tosser0001

I feel like I must be in a distinct minority because I personally prefer painted bike lanes over any other alternative. It's pretty rare in my own experience to have cars ignoring or being impatient with them (maybe because I like in a fairly bike-friendly city) I also don't like getting stuck behind really slow people in physically separate lanes where there's no room to pass.

> seemingly the bible (or similar religious textbook)

You seem to be going out of your way to demonstrate your atheistic bonafides by expressing an affected ignorance of some of the most important texts in human history. Understand that these can be read as metaphors and many people find pleasure in the words and sentiments even if they don’t accept their literal truth.

Buzz Aldrin took communion on the Moon. Not everything is Either/Or

The slight lag that I encounter constantly when interacting with devices and on-line services.

Since working from home I become acutely aware of how often I'm dealing with spinners waiting for things to load, pauses, lag, etc. I feel like I'm living half a beat behind my physical actions and it's brought on a certain amount of unnecessary stress.

I always hate the freaking Thunder Sentence:

   ... blah blah blah blah blah.  UNTIL NOW.

It's everywhere nowadays and it makes me wince every time I run into it. And for whatever reason it's especially annoying when I can feel it building up to it, like here which is basically the text book example.

Okay, with that off my chest, this technology seems on the surface pretty cool and I certainly hope it works out.

That advent of tooth decay has long been seen as a marker of a society's transition away from foraging and to agriculture which generally brings a lot more starch into the diet.

That is a mischaracterization of what Facebook is doing.

Facebook has a giant ontology of subjects. Based on their "stalking" of you, subjects in this ontology are connected to the user profile; i.e., the FB user's "interests".

Ad buyers are buying access to the ontology, not the individual users. They're not given a list of users to sift through and choose the user. They choose the subjects and FB's ad network shows the ad to users with matching interests. For what it's worth there's at least a buffer there.

You may still find this wrong, but the idea that they're providing "intimate details of their lives" oversells the argument against FB.

BTW: you have to at least give FB credit for giving users access to the interests that are tied to their profiles. I periodically sweep through them so that I show 0 interests and subsequently never get any ads. Ad buyers are looking to target people; if you're not in the target audience you wont be shown an ad.

I picture them that way mostly because of all the games of Stratego I played as a kid. I was surprised not to see it mentioned in the article!

I wish the link could go to the actual source:

https://www.rose-lynnfisher.com/tears.html

This is great. Historical newspapers are one of the largest corpora of information that has yet to be adequately brought on line.

In the U.S. the Library of Congress has digitized a fair number, but at the state and local level it's really hit or miss. Some states such as California and New York have put quite a bit on line, but many others rely on individual towns and historical societies.

Different pay services cover various papers, but there has never been concerted effort to digitize the staggering amount of microfilm that is out there.

I don't believe dowsing is real - but Arthur C. Clarke had made a statement at one point that it didn't seem completely outside the realm of possibility that there could be an evolutionary advantage for people to have some subconscious ability to notice environmental signals of the presence of water (assuming such signals exist.)

These statements were made back in the days of "In Search Of ...", etc., when there were a lot of books and shows about pseudo-scientific phenomena like The Bermuda Triangle, Ancient Astronauts, Bigfoot, etc. It really wasn't all that long ago that it wasn't considered complete insane to be studying these phenomena and have details published in peer-review journals

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology_research_at_SRI

I recall it was almost axiomatic that the more expensive the content management system, the worse the URLs it produced.

I completely believe in the spirit of TBL's statement, and wish the internet had evolved to followed some of the ideals implicit there in. I recall that people took some pride in the formatting of their HTML so that "view source" showed a definite structure as if the creator was crafting something.

Now for the most part, URLs are often opaque and "view source" shows nothing but a bunch of links to impenetrable java script. I actually wonder when "view source" is going to be removed from the standard right-click window as it barely has meaning to the average user any more.

I worked for a company that was making a large CASE tool way back when and even at the time it felt like nonsense.

Internally it never even crossed our minds to use it as a means of building the tools themselves. I remember bringing this up at one point during a company meeting and the CEO glowered at me like I was pointing out some inconstancy in religious theology. He spun some web of garbage about why it wasn't appropriate for our specific needs. I was young and realized only afterward that it was just not something you were supposed to mention there.

It was actually fun to work on for a while and we sold a lot of product, but it eventually dried up along with the rest of that part of the industry.

