You tell them you don’t work for $500.

Or you tell them that you do.

Per hour.

But since they’re clearly such great mates with dad, you can cut them a deal.

our last “just war” that was even a little cut and dry was world war two.

The Balkans were pretty cut and dry in justified intent.

It was an intervention into the worst genocide in Europe since WW2. We’re talking not only wholesale slaughter of civilians, but even the establishment of literal rape camps as part of an organized, systemic campaign of ethnic cleansing. What was happening in the former Yugoslavia was absolutely horrific and the US and NATO stepping in to put an end to it was an unequivocally good thing.

That said, there were still questionable incidents like the “accidental” bombing of the Chinese embassy or the numerous cases of civilians killed by NATO bombs. But that mostly emphasizes the fact that there’s no such thing as a clean war. War is always going to leave blood on your hands, even if it’s being fought for the right reasons.

Zitron’s newsletter Where’s Your Ed At is generally worth the read.

He also has the Better Offline podcasts. Most weeks it covers largely the same material as the newsletter if that’s more your thing.

As somebody that’s a paying Kagi user and generally happy with the service, it is interesting seeing exactly where the tradeoffs are.

While I’d say Kagi pretty much universally returns better results for technical information or things like recipes where it deprioritizes search spam, it’s also pretty clear that there are other areas where the absence of targeting hurts results. Any type of localized results, e.g., searching for nearby restaurants or other businesses tends to be really hit or miss and I tend to fall back to Google there.

Of course, that’s because Kagi is avoiding targeting to the point where they don’t even use your general location to prioritize results. It’s an interesting balancing act and I’m not quite sure they’ve hit the sweet spot yet, at least for me personally, but I like the overall mission and the results for most searches so I’m happy with the overall experience currently.

Searches are supposed to be fast at giving you the answer you’re looking for. But that is antithetical to advertising.

And we have evidence that this is exactly why it happened, too:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

While I’d highly recommend giving either the article a read or the companion podcast a listen because Ed Zitron did some fantastic reporting on this, the tl;dr is that a couple of years ago, there was direct conflict between the search and advertising wings of Google over search query metrics.

The advertising teams wanted the metrics to go up to help juice ad numbers. The search team rightly understood that there were plenty of ways they could do so, but that it would make for a worse user experience. The advertising team won.

The head of the advertising team during this was a man named Prabhakar Raghavan. Roughly a year later, he became the head of Google Search. And the timing of all this lines up with when people started noting Google just getting worse and worse to actually use.

Oh, and the icing on the cake? Raghavan’s previous job? Head of Yahoo Search just before that business cratered to the point that Yahoo decided to just become a bing frontend.

Zitron is fond of saying that these people have names and it’s important that we know who’s making the decisions that are actively making the world of tech worse for everyone; I tend to agree.

Tree nested communication is much more superior than traditional thread based communication

Heavily depends, IMO.

Nested threads are great temporary discussion of a specific story or idea. They’re absolutely miserable for long-running discussions. New posts get lost in the tree and information ends up scattered across multiple threads as a result.

It’s also been my personal experience that the nested threads format just doesn’t seem to build communities in the same way forums did. I have real-life friendships that were made on forums decades ago and I never had that experience with reddit despite being a very early user.

I don’t think that’s entirely due to the ephemeral format, but I do think it plays a part in it. A deep thread between two people on Reddit might last a few hours and a dozen replies before it falls off the page. On forums threads running months or years were pretty common, and that kind of engagement with the same people certainly changes how your relationships develop with them.

80%+ of severe injury and death on a bicycle is caused by motor vehicles, or complications of motor vehicle involvement.

Which would mean ~1 in 5 have absolutely nothing to do with a motor vehicle. That’s significant.

There is considerable evidence that everyone wearing a helmet in a car would save vastly more lives and prevent severe head injury

Then that should be an easy [citation needed] for you because my searches are coming up blank for actual studies. Lots of assertions of it, but I’m not finding anything in terms of actual data.

It’s very easy, on the other hand, to find comprehensive meta analyses on the efficacy of helmet use.

