water-data-dude

Leaving aside "which book is better" (which is hard to answer), I'll say that The Freeze Frame Revolution is much more approachable for most folks. It's the one I'd recommend to my friends first, then I might recommend Blindsight if they liked it - along with other difficult to articulate factors. Perhaps the "recommend/don't recommend" choice is arrived at by non-conscious mechanisms ;)

You know, there's probably fewer perverse incentives with a government run dating service. Obviously I can imagine ways it could suck, but when I compare them to how commercial dating services are run it's hard to see how they could do a _worse_ job.

No, but now you can talk to a model that pretends to be Willie ;)

Anathem was my favorite book by him. It has a lotta re-read value, I appreciate the work he did to make it feel like a complete, fleshed out world. But different folks have different tastes, and that's ok.

I also liked Seveneves, but it should have ended 2/3 of the way through. There was a point that would have made for an excellent ending (which is something Stephenson famously struggles with IMO), but then he forced in another 1/3 of a book that didn't engage me and which felt like it just petered out.

I think keeping the questions simple is for the best though. If they included more explanation or a definition for each term, it might inject bias.

There's some scenarios where it could. One plausible one off the top of my head is: climate change makes the flow of the Indus (which has its headwaters in the glaciers of the Himalayas) less reliable. Two nuclear powers (India and Pakistan) are highly reliant on the Indus for agriculture. Things escalate out of control, and when nukes start flying it trips the terrifyingly ramshackle Dead Hand system that Russia's got hooked up to their nukes (it's not always on, but maybe this happens during a time of heightened political tension).

For what it's worth, the picture at the top of the article is a textbook example of very high accuracy!

I feel like setting up cameras pointed at the houses of influential people with public web feeds might help push some privacy reform.

What are your thoughts on January 6th?

A lotta highly processed foods combined with most people seeming to be unaware of the impact my friend FIBER has on your poop, in terms of both stool solidity and speed of evacuation! Seriously, if you spend a lot of time going #2, adding a fiber supplement will give you most of that time back!

I read that book when I was probably way too young for it, and that incident made me spend a lot of time staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night. I'll have to dig into it more!

A few months prior to the midterms is exactly the right time for this sort of action. If the voters keep seeing prices increase because of Trump's tariffs, it increases the odds that the republicans will lose the legislative branch and will be able to act as a check on Trump's power. Ideally some other countries will follow suit.

This will cause some short term pain for Canada, but hopefully they'll have a less insane trading partner after November.

"Free" as in "free to play by our rules or suffer"

Sampling bias. Most of those millions of people are white, cis, straight folks who present as the gender they were assigned at birth. The odds of something horrible happening are much higher if you don't check all of those boxes.

It's still rare, but so are most horrible things that can happen to a person. "There's a pretty low risk of you getting into a car accident, so why wear a seatbelt?" because the risk, while low-ish in absolute terms, is still unacceptable - so you do what you can to mitigate it.

An excellent illustration of Chesterton's Fence

For most of my life it's felt like we've been moving away from this scenario, but lately it's felt like we're sliding back towards it

TMDA (too many damn acronyms)?

For anyone interested in the history of water in the American West (what's different about the west, and how did we get here?), I recommend the extremely interesting and readable book Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner.

I was never rabid about it, but I thought prediction markets were a cool idea for a while. I didn't anticipate all of the crazy second order effects.

It would be great if it worked that way, with the people living nearby getting concrete benefits from the new data center. Instead, they typically just see an increase in their utility bills.

The only time the Sunshine Protection Act has passed the senate was when gosh danged Tom Cotton wasn't there[0]. I swear, he's in the pocket of Big Time[1].

[0]https://www.mediaite.com/politics/that-daylight-saving-time-...

[1]https://www.cotton.senate.gov/news/speeches/floor-speech-on-...

You can read an explanation of the status codes on the icann website.

The explanation for clientRenewProhibited was interesting:

"This status code tells your domain's registry to reject requests to renew your domain. It is an uncommon status that is usually enacted during legal disputes or when your domain is subject to deletion."

Similar language for some of the other statuses like serverDeleteProhibited.

https://www.icann.org/epp#clientRenewProhibited

In the US it's been turned into a culture war thing, because ignoring the problem benefits some already wealthy people who think they'll either be insulated by their wealth or they'll dead before it's time to face the consequences

India and Pakistan are both reliant on the Indus River for their agriculture. The Indus has its source in glaciers in the Himalayas. As those glaciers disappear, the Indus will deliver less water, and deliver it much less reliably (melting ice and snow provides a nice steady flow, runoff less so).

So: you have two nuclear powers who are both relying on the same diminishing resource to feed their people. Do you not see how that could cause....tension?

I started listening to an audiobook of Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust with the best of intentions. It's high quality literature, and it unquestionably has artistic and human-ness value!

However...it's become my "put this on with a 30 minute timer if I'm having trouble falling to sleep" tool. I'd probably have better luck with the physical book. The narrator, John Rowe, does an excellent job, but his voice is so damn _soothing_.

"I haven't encountered a rare edge case, therefor the rare edge case must not exist"

I'm interested to see if this is the whole story[0], but on the surface it sure is infuriating.

[0] this article and a bsky post by the author of the article are the only sources I can find other than the website itself - which is definitely as chock full of AI as indicated

I'm a big fan of WaterFox! I switched when Firefox decided to add a ton of AI crap without providing a "turn this crap off" button (you could force it, but I don't want to fight my tools). Really good experience, been recommending it to all my friends.

Librewolf is also good, and I use that on one of my other machines. I like Waterfox a bit more, but that's probably just personal taste. Both are solid and both cut the mold off the tasty cheese that is Firefox

I know that if I lived somewhere urban it would feel welcoming. I know there's a large LGBT community there already. I know that there's gay clubs and stuff like Texas Furry Fiesta.

But the urban areas aren't passing the state laws. The state of Texas has laws that ban teachers from talking about LGBT topics or about LGBT folks in school. If I were to find a partner and I wanted to adopt, in Texas I have no protections against discrimination. A child placing agency can exclude me on religious grounds.

Trans folks face all that and more. They ban transgender folks from using school facilities. They ban trans folks from using public restrooms. They do that thing where they define gender as being exactly equal to biological sex. The "panic" defense is allowed in murder cases. I'm not trans personally, but they're part of my community and they're slowly having their existence criminalized.

Again: there are many parts of Texas that are great. The legal landscape is hostile to LGBT folks.

As a gay dude I will never take a job in Texas. Companies may enjoy the lax regulatory environment and favorable tax laws, but there are many bright people who - for one of a NUMBER of reasons - will never move there. It is repressive and frightening.

Who knows if that will be enough to move the needle on any of this, but companies aren't just buildings and incorporation paperwork, they're also the people.