder to the artist’s folder in my music folder then tell winamp to rescan for new files, and then import my 3+ star or unrated songs as my playlist, played on shuffle. And occasionally grab a new format plugin if the album was encoded as something new and rescan until the new songs show up. Then give any noise or gag tracks 1 or 2 stars so they don’t make it to my main list after the first listen.


  • Even if the soil is preserved, we’ve been mining the micronutrients from it and generally only replacing the 3 main macros for centuries. It’s one of the reasons why mass produced produce doesn’t taste as good as home grown or wild food. Nutritional value keeps going down because each time food is harvested and shipped away to be consumed and then shat out into a septic tank or waste processing facility, it doesn’t end up back in the soil as a part of nutrient cycles like it did when everything was wilder. Similar story for meat eating nutrients in a pasture.

    Insects did contribute to the cycle, since they still shit and die everywhere, but their numbers are dropping rapidly, too.

    At some point, I think we’re going to have to mine the sea floor for nutrients and ship that to farms for any food to be more nutritious than junk food. Salmon farms set up in ways that block wild salmon from making it back inland doesn’t help balance out all of the nutrients that get washed out to sea all the time, too.

    It’s like humanity is specifically trying to speedrun extiction by ignoring and taking for granted how things work that we depend on.


  • Not to mention that even when some components do shrink, it’s not uniform for all components on the chip, so they can’t just do 1:1 layout shrinks like in the past, but pretty much need to start the physical design portion all over with a new layout and timings (which then cascade out into many other required changes).

    Porting to a new process node (even at the same foundry company) isn’t quite as much work as a new project, but it’s close.

    Same thing applies to changing to a new foundry company, for all of those wondering why chip designers don’t just switch some production from TSMC to Samsung or Intel since TSMC’s production is sold out. It’s almost as much work as just making a new chip, plus performance and efficiency would be very different depending in where the chip was made.


  • You’ve never been tempted to get the most extreme version of something when you only need a simple one when the inertia to get either was similar? Or ended up with a tool far more powerful than you needed because you weren’t sure about the difference when you first got it and by the time you realized, you were already used to the advanced tool and just kept using it?

    Plus, I’ve found the free calculator apps to be a bit disappointing when I’ve tried them, though I haven’t looked in a while.






  • Yeah I liked the idea of Uber at first because taxis have been shitty for a long time and Uber was shaking up that industry.

    But then I learned that Uber wasn’t making money and immediately realized that they were just looking better than taxis for as long as they needed to to drive them out of business so they can be even worse, while providing even less than taxis companies do. At least taxi companies have a relationship with their drivers while Uber was just a platform for connecting anonymous riders with almost as anonymous drivers and handling the financial aspect of it (so that they control it all as middlemen with control of the wallet).

    So now I just use taxi services when I need a ride (while cursing the state of mass transit in North America and GM plus corrupt politicians for their role in making this like this).

    Similar story with hotels/airbnb, though they’ve made it even worse because they are affecting the housing market itself rather than just the luxury service of staying somewhere while away from home.


  • Or even from the same post. I’d frequently see replies that were so obviously out of context and would usually find the source when just doing a text search on part of that comment. Some bots were sophisticated enough to adjust the wording a bit (those might have been using earlier LLMs that weren’t very successful at conversations but could handle a bit of editing).




  • I wouldn’t call it overclocking so much as changing the way you think, and making it easier to separate thought from emotion. Or at least that was an observation I made about what was different. I could think about things that were normally very emotionally charged without those same emotions getting in the way, kinda like being able to skip the stages of grief when thinking about things many people are in denial about without even thinking about it.

    I also believe that it reduces the barrier between the conscious and subconscious, allowing more things the subconscious “figured out” to bubble up to conscious thought. “Figured out” in quotes because while the subconscious is powerful, it is not infallible. There might also be a sense of connection between the “a-ha!” feeling of figuring out something profound and random thoughts going through your conscious mind, making normal or dumb shit seem important and groundbreaking in the moment.