For anyone on the “invest in the complete opposite of whatever Don Jr. is doing” plan, there are lots of good ESG’s you can put your money in. Firms like Calvert are gonna perform slightly worse than VTSAX, but it’s typically not more than “slightly,” and at least your money isn’t funding oil cartels, Meta, Amazon et al.

The Microsoft store app that nobody uses? Oh god, anything but that

It’s all hallucinations. It’s just that some of them happen to be right

Or!—hear me out—one woman whose 8 co-gestators were just laid off by someone who doesn’t understand what their job was

“If we run terabytes of text through a statistical model, then spend millions of man-hours labeling outputs, we can approximate the way humans respond to a prompt.” –OpenAI, more or less

Wow, what a surprise. I’ll do you one better: if you take me to a river, I can tell you where the water is going to go next! Maybe we can get some VC money by promising to deliver clean water to every business in the world without all the expense of pipelines and plumbers? I mean, just look at all this water. It may not go where you want right now, but let us dump sewage in it for a couple years and who knows what it’ll do.

This is why email never caught on. Who wants to choose between Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Proton, and Comcast? A successful email service would be one where you can only communicate with users of the same email service. /s

As this thread demonstrates, there are plenty of ways to say “I’m doing terrible, actually” without breaking the social contract. If I’m having an awful day, my go-to is “hangin’ in there, how are you?”

The last part is important. Some people don’t want to talk about how you’re doing (maybe they don’t have the emotional bandwidth at the moment, maybe they’re in a hurry, maybe they just don’t care) so give them an out, a clear signal of something else they can discuss without seeming rude. The easiest way is to return the question, but you can also just jump into the imminent topic of conversation, like:

“How are you?”

“Keeping on keeping on. Hey, just wanted to reach out about that thing on page 4, do you have a minute?”

Or if they started the conversation and you don’t know what it’s about, there’s always “Takin’ it one day at a time, eh? What can I do for you?”

The biggest “risk” of this approach is that someone may offer sympathy or ask you what happened, which is a whole new set of protocols. But for me it’s worth it to not have to lie.

Kavita for my ebook collection—mostly tabletop RPGs, but some comics and sci fi as well.

I don’t actually use the web interface that often. I add books to my Kavita library, then scan the OPDS feed into my scratch-my-own-itch mobile app, Bookoscope, and download whatever I want to read onto my tablet from there.

Side note, PDFs are the absolute worst. Even reading them on a full-sized tablet is incredibly annoying. Anybody have any tips/tricks/apps for that?

Mosquito baiting

Is Unreal worse than Unity? I’ve only ever heard people complain about the latter

That would be Edward Jenner. He saved more lives than anyone else in history, and that number increases by the day. If it were up to me, his birthday would be an international holiday and kids would learn his name in elementary school.

For anyone who likes the video: definitely read The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus. Exurb1a does a solid job summarizing it, much better than most YouTubers, but skips a lot in order to keep the video short. It’s a very accessible book, especially if you skim the Kierkegaard stuff, and the core of it is strenuously punk and badass.

Of note: Camus doesn’t just think you should live in defiance of a meaningless universe. He argues that you should live as long as possible, experience as much as you can, repeatedly do what you love most even to the exclusion of everything else. Absurdism is not mere hedonism nor optimistic nihilism; its rebellion is tenacious, passionate, intentional, and incapable of passivity.

For a followup read, I recommend Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, which is a great crash course in staring into the abyss.

+1 for biking. I track my bike rides with Apple Health and it’s pretty solid, I don’t know if it would be hard to make those importable to the game.

Maybe not documented as such, but it’s understood to be correlated (especially in terms of “risky behaviors”), likely by way of chronic understimulation.

In layman’s terms: brain never gets the reward chemicals it needs > sex is a reliable source of reward chemicals > okay we’re obsessed with it now

Holy butts, why has no one ever said this sentence to me before

“If you knew what it was, you’d be using it already.”

One of my best friends in high school was a Norwegian exchange student. He was easygoing and smart and we rode the bus together because his host family lived nearby. Some of the funniest conversations of my life happened on those bus rides.

When he went back to Norway we lost touch. I think it must have been difficult for him to be here—the isolation, the culture shock, the language barrier, I can only imagine. Maybe it was a relief to leave our little town in the rearview mirror. But I’m forever glad I met him.

This is a great concept. I hope it catches on.

I participate in a pledge called #50forFOSS. On the first Friday of every month, I choose an open source project and give the maintainer $50, no strings attached. It lets me target small projects that may not have a lot of users, but are valuable to me, as well as bigger ones with more expenses. My mindset these days is that I need to insist on paying for the software I use, because if I don’t, someone else will (i.e. advertisers and venture capitalists, which is bad) or no one else will (i.e. abandonware, which is worse).

Disclaimer: I started #50forFOSS and there’s a very small group of us who are doing it.

Mine is yeast, but if Chonkus saves us all I guess it can have second place

Only for the floors that are labeled correctly, though.