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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Yeah, I’m not sure why so many adults try so desperately to forget what they were like as kids and teenagers. Rather than stop their biological urges, curb them or direct them towards safe release. Letting them figure it out on their own, and how else can they if you don’t actually teach them, is a recipe for disaster.

    Two of the best ways to reduce teen pregnancy are sex education and easy access to contraceptives.





  • The other response said it well enough, but I’ll go a step further.

    MS made a tradition of moving functionality around in their OS for no other reason that I could glean than grouping things in an at least superficially comparable group and absolutely not where it was in the last version, merely so that certification from the previous version wouldn’t apply to the current one. They would do similar things with their Office application menus, in one version moving them around based on how often you used them (try doing phone support with that!), in another replacing them with little pictures that pretended they were related to their functionality, and again moving them around every version apparently for the sake of requiring recertification.

    To top it all off, they would also not give you access to the old menuing systems. You could argue bloat, but that would be ignoring the massive piles of it they added for the sake of animating their new menus alone (which has value, to a degree).

    I’m aware of some of the interesting bits of woodworking, as well. I can imagine the response if you told woodworkers that the only hammer/mallet they could use was a 16 oz claw hammer. And the reason we made all those different hammers is because they are the best option for the task they were designed for. You can get away with using a smaller set, especially if your workflow would require using some rarely enough that it isn’t worth adding in their storage and cost to be worth it, but a good woodworker will still be aware of those tools and be assessing their processes to determine if it’s time to expand their toolset.

    And the difference between the physical world and the world of computer interfaces is you aren’t limited to just one. The open source world is particularly fond of including deprecated functionality because there are a lot of pieces working together and it will often take years to get everything updated, and you will never know when the last dependency is removed. Likewise with UIs. A lot of the time, a deprecated one can be kept around for those who can’t be bothered to learn the new one, but the cost of keeping the old version around for a few years is usually relatively low (and the developer can determine how much they are willing to have that cost be and do things to help make it stay within that limit). That’s no reason to leave the old version as the default, though.



  • Just because someone got used to walking around on their knuckles doesn’t mean walking upright isn’t easier and better overall. Sure, it will be difficult, it will be uncomfortable, and they’ll have to get used to it before they see any improvement, but once they get past those hurdles even they will be amazed at how fast walking upright can be. And in the meantime, no one else who already has a tendency to walk upright will have to go through the pain and inefficiency of walking on their knuckles.



  • Saying “religion is the problem” when the problem crops up in many different areas regardless of which religions are present in an area or if religion isn’t present at all makes it seem like you might be focusing on the wrong thing. Nationalism, religion, strong ideologies, groups with deep emotional bonds and a sense of insularity are all susceptible to the same things - charismatic leaders can easily direct their attention and they have a tendency towards directing their hostility towards groups that don’t fit into their group.

    So, tribalism. And if one tool won’t work, or is removed completely from access, those who wish to use tribalism to mobilize a large group to help them achieve their goals will just use the next one that is available to them. The tools are rarely what are important to them, but the results. So I don’t see how focusing on one tool, even a particularly well-suited tool, will solve the problem.




  • First, religions and the existence of God are two different things, just like the existence of the earth and the earth being flat are two different things. Likewise, the existence of religions is no guarantor of God’s existence, nor is there many flaws proof of his non-existence. And unknowns are facts we haven’t discovered or proven yet, much like germ theory, or fanciful ideas which haven’t been debunked, such as the idea that an imbalance of humors was the cause of disease.