It’s also worth noting that the introduction makes a point of calling out another common online assertion that you repeated – that helmets make people engage in more risk-taking behavior – as false:

There has already been an extensive peer-reviewed literature review conducted by Esmaeilikia et al.5, which found little to no support for increased risk-taking when cyclists use helmets and if anything, they cycled with more caution.

I don’t feel those people should be called stupid for their choice.

I don’t think they’re stupid. I think they’re bad at risk analysis. That’s a pretty inherent feature of humans. It’s the reason I want to see actual data.

A helmet is only needed if you intend to spend significant time in traffic.

The worst wreck I’ve ever had on a bike was without a single car in sight. Pinch flat while carrying speed through a steep downhill curve. I split an expensive MIPS helmet in two and still hit hard enough that I had a minor concussion, road rash up one side of my body, and cracked the face of a week old watch just to pour salt in the (metaphorical) wound. I mostly landed on my head and that helmet is the reason I didn’t have drastically more severe head injuries.

Helmets aren’t just for traffic.

This comment is kind of fascinating because it’s essentially reinventing Slashdot’s metamoderation system 25 years later.

It was good then. No reason it wouldn’t work again today.

In a vacuum, sure, but it also completely tracks with Sam Altman’s behavior outside of OpenAI.

Employees at previous companies he’s run had expressed very similar concerns about Altman acting in dishonest and manipulative ways. At his most high profile gig before OpenAi, Paul Graham flew from London to San Francisco to personally (and quietly) fire him from Y Combinator because Altman had gone off the reservation there too. The guy has a track record of doing exactly the kind of thing Toner is claiming.

What we know publicly strongly suggests Altman is a serial manipulator. I’m inclined to believe Toner on the basis that it fits with what we otherwise know about the man. From what I can tell, the board wasn’t wrong; they lost because Altman’s core skill is being a power broker and he went nuclear when the board tried to do their job.

When I was a teenager in the early 2000s, typical retail price for a game was $50.

That’s equivalent to about $85 today.

The vast majority of the games I buy today are well under $50.

Like how Ferrari cars are designed for 20 year olds but only 80 year olds can afford to buy them.

I mean, making the comparison to motorsports just emphasizes how cheap gaming is as a hobby.

Autocross is as entry level as you can get and a typical ~$50 entry fee gets you maybe 10 minutes of seat time and it’s typical to need to drive 2-3 hours each way for an event. That’s before you start adding in things like the fact that a $1500 set of tires will last you a season or two at most, suspension and brake upgrades easily running a couple of thousand dollars, etc.

Start dipping into actual track time and fees jump to more like $250-750 plus around that much again for track insurance per event. And the upgrades needed for the car to hold up on track are even more expensive still. And this is all ignoring the purchase price of the car and potentially needing to trailer a dedicated track car.

I’ve almost certainly spent far less on PC gaming in the last 5 years combined than I have on motorsports in the past 3 months. I’m on the upper end of spending for most gamers and a dabbler at best when it comes to the cars.

The insanity of the GPU market since covid has put some upward pressure on things but A. the proliferation of great indie titles means you can get incredible value without breaking bank on the highest end equipment and B. even then, the money I spent literally tonight ordering just brake pads and rotors would buy you a 4070 all day long. And I went cheaper than I could have.

Gaming dollars go a long, long way. It’s a hobby that was affordable even when I was younger and broke. It’s still relatively affordable compared to many, many other hobbies.

I had a few years of young and dumb followed by struggling through the great recession that pretty well wrecked my credit early on.

I then went through a few years while rebuilding where I really dug into learning how the credit system works and gaming it to my advantage. It was literally a case of getting entertainment out of “number goes up.” I got bored with it once my available lines of credit hit a couple multiples of my annual income, but the end result was having a basically perfect credit score.

It ultimately paid off when it came time to buy a car and get a mortgage. Basically had immediate access to the absolute best rates available and approvals have always gone super smooth.

The flip side of that is my SO who never went through the young and dumb stage and hadn’t needed to rebuild credit, but had a similar “fuck credit” attitude as the OP so they’d never had credit in the first place. The fortunate thing there is we were able to jump start their credit history by adding them as an authorized user on one of my older accounts with a high line of credit – this gave a massive boost to both average account age and available credit and pretty much instantly brought their score up from the 5-600s to low 700s. Add in a few more deliberate things like financing a car instead of paying cash and now they’ve got enough of a credit profile built up that it’ll be okay if anything ever happens to me.

