krrrh

That’s a really great endorsement. I had Zinsser as a textbook for a non-fiction creative writing class in university. It was one of the only textbooks I never had a compunction to sell. Haven’t read it since then, but your comment will make me give it a re-read.

Link aggregators was what site like this, digg, and reddit were called when they started. They introduced a social aspect for upvoting content into a dynamic feed. It’s something more than a forum, and something less than what later became social media.

Signal runs on donations with a small staff and budget, and even still half of its infrastructure budget goes to sending a verification SMS on sign-up. You can run an open chat network as a tiny non-profit, and any hope of profits is in the same ballpark. For the incumbents it’s a loss leader for other services, and that complicates the whole analysis going on in this thread.

Microsoft barely got a slap on the wrist from the DoJ in the end. Market competition from Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Chrome, along with industry and cultural support for browser standards, was the ultimate remedy, and that would have happened with or without the DoJ. The original suit was brought by Netscape who were charging $40 for a browser license at the time. It was a dead end business model and MS was ultimately right when they argued in the nineties that browser tech was so fundamental it needed to be integrated into the OS.

I love iMessage because it has a good feature set for family group chats (photo sharing is stellar), but I’m also happy with all the innovation, choice, and competition on features and governance provided by Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, et al, each of which have their own strengths and have to respond to improvements by the others. The worst thing that could happen to innovation is if we were all using the same iMessage protocol forced into the stewardship of a DoJ mandated standards body.

I really can’t understand the obsession with default SMS functionality. Other than 2FA codes or setting up Uber on a new phone who gets an SMS more than once a month?

“DOS ain’t done til Lotus won’t run”

Whether that was ever fully policy at Microsoft, people sure believed it was.

1995 was also around the time MS was pursing its embrace-extend-extinguish strategy to the internet with internet explorer.

The hacker spirit uses Signal. Promoting WhatsApp over the more open community-supported alternative is worse than gloating over Beeper.

Counterpoint: it’s totally embarrassing that the US public had to learn about the serious issues of myocarditis amongst young men and blood clots from J&J from Israeli and European public health, and that it took several months, and arguably more than a year for US public health to fully acknowledge the myocarditis issue with US data from VSD [0] (let’s put to the side what a mess VAERS is).

European countries acted swiftly to increase the time between primary series doses for anyone under 40 (give or take depending on country), and also restricted Moderna for young men as it’s higher dose produced many more myocarditis cases than Pfizer. US regulators for some reason seem to have a parochial view of data provenance and didn’t take these common sense approaches.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/ensuringsafety/monitoring/...

Sarno doesn’t claim that soft tissue injuries are never real. Stuff like golfers/tennis elbow usually manifests with a clear overuse cause from strain in exercise. But this sort of thing where people experience debilitating pain from… typing, or their back seizes up when they pick up a bag of groceries. A lot of those cases can have a big psychosomatic component. There were two things in particular that I found interesting and that made my back pain shift around and leave when I read his book (paraphrases):

Chronic pain is culturally dependent, some countries have a lot of RSI, some don’t. Chronic neck pain from whiplash is a bigger deal in some places or in some decades than others.

If you give an X-ray to some one with chronic back pain a certain percentage of them will show bulging disks. If you give X-rays to a random group of people of the same demographics a similar percentage of them will show bulging disks, with no correlation to back pain.

The Tyler method you used for golfers elbow is a different example of a a rethink in treating other types of pain. It does have a plausible mechanism that runs counter to the traditional treatment, and it probably works as explained, encouraging healing and tissue remodelling through increased exercise-induced inflammation from eccentric reps. But… it’s also plausible that the quality of the paper describing it and the thrill of counter-knowledge helps make it work even better.

See my comment above about using chocolate as a bridge to deal with caffeine withdrawal. For me the brain fog and headaches always made it hard to transition to getting off caffeine, but chocolate is a good methadone for a week.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38103097

The Bose sleepbuds were helpful for me in masking snoring sounds. I found conventional earbuds too uncomfortable the way they seal, while these make up for the lack of perfect seal with white noise. Looks like the product has been recently spun out to a new company.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/22/23837206/ozlo-sleepbuds-b...

