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alabastervlogon Why is everybody knitting chickens?

You're weirdly concerned about how much I'm reacting, which is pretty minimally. Like, I can't imagine how I could have raised this while reacting any less. But yes, I also saw your other post and got your message that you're bothered I brought this up at all. [EDIT] Ah, ninja-edited this paragraph into irrelevance! :-)

Maybe you need a chicken. [EDIT] But perhaps we all need chickens?

But thank you for helping me understand this. The framing is 100% serious, I guess.

alabastervlogon Why is everybody knitting chickens?

The name they've decided to give these, "emergency" chickens, knitting them for hurricane survivors. It's all a step up from just "we like these and they're nice" and into "these are Helpful with a capital H".

My point is exactly that that kind of thing reads like a joking exaggeration, but this sort of approach to things is really common now and I truly have trouble telling when people are joking or being serious about it. Most of it reads like joking to me, but I don't know. It's also been going on long enough that it's making me wonder even more, since, judged as a joke, it was played out and over-done years ago.

alabastervlogon Why is everybody knitting chickens?

Huh, I'd liken school in those grades to a series of meetings basically all day, that are mostly presentations, every day of the week, with a lot of restrictions and harsh conduct & expectations from the people leading the meetings, which'd never fly in an office. Often with terrible lighting and long stretches without seeing the outdoors, even though a window. And crazy-early start times that may have you not seeing the sun until 3PM or so, for months. And, especially toward the end, a couple more hours of work at home every day. Mostly of math problems.

Also, all that, plus you're not getting paid for it.

alabastervlogon Why is everybody knitting chickens?

I'm more stressed out than like... during Summer, when I was a kid.

I've never, ever been as stressed out as during school, grades 7-12. If the rest of life had been that stressful or worse, I'd have checked out a long time ago.

alabastervlogon Why is everybody knitting chickens?

Framing everything in terms of mental health is one of those things were I can't tell if people are participating in some kind of mass social joke, or are serious.

alabastervlogon My website is ugly because I made it

I'll still bust this out if it's some quick page that's not going to last long (like some kind of "service down for maintenance" page that's only going to be visible for a few minutes, or something)

It's "bad" but you know what? It fucking works, it's concise, and I can remember it no matter how long I go between writing HTML/CSS.

Hell I wouldn't be surprised if the paths it takes through a typical browser engine also makes it burn 5% or fewer as many cycles as CSS centering methods.

alabastervlogon I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old

I learned way more on most topics on my own than in school. Reading was the main skill that unlocked that, though things like PBS and (when somewhere with cable, and before these channels went to shit) Discovery & TLC played a role too.

Reading earlier means getting to start on that stuff sooner. Young kids have shitloads of free time.

alabastervlogon US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

It's funny how Nixon definitely was a crook, and a loon, and should have gone to prison, and his paranoia and shenanigans set the pattern for and gave license to things to come, up to and including the current crisis... but he's still probably the best postwar Republican president, in terms of good things done or attempted.

alabastervlogon US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

Too much of that should, but probably won't, set off every alarm and siren with the conservative justices, for stepping way over the line, after their reasoning on Chevron.

alabastervlogon US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

God. The WTO penalties are gonna be epic (if much of this stuff ever actually goes into effect).

alabastervlogon The Who Cares Era

I think the 3rd or so time that all the work I'd been doing for months or years just got thrown in the garbage, having never provided more benefit than it cost, or even without ever providing any benefit whatsoever due to never having been released, through no fault of my own, was when I decided giving a shit was for suckers.

We're just human parts of some weird business-metaphysical Plinko board—and we ain't the ones dropping the chip or winning the prizes. Truly, who could possibly maintain any amount of giving-a-shit after years and years of that? All that's left is pretending, which is, transparently, the same thing "leadership" does.

alabastervlogon The Who Cares Era

> Even companies don't really talk about the future anymore, just vague AI thoughts (and often crazy negative ones, witness the CEOs talking about the white collar bloodbath coming).

The currently-ascendant business and political leaders pushing some mix of millenarian wankery and a conspiratorial mindset with all the finesse of 3rd-rate carnival barkers while stealing everything in sight definitely has me pretty down on, like, anything mattering.

alabastervlogon The Who Cares Era

I think a lot of harm has been caused by "automation" actually meaning "distributing parts of the same tasks among a bunch of people". As far as I can tell that's one of the main outcomes of "efficiencies" from computerization of offices, among other places: they mostly just made it feasible to carve up the job of e.g. secretary among everybody, adding to the number of things and processes each worker has to understand and deal with.

alabastervlogon Chairs, Chairs, Chairs

We must still not think cushioned chairs are that important, or we wouldn't make kids spend 13 years straight sitting 5+ hours a day in hard chairs.

alabastervlogon Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

It’s really just interviews, and even those are nothing like any exam I’ve ever taken. They’re closest, in terms of the kind of stress and the skills required to look good, to some kind of solo public speaking performance.

