AequitasOmnibus

From the discussions I've seen about theanine, the real benefit supposedly came when it was taken alongside caffeine. The thinking being that theanine moderated some of the jittery effects of caffeine, allowing the user to take higher doses of caffeine, which itself has some benefit on task concentration and focus.

I wish the author had spent time addressing that theory specifically.

Active Postbox user here. If I'm being honest, it's mainly a nice skin over Thunderbird, and inertia kept me on it all these years. With the wind down, I'll likely switch over to Thunderbird full time. I wonder how many other current users will do the same.

That sounds a lot like all the homeowners in California that have sold their significantly overvalued homes for 7 figures to move to states where real estate is a fraction of the cost. Generally it’s considered to be a factor in home price inflation in those cheaper states.

While not mentioned in the article, it’s worth mentioning that this also coincided with T-Mobile’s acquisition of Sprint. Specifically, T-Mobile made assurances that the acquisition would lower prices. Instead, within a couple years they exercised their newfound market power to increase prices a fair amount. The merger should have never been authorized.

I've wanted to love MARP for years but the documentation is so limited (and tutorials so sparse) that building a presentation with any complexity beyond the basics is almost impossible unless you have a solid understanding of CSS and YAML front matter.

It's a shame, because I think the idea of MARP is revolutionary, but in practice PowerPoint (or even free alternatives like Google Slides) is easier to use.

> a protest against the ubiquity and inhumanness of digital photography

A protest to the tune of approximately $1 per photo. I love my 35mm SLR but shooting on it is extremely cost prohibitive. Digital photography doesn’t have to be inhumane, it’s more about the user than the technology.

Nationalized healthcare doesn’t stop at a pharmaceutical manufacturer’s borders. You think NHS or any other country with socialized medicine pays what the US does? With socialized healthcare the pharmaceutical companies pay what the nation dictates or it doesn’t do business with that nation. I highly doubt Novo Nordisk would write off the US if it went to Medicare for all.

Incidentally I’ve written about this before [^1].

Basically, the sitting president appoints circuit judges to a lifetime position. The judicial candidates are selected by senators from whichever state the judge is to be appointed.

Generally, a conservative president will only nominate conservative judges. The candidates will generally be even more conservative if the senators who nominated the candidates are also conservative.

Over time, court watchers can conclude how ideologically predisposed a judge is based on their opinions. Usually, judges appointed by conservative presidents tend to rule as conservatives (that is, side with Republican positions), and vice versa with judges appointed by democrats. This trend is so consistent that you can often predict the outcome of a case from the composition of judges hearing the case.

The Fifth Circuit is dominated by republican senators and has recently seen a lot of appointments filled by Donald Trump. As a result, the Fifth Circuit overwhelmingly rules more conservatively than its sister circuits.

In this case, the fifth circuit panel ruled against the EPA in favor of commercial plastic producers. This is in line with Republican goals to erode the power of administrative agencies. Nobody is surprised by this because the Fifth Circuit operates in service of the Republican Party. As we say, you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25473858

It warms my heart to see people still taking about the X201’s faulty WiFi switch. I loved that laptop but ended up mothballing it over the switch. It remains a perfect example of how cheaping out on an extremely minor component (a plastic slide-switch) can sabotage an otherwise fantastic product.

Copyright was never conceived to apply to technology like this and the onslaught of copyright suits (like the NYT one) underscore its fundamental rent-seeking nature. No doubt these latest changes to GPT-4 are in response to the suits they’re presently fighting. However these cases are ultimately resolved, the end-user will be the biggest loser.

In one fell swoop, Nate tries to redefine political alignments in order to artificially distance himself from a concept he personally dislikes (“wokeness”).

His statistical analysis is a fun way to follow political horse racing (even if his models aren’t perfect) but this post is the chef’s kiss of ham-fisted amateur political science. Appreciate the earnestness, but can’t agree with basically any of his unsourced “theory.”

Obesity is curable. Diabetes is not.

So… which part of an anti-vax, anti-abortion access, climate denier is the rational part?

People are scared of change. Particularly where those changes require mass acceptance of uncomfortable truths.

Intellectually it’s obvious that society has to come to a reckoning over our current way of life if we’re going to get a handle on existential threats like climate change and endemic disease.

Emotionally it’s appealing to hear someone say that those hard truths don’t actually exist, and even if they do exist they don’t matter.

Societies are reactionary by nature. Until avoidance hurts more than denial we’ll opt for the latter every time. Argentina is by no means the first place where voters picked the guy peddling emotional comfort over the other candidates. The US may very well head in the same navel-gazing direction soon.

> The cable industry did the exact same thing.

Kinda but not really. The cable providers were and continue to be hamstrung by the networks who force the cable providers to buy channel packages. Cable never had the leverage to, say, tell Disney that they only want to offer ESPN but not the 10 other Disney branded networks being offered. It was often all or nothing.

This is a legitimate use of a DMCA takedown. The author of the obituary (presumably the decedent's family or friends) owns the obit and therefore owns the copyright to it. Whether Youtube would honor that type of takedown is a different question, but it's as legitimate as any other copyright takedown and not subject to any fair use.

A better approach, in my opinion, would be for websites like legacy.com, where the obit author originally posted, to seek authorization to pursue DMCA takedown requests on these obit pirate videos through a clickwrap agreement when the author makes the initial post. That way, there's value-add for the original obit-posting website, and it adds legitimacy/weight to the DMCA takedown requests because YT can centralize the DMCA takedown processing from fewer sources.

The United States can’t even carry out basic governmental functions. The House of Representatives is without a speaker going on a month now, and each election cycle is degrading to the point that it may stop functioning properly.