Just a note that lavender oil is estrogenic and topical use has been associated with precocious puberty or gynocomastia in children. Small doses in adults may not be a huge issue, but I would not use it as a sleep aid for kids.

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/lavender-tea-t...

Without reading this paper but having read a bunch of this research in the past, it’s definitely inconclusive due to poor quality data. The people who don’t consume caffeine category too often includes those with major health issues that prevent them from doing so.

Low dose nicotine gum does help, but it’s pretty habit forming. I’m not convinced it’s worse than taking daily ADHD medication or caffeine though.

Aerobic exercise (preferably outdoors) is the one thing that works with mostly positive side effects.

For anyone reading this and wanting to get off caffeine, but finding it difficult because of withdrawal symptoms like headaches, here’s a trick that makes it easier.

If you’re drinking a morning coffee you’ll be getting 100-200mg of caffeine. But even a small amount of caffeine will take almost all the edge off withdrawal and prevent headaches. A 75g dark chocolate bar at 70% will give you 20-25mg of caffeine. Costco sells boxes of Lindt chocolate bars that meet this criteria. Eat one in the morning instead of coffee (the sugar and theobromine seems to help as well). Once you’ve done this for a week it’s easy to just stop because most people won’t get withdrawal symptoms from 20mg.

At least a year ago when I was playing around with TikTok live it was amazing how much of it was machinists, lumberjacks, or assembly line workers live-streaming their entire shifts. Some of the most interesting content on the platform.

The artist Nicole Ondre makes striking ceramic sculptures based on knot theory.

https://www.nicoleondre.com/heatwork-tanya-leighton-2023

https://www.nicoleondre.com/primes

Full disclosure, she is also my wife.

I think you’re right, but I’d rephrase it as Apple focusing on what can be a great experience right now (viewing any iPad or macOS app spatially, a massive improvement over using either platform currently) vs highlighting what can only be a mediocre or enthusiast experience at the moment (full VR environments, and 3D AR).

They’re smart to set a minimum bar for quality experience and work on future applications over time vs Meta and Google’s typical approach of developing beta products in public.

I for one welcome the decentralized internet that Elon is ushering in. Things were better when we had small disparate forums where people could develop their perspectives in community. As long as people are members of multiple communities we should have enough cross-pollination and course corrections to keep things mostly on track.

Mods and groupthink are always a threat but it turned out they were a bigger threat still when everyone was trying to be on one social network to rule them all.

I don’t live in a red state but I was raised in the most socially conservative area of Canada and I do have a number of religious and evangelical friends though I was raised atheist. Granted I do now live in the gayest neighbourhood in Canada.

The level of homophobia I witnessed and experienced in the nineties was on another order than what exists today, there is absolutely no comparison (I’m not gay but was routinely called a fag even by strangers because I was a skinny kid with long hair and had gay friends). In the nineties I would read conservative magazines that had ads in them pushing conspiracy theories about how the NAZI leadership were all gay. DOMA was a huge issue that ate up a lot of national politics in 2004, even California voted against gay marriage in a referendum. In 2012 Obama was still compelled to campaign in defense of DOMA and was openly supportive of marriage only between men and women (though interestingly the earliest activists for marriage equality came from the centre-right (Sullivan and Rauchman)).

Now the nuttiest MAGA republicans all love George Santos, who was a literally drag queening in Brazil and Peter Thiel who got a massive cheer when he keynoted the 2016 convention and said “I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all I am proud to be an American.” Unthinkable even 4 years prior. One poll of gay men in 2020 shows 46% support for Trump. [0] On the more traditional Republican side of things (Dispatch conservatives and Reason Libertarians) it’s hard to find many living authors who are more valourized than Deirdre McClosky who has been trans for 30 years.

It’s possible that homophobia has increased a bit in the last few years amongst social conservatives, but it still isn’t close to anything like it was even a decade ago. So if it has increased, and if young people are reverting to viewing sex as a binary according to a recent Pew poll [1] the question is why. Partly it’s the weird corporate and state monomania around the topic. But more than that, as I stated above, it seems to me to be mixed with blowback to gender ideology which has been conflated with gay rights, even though it is a very different and contradictory thing with a whole separate host of questions around medical ethics and educating children that many don’t find to be consistent with the positive message that universalized gay rights - you’re fine the way you were born and you don’t need to change anything to be accepted.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/trump-applauds-poll-...