It's funny to think that if Buddy Holly were alive today he'd be 8 years younger than Mondale. People who've lived a long time connect to a world that seems so distant it feels like an entirely different era of existence.

Being able to model consciousness mathematically opens up some grotesque possibilities.

Human suffering presumably has some sort of limit based purely on our physical makeup. Suppose though the very concept of subjective suffering could be modeled in some way. Is there any law in the universe that says there is a limit to suffering, pain (or pleasure)?

Could an investigator of the future test out an algorithm on a conscious entity modeled in software, just to see what the mathematical limit of pain is? Maybe that's what Hell is...

I really hope that in the near future, we can look back at this period as a moment of temporary cultural insanity.

It also reminds me of Tschiffely who spent 3 years riding on horseback from Buenos Aires to New York City in the mid-1920s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aim%C3%A9_F%C3%A9lix_Tschiffel...

This feels like the latest round of moral panic that we'll look back on with bewilderment

This is just a wrapper around:

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/a-billion-galaxies-lurk-in-a-1...

Probably should change the link to that

I'm sure there is some core set of people that want to "stick it to Wall Street" but the vast majority are probably just along for the ride.

The irony is, once this stock finally comes crashing down, it will be the small retail investors losing a lot of money, and a different set of Wall Street investors will be the ones reaping the reward.

My company has a program specifically designed to bring in new blood probably because there are so many older folks. Part of it involves spending time with different teams to get a feel for the various things that are going on. How well it works in practice I can’t say. Like everything else it depends on the quality of the teams you’re on and the nature of the work they’re doing.

I’ve only ever experienced salary-ism which is just a side effect of being in the industry for so long.

The issue with getting decent reviews and salary bumps is that eventually you’re making more money than many people are willing to take on.

I’m 57 and working with a lot of people my age. We’ve hired a lot of older people.

Twitter can feel like YouTube without the videos, just the comments.

I especially despise the “trends” sections. It ignores any keywords and sites that you’ve blocked and seems designed to inflame. Dorsey at one point made a big statement about trying to change the tone but I’ve seen little evidence of it.

I have a small list of people that I actually follow who tend to keep things civil

I opened this in Firefox and Chrome on a desktop and nothing happened other than some blocks floating by. No keyboard or mouse activity had any effect.

It was only when I tried it on my phone did I see it was a game

Are you saying you removed every single item from your "Interests" in ad settings? If you haven't done that before it can take a while to remove all the accumulated topics.

I honestly can't remember the last time I saw an ad on FB

I think they're a bit to aggressive in naming tropical storms as it is.

Currently any tropical storm that reaches 39mph/63kph gets a name, which to me is pretty low threshold. Maybe if every two-bit storm didn't get a name people would pay a bit more attention.

This was the first thing I had ever read by him about the time of the Yale controversy.

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004):

http://abahlali.org/files/Graeber.pdf

It struck me as some really original thinking

It’s not really the rate of accidents so much as who will be getting sued. I think it will take legislation to protect autonomous vehicle manufacturers against certain lawsuits otherwise the cost of liability will be so high the vehicles will be rendered uneconomical as the costs are passed on to consumers, or the companies driven out of business altogether.

The article mentions the General Aviation Revitalization Act. The small aircraft industry was almost wiped out until these protections were afforded. I don’t see how any company could risk unleashing a fleet of vehicles with the threat of uncapped liability looming over them.

While that does freak me out, I'm also somewhat disturbed by the idea of leaving no trace in the universe.

In today's world there is a lot of information about us that has been recorded. In some sense we're not completely forgotten because, at least in modern societies, we have birth records, death records and all manner of other details collected about us... mentions in newspapers, pictures, video clips, etc. But there will be some point in the future where all these details will inevitably be lost and all trace of our personal existence will be unrecoverable. In some ways that's sadder than anything I can think of.

I think of ancestors who were born before the advent of any sort of record keeping now are nothing more than nameless ghosts. Their only record may be some small fragment of DNA, and even then there's no guarantee that any of it was passed on after enough generations.

I remember Scientific American had an article about what would happen to New Orleans if a hurricane hit several years before Katrina [1]. I recall having a bit of a hard time believing it could really be as bad as they said: surely people would have planned for something like this given its inevitability? Obviously I was wrong.

Also, Katerina wasn't even the direct hit that they had modeled so it could have been much, much worse. I still wonder, even in the wake of Katrina, if New Orleans is truly prepared for the storm that is inevitably going to come.

[1] paywalled, but this is the link from 2001: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/drowning-new-orle...