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What conditioning? I've always heard it described as the "least bad" form of government. It definitely beats having a communist dictatorship though.

My heart bleeds for the poor Russian military contractors

I've cycled in both places and enjoyed it. The bicycle infrastructure is top-notch. I would note though that both places have a notoriously flat terrain and that helps.

Every now and then I download Firefox and try to gaslight myself that it's actually a good browser now. It usually doesn't take long before I'm using a chromium based browser again.

Australians are not exactly a svelte lot either, ranking 10th in the OECD countries for obesity (US is the third), and on par with the UK.

I remember riding my bicycle over to the local sysop's place to pay $5 cash for my BBS account as a young teen. Looking back this was probably ill advised and risky. Turned out the sysop was only a couple of years older than me.

I found myself reading through textfiles.com just recently,a really good archive of BBS-era text files.

Nostalgia. I had a SparcStation 20 back in 2003 I got for free. I ended up getting NetBSD running on the thing, but for some reason I had to patch the boot floppy with a patch file I got off comp.os.bsd.netbsd for it to actually boot. Of course it was basically useless and I never really used it for anything, but it looked cool.

speaking of which, try asking ChatGPT how many r's are in strawberry

Hint: GME bagholder

Musk made his opinion regarding advertisers pretty clear: "Go F Yourself"

Linux evangelists usually annoy me, but this would actually make me switch over to Linux fully.

I got really into this sort of thing about ten years ago and set up my wireless router to serve up the initial iPXE image and then load various OS's over the internet. I got about ten or so OS's set up to boot this way then I lost interest and never used it again.

You're right, "these days" isn't correct, it's something I added without really thinking about it.

After all, the earliest sources of "Journalism" were not much more than PR rags for the local lord. "Yellow Journalism", is over a century old. There is an amount of romanticism for the era around Watergate, and the Fairness Doctrine though which a lot of people harken to for "the good old days"

However I think the situation has gotten incredibly worse for journalism in general because of there simply not being the money in it any more. Journalists are must produce more for less, quality slips even further, the attention economy becomes even more acute (although that aspect was always there to a degree in the tabloid news)

I think most journalists these days are not much more than poorly informed and poorly paid professional sh*tposters/provocateurs who learned how to write an inverted pyramid in j-school. I can easily find poorly informed and attention-grabbing opinions from a number of places, including even here :).

Disclosure: I learnt to write an inverted pyramid in j-school but dropped out after a year, I didn't want to work in this industry. Also maybe I just wouldn't have been a good journalist.

An interesting book on this subject is Flat Earth News by Nick Davies, it's where the term "Churnalism" was coined.

I got a new job recently and came into the office for the first few weeks for the novelty of it as I hadn't worked in an office for years. There are few people who swear by the office and complain that they can't work without it, no kids either, I think they like having a chinwag every day. Now we're moving offices so they are going to a coffee shop so they can work together, sounds like hell, I won't go back.

Other search engines at the time (I'm thinking Altavista, Lycos, AskJeeves, Yahoo) were plagued with ads and also their search results were not as good. You might find what you're looking for on the eighth page of results, whereas with Google it was the first result practically all the time. It loaded, fast, it had no ads, it was magic. That's when the "I feel lucky" button meant something (before it was killed off years later in the name of serving up more ads)

There's also Lenny, the voice chatbot for wasting the time of telemarketers, scammers etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEmHTS2UGlc

Russia is bad though, they just bombed a children's cancer hospital yesterday.

PowerShell helped me a lot in my earlier career, bash always felt like banging rocks together in comparison.

It's generally a mix between the so-called "baby ducks" (people who fixate on the first OS they ever used), and Linux evangelists who announce every change to Windows as the surefire catalyst of the year of the Linux desktop.

Interesting thought. Looking around the room I'm in the only think I'm sure was definitely handmade is a musical instrument, because I know the guy who made it for me. And even then it uses parts which were machine made: strings, tuners, bridge etc.

>Also, Irix was hilariously insecure due in part to its closed source nature.

That was in addition to having three default accounts with well known passwords and a telnet server.

I was also doing dialup internet support around that time. Talking a senior citizen through setting up a dial up networking connection on Windows 95/98 using a winmodem on a line which was obviously noisy with no way to see what was on their screen was pretty common.

I remember one time I'd gotten the connection established and they said "now what?", and I said "You've connected to the Internet" and they said "so what do I do now?" They'd gone out and bought the internet package because it was the thing to do, but had no idea what to do with it. I ended up showing them how to go to Google which had only just been released that month.

And I definitely relate to being adverse to hearing a ringing phone

I don't see mention of removing news from the widgets bar. I could actually use the widgets bar for things, but it's pointless with more than half the bar dedicated to low-quality clickbait that I can't get rid of.

Yes, I will keep my default credentials just as they came, that'll show the NSA

Airfares are quite a bit cheaper however, and it seems that most passengers are willing to forgo luxuries in order to receive a lower-priced ticket. That's evident by looking at the airline industry in Europe. Those are simple market effects.

Regarding China, it's great that large swathes of people are escaping absolute poverty, here's to our shared common prosperity.

Dutch can also sound exquisitely hilarious to an English speaker, hoor.

The forced tabloid news is honestly horrific. I was begrudgingly willing to turn a blind eye to candy crush adverts on the start menu as I tend to like the OS, but this is just terrible. I have bad enough focus issues as it is without Windows bombarding my with crap notifications and clickbait in the widgets menu. I have turned off as much as I see possible and my blocklist for the news must be hundreds of entries long but I still get absolutely inane crap recommended to me. Oh I hate it so much it makes me rage. This is worse than the Windows 8 start menu.

Just spitballing and I have no particular expertise.

I do not have experience with Ayahausca, but I do have experience with Psylocibin, LSD, Ketamine, Salvia Divinorum, and a few other things. Psychedelics disrupt the Default Mode Network (this has been shown in brain imaging studies), which the brain process which covers internally directed thought, self-reflection, self-criticism, etc, and that this disruption appears to be what helps many people overcome ingrained patterns of negative thinking.

The trouble appears to be that this state of epiphany following a psychedelic experience is not permanent, I have heard figures of six months following a psylocibin experience. Therefore, to keep achieving this affect repeated doses would be needed which may have a negative effect, further studies may tell. However it may provide time window to allow other treatments to work, in the same sense that antidepressants are supposed to be paired with therapy.

I'd always heard that psychedelic experience provides similar effects to a deep meditative experience and thought "well, who wants to do that boring meditation when you can just take a magic potion and be done with it" ? However, meditative and mindfulness practices, for those it helps, would seem to be far more sustainable than any drugs. I have lately been reading The Craving Mind by Judson Brewer, and the RAIN (Recognise, Acknowledge, Investigate, Note) framework it prescribes has been useful in reducing negative ruminations and undesired cravings.

Currently I am completely sober from all substances and am using mindfulness and meditative practice to find a more sustainable path to peace within myself. I have no desire to take any substance which would jeopardise this.