[1] Most favor protecting trans people from discrimination, even as growing share say gender is determined by sex at birth - https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/america...

Her interview on the Psychoactice podcast was really good if you want more than this article delivers.

Primarily she’s getting closer to a more appropriate definition of what a psychedelic is, with the more common modern usage including ketamine and MDMA instead of just tryptamines. All of them seem to re-open a critical period of learning through different mechanisms.

If you query Wikipedia or Google for an hour on a topic you know about there’s much less of a chance you’ll get inaccurate information than with ChatGPT where it’s almost a given. Assuming people get some basic training it won’t be hard to ask someone in the class about a baseball record and then let them see ChatGPT hallucinate the players and dates.

> Status quo is active oppression everywhere all the time of certain groups

In America in the year 2023, this is a wild statement that amounts to a matter of faith. There is no sensible way to prove or disprove it with evidence, except the obvious fact that any statement that includes the phrase “everywhere all the time” is not reflective of reality and an dismissal of viewpoint and nuance. It’s part of why so many people call wokeness a religion.

As another former a.r.s. and a.c.t. denizen this is spot on. Good summary!

For those of us with winter to deal with the better approach might turn out to be judicious use of UV tanning beds.

Good points but it’s worth clarifying that this is not what the Citizens United decision said. It clarified that the state couldn’t decide that the political speech of some corporations (Hillary the Movie produced by Citizens United) was illegal speech and speech from another corporation (Farenheit 9/11 by Dog Eat Dog films and Miramax) was allowed. Understood this way it seems obvious on free speech grounds, and in fact the ACLU filed an amicus brief on behalf of Citizens United because it was an obvious free speech issue. It’s clear that people don’t and shouldn’t lose their free speech rights when they come together in a group, and there is little distinction between a corporation and a non-profit in this regard. If political speech was restricted to individuals then it would mean that even many podcasts and YouTube channels would be in violation. It also calls into question how the state would classify news media vs other media.

The case has been so badly misrepresented and become something of a talisman.

No worries, I’ve made this suggestion to a lot of people but no one has followed through with it afaik, not even me.

I do find that https://freedom.to/ is one of the few things that has worked for me. It’s more difficult to bypass than ScreenTime, and syncing blocklists with the laptop during the day is great for overcoming procrastination. It works through a VPN profile (though not an actual VPN), so it also blocks apps.

I‘ve used it with schedules that go from 05:00 to 19:00 and it’s just such an eye opener when even a week after implementation I still open safari and reflexively type the urls for Twitter, hacker news, and Reddit even though they’ve only produced blank pages for days. Restricting it to the evening and going a couple of hours longer than the workday means I can still enjoy some mindless surfing but if I get busy doing something else I’m less likely to get sucked in. I also really like some of the suggestions here to restrict time wasters from the phone completely and only do social media stuff on the desktop. The extra effort for me to go to the office would mean that I’m more likely to use the time doing something else.

What you’re asking for has been available for years. The answer is to swallow your pride and have a friend set up parental controls on your phone and safeguard the password from you.

The one that’s driven me crazy lately is when Siri tells me through my AirPods that I left something beind. It always pronounces the “St.” in the address as “saint” instead of “street”, and I can’t understand how it would do this by accident.

> On MacOS, if I want to completely terminate a program, I have to right click on its icon in the dock and then select quit.

Cmd-Q ?

Or even better cmd- tab-q-tab-q. Who has time to find the corners of a half dozen windows with a trackpad when they want to simply quit a program?

I haven’t run Linux desktop for a while but the inconsistency in keyboard shortcuts was a drag, maybe it’s gotten better? One of the best parts of macOS is how consistent keyboard shortcuts are across the system, and how easy it is to customize them with the built-in preferences, or via karabiner-elements if you have the accessibility challenges of being a power user.

Chrome for iOS switching to Blink from WebKit will have next to zero effect on Safari’s share of iOS browsing.