It’s Google devouring Google Search!

Not to mention, even if you can accurately measure calories in a specific serving, companies produce thousands and thousands of servings per day. They can’t accurately measure all of them. And ironically, the more ‘natural’ the food is, the less accurately they can measure the nutritional value: protein paste is going to be a lot more predictable than pasture-raised chickens.

Hi Tom,

I was just taking a look at your resume, and your experience at Deceased really caught my eye! I’m especially interested in your knowledge of being missed by friends and family. Did you know that complications from heart surgery is in high demand right now?

I’m a head hunter looking for dynamic individuals who are interested in positions at an exciting new startup, and I think you’d be a perfect fit!

I hope we get a chance to chat soon!

Nice, you avoided having to think on a self-imposed technicality. Real intellectual rigor there.

Makes it easy to dismiss my argument without bothering to think about it, you mean. Just take abortion, then. Or “tax is theft”, or right to bear arms, or any of a thousand other beliefs you probably don’t agree with.

So like, if you were in a restaurant and ordered food, but it never came because a couple of the servers were blocking food from being served because the company wasn’t taking a strong stance against abortion, you’d think “these good people are taking a moral stand, good for them! The company better not take any action against them to make sure I get my food!”

Or for that matter, if Google stopped all cooperation with the IDF, the company’s Jewish employees could (in fact should) disrupt business because Google was supporting terrorism?

It seems to me that you can only support forms of protest you’d be willing to accept when the other side uses them against you. Basically the golden rule.

But what u r saying is under the assumption that laws cannot be changed.

Tend not to change. The parliament will move on and forget about the issue. It’s not gonna revisit this decision every 6 months.

This is why the whole medical field in the US still uses fax machines on a regular basis. It was encoded in legislation and then never removed.

USB-C solves all problems that a port can solve.

Tell me you’re under 25 without telling me you’re under 25. This has been said many times before. USB-C is frankly a bit of a mess (I mean, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 3.2 Gen 2…)

There were ideas about using USB-C for power & networking in houses, replacing most of your wiring with USB cabling. That didn’t pan out. You can only use USB-C to drive a 4k display over relatively short distances. It’s often flaky. There are things that could be fixed with USB-D or whatever. This adds an obstacle to that goal.

A big part of it is that people are so unbelievably cynical now. They’ll rush over one another to point out and then circlejerk over the most negative aspects of every new development, while ignoring every positive.

The old internet would have flipped out over ChatGPT, much less Midjourney, and generated thousands of hilarious stories and images and websites that made ridiculous random comic books or fake government websites for absurd departments or whatever. They would have been delighted with it…and as an afterthought it may have occurred to them that there might be downsides.

Today, people get furious about the fact that AI exists, that it was trained on existing material, that it might affect people’s lives. Long articles are written on the terrible effects AI is going to have on politics or media. Post an AI-generated image in anything other than an AI-art forum, and you’ll be absolutely lambasted. Suggest that there may just be a few updates and watch the downvotes and angry replies flood in.

Part of that is just experience. We’ve lived though a few ‘revolutions’ for which the net effect was…arguably not so great. Part of it is that the age of the average Internet-savvy user is like 35-40 now, not 22, so they’re bringing a level of fear and skepticism that wasn’t there before.

And partly there just seems to be a sort of social malaise and negativity that wasn’t there before. People in 2005 were happy and excited for the future. Now everybody just seems fearful, angry, and burned out.

So fewer downloads, which is a very different thing.

Well this is a blast from the past. I can’t even load the context anymore.

I was engaged in an argument, and staying focused on the argument instead of getting sidetracked by semantics. But anyway, you claimed “it’s not ad hominem, he said you were wrong therefore you are stupid!” That rests on the assumption that I was wrong, so I was assuming that was your assertion.

I think. This was, after all, months ago, and apparently the account I was arguing with got deleted or something?

For real? You’re really suggesting that anybody who says they’re for free speech is actually a fascist pedophile?

What it shows is that inflation goes up, and the population is both growing and urbanizing all over the world.

Like where? I know towns that will offer you a plot of land for $1, so long as you promise to develop on it.

You do get high housing costs in places where populations are rising faster than housing development can keep up, or where development makes no sense (would you build an apartment block in a shrinking town?)

But like…I can point you to a bunch of cities in the US where housing prices are still quite cheap. You probably won’t want to live in those cities. That’s why they’re cheap. Supply and demand in action.

You have to be a complete moron if you think the problem isn’t enough supply.

The population of the US is growing. And the percentage of people living in cities is rising. That’s lots of people looking for housing in cities. At the same time, single-family zoning (which account for around ~80% of land in US cities–before accounting for industrial and commercial) prevents the development of more housing. Old neighborhoods are effectively full, mostly owned by the same families that bought them in the 70s through 00s. New development is waaaay out on the fringes of the city, and expensive as hell because it’s in such high demand.

There isn’t enough new housing being developed to satisfy the growing demand for housing, so prices rise. It’s that simple! The problem is exacerbated, because the rising prices attract investors (corporate and private) and AirB&B etc. But the fundamental problem is that most of our cities are seas of already-occupied single-family homes, and at the same time populations are rising. This is obvious.

But politicians love to blame foreigners, immigration, corporations, AirB&B. You know why? Because the root of the problem is middle-aged surburban majority-white families that don’t want more people (with associated traffic, noise, whatever) in their neighborhood. And that’s their core voting base. Old white people vote like clockwork, young renters reliably don’t. If politicians go on a crusade against the single-family-dwelling suburbs, they know they’ll get voted out. So they throw you these stupid bones: “it’s the Chinese who are making housing expensive, by buying 1% of units (and mostly living in them)! It’s AirB&B, with a few thousand units for rent in a city of 6 million people! It’s the corporations, doing…things nobody can quite explain, that somehow involve buying housing and then just letting it sit there unoccupied? Or something?”

You’re a sucker, believing that bullshit. It’s the voters (the ones who actually vote) who are the problem.

Zoning laws: yes, strong agree, but the bad guy there isn’t corporations, it’s NIMBYs. People with houses don’t want any development of any kind near them, and being residents they’re the ones who get to vote on it. They almost always vote no.

Foreign people buying land as assets is a thing. You know how you defeat that? Build more housing. If the value of the assets fails to rise, or even falls, then people won’t hold them as assets–and by dumping them on the market, they’ll further decrease the price.

Companies buying up houses to sell (usually after developing or refurbishing them) or rent is ECON101 in action.

If you can solve problem #1, the rest falls into place. But corner apartments overlooking the water in nice cities are still going to be expensive relative to other housing.

Well I mean…more and more people want to live in cities, and they’re not making more waterfront apartments. Lots of people want that apartment now, so the price is higher. I don’t know what you can do about that: you can’t provide a beautiful corner apartment overlooking the water in a desirable city for $700 to all the millions of people who want one.

what good does maximum privacy when you don’t do anything with it?

Soo, if I understand you correctly, the next logical step is to become a dark market drug dealer?

Yeah, if there’s a -r (sometimes -R) in the command line, be careful: it means ‘recursive’, and it’s gonna do it to all the files.

Likewise with *. It’s a wildcard meaning “match everything”. I think that’s widely understood?

On that note, backup your stuff - set it to do it automatically daily.

Mainly /home/. As long as you have a backup of that, you can usually recover almost everything if something goes wrong by just installing all the same software. Configs, documents, downloads, saves, and so on are almost always stored in /home.

IOW you’ve turned it into a thought-terminating cliche.