Obviously, that requires a lot of trust, but it’s good info for relationships where one partner has established credit and the other doesn’t.

For myself, I simply dislike the usury present in the debt market for consumers and have decided not to engage with it.

You’re engaged with it whether you like it or not.

Credit cards are a reality of the modern economy. There are costs associated with every credit card transaction and, due to the ubiquity of credit cards, those costs are priced in to nearly every single purchase you make. Because most merchants charge the same price regardless of payment type, this effectively means that your cash purchases are subsidizing my purchases made with a rewards credit card that has its balance paid off each month by a couple of percent.

You can choose to opt out, but that doesn’t mean you’re not playing the game either way.

I request a credit increase every time I get a raise or every 6 months, whichever happens first. Why get credit I dont need? In case I ever do need it, but more important is that debt ratio. That is what gets you good loan rates. Do it before you need it, and you will be set.

There’s also a feedback loop here – once the credit limit increase hits your report, other creditors see it and are more likely to extend increased limits to you. I went through a few years where AmEx and Discover both seemed intent on being my highest limit card and would preemptively offer CLIs after the other one had.

And to expound on your point re: credit utilization ratios - this is another area where having higher limits than you need helps. Your percentage utilized of available credit has a huge impact on your overall score. Having a higher limit means that if you need to carry a balance due to an emergency spend, it’ll have less impact on your score.

e.g., you have an emergency expense of $700 with a line of credit of $1000. Your utilization is now at 70%. This will have a negative impact on your score pretty quickly.

Take the same $700 spend and apply it to a $5000 line of credit and you’re only at 14% utilization. That’ll still have an impact but much less than anything over ~30% utilization.

Even beyond emergencies, if you use a credit card to pay fixed bills each month and then immediately pay them off, you’ll occasionally have months where the payment credits after your statement date and hits your credit report – same deal there. It looks much better on your report if that balance is a fraction of your available credit than if it takes up a large chunk of it.

The last point is purely a configuration thing. Our Teams instance only keeps DMs for I think 30ish days – legal wants to minimize the surface area of discoverable material. Same reason our Exchange instance nukes emails over 12 months old unless you manually move them to an archive.

This is basically every major enterprise ticketing system. They’re typically extremely customizable over-featured behemoths so that they can check all the buzzword boxes for the people that make purchasing decisions but will never actually use the system.

"It’s a fully integrated Agile ITIL DevOps CMDB that empowers your users while providing generative KPIs to guide business decisions!”

Then, on top of that, ownership of it is generally dropped on a team that is completely incapable of properly managing it from both a technical ability and sheer manpower availability standpoint. So each install ends up becoming an overly complex, confusing, terribly performing mess.

I think I’ve seen one reasonably well managed install in the couple decades I’ve been doing this, a couple of more that were mildly jank but usable, and then everything else has been a pit of despair largely driven by the above.

You can also just spend $10 on a domain name with a registrar that offers dynamic DNS. Offhand, both Namecheap and Cloudflare do. I have no idea what my public IP address is because my router just updates it automatically for me. Plenty of DDNS desktop clients around if your router can’t for whatever reason.

Part of what makes all the hatred for Common Core math so hilarious to me is that when I finally saw what they were teaching, it was a moment of “holy shit, this is exactly how I use and do math in real life.” It’s full of contextualizing with a focus on teaching mental shortcuts that allow you to quickly land on ballpark answers. I think it’s absolutely wonderful.

But it’s so foreign to the rote manner that a lot of parents were taught that many of them have a hard time grasping it, and get angry as a result.

The article cites the opinion of an unnamed author of an unnamed “image encyclopedia.” Not really what I’d call definitive, which was the point.

In my circles back then, soft G was predominant. I wouldn’t cite that as evidence of a One True Pronunciation either.

There has always been debate about it. Hard G has certainly become predominant, but declaring that people that prefer soft G “weren’t on the internet back then” is revisionist at best.