Shoutout to the pipe operator in R. The code equivalent of "and then." It helps to unnest functions and put each action on one line. I know R is more for stats and data, but I just think it's neat.
I think I’ll try to close any offending vids as quickly as I can going forward and not downvoting. I suspect the YT algorithm sees me watching the first few seconds in shock as “engagement.”
Youtube toxicity is real for me. No matter what I downvote, the same kinds of radicalizing videos make their way through. Either the algorithm is broken or people are trying to break it. I’m glad I’m not a kid in 2025.
While I'm sure a wearable could be occasionally useful or even save a life, most don't do much. It's telling that mainstream fitness wearables tout their data collection ability but never use this data in marketing to prove they make people healthier. I think most fitness wearables are cashing in on pseudo medical device branding as a way to charge hundreds of dollars for electronics that cost very little to manufacture. I'd be wary of those kinds of devices if I were a doctor.
Sleep is like drinking water. No one says, "I'm gonna get dehydrated right now and then drink a lot more water later so it's OK." But people do this for sleep. You need to sleep right when you're tired, because being tired is a stress that will need more time to heal the longer it goes. Sleep timing is underrated but it is just as important as quality and amount.
This reminds me of economist E. F. Schumacher's idea of "intermediate technology." It's tech that is more advanced than an impoverished person's existing technology, but not so advanced that only a few can afford and use. Intermediate technology prevents a dual economy / neocolonialism where only a few people get rich and productive from using advanced labor-saving technology.
When I was kid my dad had a Dodge Ram 50 which was about the size of a car and it had a four-cylinder engine with a manual transmission and no 4WD. Never had any issues hauling anything. We put a pallet of bricks in the bed and it wasn't a problem. Modern trucks are too expensive and big for no real reason other than ego and insecurity. It's blue-collar cosplay. Maybe a few people need a huge truck, but for most people a smaller truck or a van would work better.
If you are a libertarian and want to debate me, please don't. I don't want confrontational "debate" from someone who already labeled themselves and won't ever consider changing their own ideology. Reread Ayn Rand or something.
There's a movie with Benedict Cumberbatch playing Wain. The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (2021). Not my favorite movie, but maybe someone here might like it.
I take snapshots on film for fun and sometimes don't develop the film for a few months. When I finally see the photos I've taken, I might have forgotten most of the detail from that time. I see the photo and it jogs my memory. But I'm never sure if my memory is a hallucination extrapolated from the photo or if I'm using the photo to recall something that I just needed help to remember. It's like that experiment that showed people a faked picture of themselves in a hot air balloon. Many of the people shown this false photo would respond by creating false memories. My photos are really me but I wonder how accurate is any recollection beyond the photo.
If you like stories about reconciling with weird sci-fi evolution of non-human intelligence (spiders, in this case), check out Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
My (former) neighbors here in North Carolina have a trans kid and they just moved their whole family to Maryland which is a trans sanctuary state. Two terrific parent with professional careers who were born and raised in NC.
The 420 with Windows 7 is my personal idea of the peak of desktop computing. 2011 was also around the peak of computing in general considering it was right before social media turned hellish psyop and smartphones became distraction / disempowerment devices.
They didn't learn their lesson from the HP laptop they bought two years ago that (I am not making this up) had wifi hardware but no installed wifi driver. How does that happen?
My in-laws needed a printer scanner because they are getting old and needed to scan paperwork to move to a retirement community. They went out and bought an HP printer scanner and asked me to help them set it up. It took me multiple hours and I still couldn't figure everything out. It took them the next two days to really get it up and running. Poorly designed actively hostile software.
I first read about the Cauchy distribution in a book titled The Physics of Wall Street by James Owen Weatherall. Before then, I was mostly familiar with the normal distribution. The normal distribution shows variance as contained around mean, median, and mode. The Cauchy distribution can look like a normal distribution but it actually has no mean. What is unsettling is how real world processes or events might seem like a normal distribution, but actually be a Cauchy distribution. Which means a variance you believed to have reasonable bounds would suddenly go haywire.
Reddit stock gurus do the opposite of what a legit person would do. Unlike "world's smartest billionaire" Jim Simons, who's operations are super secret, finance influencers share their picks as a way to grow followers and sound smart. If the modern equivalent of haruspicy (technical analysis) worked as well as claimed, these con artists would realize they could make more money keeping quiet.