… which most people come out of 17+ years of school having done very little of, with basically a phobia of it, and being awful at it.

They are probably something like oral exams that a few universities use heavily, or the teaching practices of many elite prep schools.

[edit] oh and interviews in most industries aren’t like that. Tech is especially grueling in the interview phase.

alabastervlogon How to live on $432 a month in America

A small set of professionals do, yes. A lot more stay near family and friends instead.

alabastervlogon Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

I used a really low-end system for a while some time back, running Linux, and WebKit-based browsers were the only ones with a mainstream (so: actually renders correctly for practically all sites) engine that was usable with even one tab open (I could do 2-3 as long as none of the pages were “webapps”)

This indicates some kind of fundamentally better design, to me. Probably related to why Safari’s by far the most respectful to battery life, of the big three browsers.

alabastervlogon Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

A lot of developers and “UX” “experts” really don’t appreciate how extreme these modals are. They disrupt everyone a little bit, and for less-technical users can throw them off entirely.

“Once per year” heh, add it to all the other disruptive shit they pop up and out on launch basically at random and they’re training users to dread launching the program. “Will it slap me in the face this time? If so, how hard?” Most modern programs have a problem with this, but FF is bad about it. And it’s just a fucking browser! Why? Why do this crap?

alabastervlogon How to cheat at settlers by loading the dice (2017)

Even with the social fix, there’s usually one person (sometimes two!) in a four-player game who does nothing wrong but is basically out by the second or third time around the board, just hanging around to help the one or two other non-lead players harass the leader but with no viable path to victory short of an insane run of luck with the dice (or, if you’re me, as soon you realize this has happened to you, you help the leader get ahead faster so you can move on to a better game sooner…)

alabastervlogon How to cheat at settlers by loading the dice (2017)

Monopoly’s maybe the only board game I prefer playing in computerized form.

Even the one on the NES is totally fine.

Rules enforced without having to remember them, auctions run for you, nobody has to be the banker, no manual book-keeping for how much is owed where and mortgage status and all that.

Plays so much faster and smoother than the real thing, and no dumb house rules making it last forever for no good reason.

alabastervlogon Trump administration halts Harvard's ability to enroll international students

I've been like fuckin' Nostradamus since early in the Dubya admin just because I skim GAO and CBO reports on big legislation sometimes, can read graphs, take the things Republicans say they want to do seriously, and have a half-decent grasp on 20th century history, including the latter half of it.

alabastervlogon Claude 4

Yeah the only thing I find surprising about some cases (remember, nobody reports boring output) of prompts like this having that outcome is that models didn't already do this (surely they did?).

They shove its weights so far toward picking tokens that describe blackmail that some of these reactions strike me as similar to providing all sex-related words to a Mad-Lib, then not just acting surprised that its potentially-innocent story about a pet bunny turned pornographic, but also claiming this must mean your Mad-Libs book "likes bestiality".

alabastervlogon I have tinnitus. I don't recommend it

> it's not to stand out when every person types like this

Yeah, OK, I should have written "for social signaling".

> basically, it doesn't make it harder.

Iassureyou,capitalizationisn'tbecauseit'spretty.Aspectsofwrittenlanguageareoftenthereforverygoodreasonsrelatedtomakingreadinglower-effort.

alabastervlogon Should I Block ICMP?

My newest router doesn't have any of that shit and works just as well, with at least as much range, as the one it replaced, which had six(!) of those insectoid antenna things.

I wouldn't be surprised if the damn antennas are just empty. They don't seem to serve any purpose.

alabastervlogon I have tinnitus. I don't recommend it

Kids doing weird shit to stand out, like every generation.

It makes reading harder, and with modern tools it certainly isn't any easier to write—with both those things working against it I doubt it'll stick around.

alabastervlogon The Era of the Business Idiot

Especially if one of the children's David Friedman. Yeesh.

alabastervlogon The Era of the Business Idiot

I figured you had, and posted it for others. Should have made that clearer.

FWIW I didn't find Zitron's framing of it misleading, having now read it (I'd read excerpts of that book before, and maybe even that chapter, but couldn't recall for sure, so re-read it just now)

alabastervlogon The Era of the Business Idiot

https://ia803400.us.archive.org/18/items/murdoch-murdoch-boo...

Page 93 (as numbered on the pages, IDK which PDF "page" [edit: nb the table of contents gets it wrong, one supposes the pages were re-numbered in the digitization process, or something]) or just search "Capitalism and Discrimination" and it'll get you there fast, for anyone who's interested. The chapter is... well, I found a real howler, but then I have odd taste in entertainment, sometimes, and my enjoyment was almost certainly not by a route the author intended. I'd recommend it just on that basis, regardless of its role in this thread but, uh, only for my fellow weirdos.

alabastervlogon OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

Yes, and "that question is in not-even-wrong territory", respectively.

alabastervlogon OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

Dude just says whatever he thinks will make Line Go Up on his accounts. It's basically the only thing he does.