We are unfortunately well beyond the point of expecting the legislature to legislate, let alone pass robust beneficial laws.

> Speaking at Unreal Fest 2023, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said Unreal Engine would become “a licensable piece of software like Maya or Photoshop” with a subscription-based pricing model.

SAAS is rent-seeking at its worst. It’s predatory, anti-consumer and downright annoying. I hope this backfires on Epic.

Or put differently, 8-10 thousand years ago, the number of men reproducing dropped significantly. That makes sense to me given that this is the period in human history where society begins to form into agrarian communities [1]. The beginnings of social stratification would likely impact reproductive trends.

Saying that the development of society caused more sexual competition among men isn’t crazy. This study basically uses Y-chromosomal tracing to support that point.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_prehistory#cite_no...

Just wanted to say that Croc is one of the most reliable and straightforward file transfer tools I’ve ever used. It worked so well that I used it for Android (via Termux) to Windows transfers regularly. I only wish there was a way to use it on iOS but I imagine that’s challenging.

As someone who writes for a living, I often say that there are two components to being a passable writer: a technical understanding of syntax, and exposure to the written word.

Syntax can be taught. When I was in school, I was taught sentence diagramming [1]. Learning to diagram sentences is akin to learning how to compute mathematical equations. At some point, teachers stopped teaching sentence diagramming (I suspect because it was too onerous on English teachers to effectively teach, and because it was too technically difficult for the lower end of students to learn). My wife, for example, who is vastly smarter than me, was never taught diagramming. Consequently her knowledge of English syntax is much worse than mine.

Exposure can’t be taught. You have to read and continue reading. The more someone reads, the broader their exposure. Reading is the best way to increase your vocabulary and learn about different use cases for words. The best writers are avid readers.[2]

If we want to create a generation of better writers we should restructure our English classes. More sentence diagramming and more assigned reading. My guess is there isn’t really an appetite to make English more rigorous. Unlike math, where there are different levels of math offered in school, English is pretty much one-size-fits-all until college.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_diagram

[2]: I’m not suggesting that I’m among the best writers, and I disclaim any errors on this social media post. Even people paid to write can and do make dumb mistakes. That’s why God created editors.

10 years on, Snowden remains arguably the most important whistleblower in the US after Daniel Ellsberg. The fact that the government pursued Snowden and effectively drove him into exile in an unfriendly country shows how serious the revelations were, and exposes the dangers of an unchecked government.

I don't think it's hyperbole to say that Snowden single-handedly changed public perception against the NSA and the domestic branch of the war on terror. And yet, what shocks me to this day is how feckless the Congressional and Administrative responses were to public outcry. The government bet on the scandal blowing over, and for the most part it was right. Snowden's whistleblowing should have led to widespread changes in the law and in agency policies - and in a healthy democratic society that would have been the result. Instead, he'll never be able to return to the US because DOJ has made him tantamount to Public Enemy No. 1.

I lived in LA for almost a decade (leaving in 2020) and, despite hearing these horror stories, never once had that experience. And I rode the light rail at least 3-4 days/week. Instead what I saw was a largely unused public transit system that passed by hundreds of thousands of cars sitting in traffic on the 10 and 101.

During that same time period I used to commute to SF for work 1 week per month and used BART and public transit almost exclusively. Also never had that experience.

In both, I definitely SAW homeless people, some of whom were likely mentally ill, but seeing them and being harassed by them are totally different things. The latter is mainly fiction. By contrast, I’ve been harassed (at gunpoint) by middle-class “sane” drivers in a bout of road rage.

Forget small cars, Americans should embrace (and demand more) public transit. Switching everyone to small cars is putting a bandaid on a gaping open wound.

Circa July 31, 2022. Over a year old….

I think the easiest way would be to change local property taxes in a way that disincentivizes investors. For example: a “cap” on property taxes for purchasers who declare the home as their primary residence, and a substantially higher tax rate for secondary homes that compounds per home owned by the investor in the jurisdiction (e.g. Primary Resident owner gets capped property taxes at 3% while AirBNB investor who owns 4 homes would get taxed at 15% on investment house 1, 30% on house 2, 45% on house 3 and 60% on house 4).

If we’re talking about ideal housing policies, why not extend it to say that individuals seeking primary residence should get priority over investors or secondary purchasers. AirBNB operators are just as predatory if not more in these markets than non-citizens.

390 books in a year is an impressive figure. I have a hard time reading 12 books in a year. Somehow I think her definition of “reading” or “book” is different than mine.

> Wang Zhaolin, a representative of the company operating the lab, Prestige Biotech, told investigators that the mice inside the warehouse had been genetically engineered to catch and spread the COVID-19 virus, according to The San Joaquin Valley Sun.

This fact alone shocks the conscience. Criminal charges should fly swift and fierce against everyone involved in this illegal operation.

What’s horrifying is that this biolab was found on a fluke. How many more covert biolabs is China operating in secret in the U.S.?

Your comment is made in bad faith. Notably, you posted from a brand new account echoing the most inflammatory talking points that the government uses in support of eroding encryption. Either this is some blatant (and bad) astroturfing, or you've drunk the kool-aid from the government.

Nobody is here to defend child pornography or terrorism. But even accepting that they exist, those are a drop in the literal ocean of use cases for encryption relative to the overwhelmingly legal and productive and often necessary uses.

> They should come up with a useful alternative

We have a useful alternative - criminal laws. Make the criminal penalty a strong enough deterrent and you'll stop everyone except the most craven malfeasors (and those people will find ways to continue to disseminate their materials irrespective of encryption status).

Rather than accuse privacy supporters of being "stubborn", you should come up with a legitimate argument why ordinary, law abiding people should have to sacrifice their autonomy in service of an effectively phantom boogeyman.