Bnichs's comments

Reminds me of the video game Everything. Its a really cool game where you explore the various scales of the universe. It has its quirks (somewhat phoned in graphics like animals walking) but the concept and execution are great IMO, would love a sequel. Also bonus points for featuring Alan watts as a core character.

Can you explain how it changed after being a father?

You just echo the institutions you defend so fervently by being sanctimonious. I hope you're a politician or healthcare exec, someone who at least has an interest in defending this mess. Otherwise it's just sad. Again, good luck.

Again, I do not care about covid and have no interest in arguing with you about covid. This is a discussion about eroded trust in institutions. And denying that the government's handling of covid had a causal relationship with the current distrust of institutions is as insane as denying covid itself. If you think that during that time the government exemplified honesty which would build trust, I do not have any argument that will convince you beside saying to increase your media literacy. Good luck.

The number isn't the point, the messaging of "this number is science" is. If it were delivered clearly as "we done have all the information, but our best judgement based on a, b, c says the number is X" that would be far better and most of all honest than "it is 6ft and that's the science, follow the rules or don't enter public spaces"

Does that make sense to you?

Just to preface. Covid is the new Nazis, all arguments end up devolving into its discussion. Im tired of talking about covid but it's hard to get past how our country handled it, both the people and the government. To answer your question: https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/jun/06/did-fauci-say...

>He said the 6-foot guideline “sort of just appeared” and wasn’t based on any data, and that such a study would be difficult to do. He also said he didn’t recall any studies about masking young children, but said the guideline was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s decision.

https://oversight.house.gov/release/hearing-wrap-up-dr-fauci...

Making up arbitrary rules and then enforcing them saying "trust the science" is not coming from a place of honesty. Especially when combined with the deletion of emails.

The problem is that when the government itself spreads verifiably false information, there are no reprocussions like there are for the individual who does it. Just like when an individual steals money they tend to face consequences, banks who do the same thing on a much more massive scale face nothing.

A system that naturally occurs as a result of the context like you describe sure sounds like a superstructure. Which in our case is a government that allows anyone with the money to steer the ship while actual people have little power to change anything. And when you put enough of those people with money in a room with people who take money and give them laws, it absolutely results in a single unified direction for that system. Of course there are disenters, but they are ineffective compared to those with actual power.

>If our institutions can communicate their work better, supernatural beliefs will dry up a bit. We’ve seen this historically.

I feel like this article misses the reason why people distrust institutions. Being "kicked out of the tent" is no doubt part of it, but it's more that the institutions themselves have stopped trying to communicate in good faith.

In the past 50 or so years we've seen almost every institution (in USA at least) get caught in a massive scheme of lying and manipulation. The church was caught harboring pedophiles, the education system told us trades were bad and we needed to spend $100k+ to have a good job, the Healthcare system leveraged our own wellbeing against their profits, the government sided with insurance companies, banks, etc over its own people at every turn then proceeded to lie us into war after war after war, and all the the while the news has been proven to support almost every lie happily if the ad dollars go their way. Not a single institution hasn't failed us.

Asking why people distrust institutions is the wrong question. Any partner that lied to you that much would never be trusted again, distrust is a defense mechanism that comes from years of betrayal. But still there's some implication that we should still trust them, despite the lies, and along with it a sense that distrusting them makes you crazy (paranormal/alien beliefs are a good example). This problem does not originate from the people, it's the result of a world where truth only gets in the way of profits and power and actual people are the lowest priority.

I'm very happy I switched from Kindle to kobo. Kobo is not ideal but getting koreader/syncthing to work on it was a breeze compared to Kindle. It's a much less locked down platform, and it has usbc which got rid of the last micro USB cord I had in my backpack.

I think a lot of this can be ascribed to "startups don't always do the right thing" and you have to learn a lot over time.

That's said, I've been a customer for a while and the t-shirt debacle is one of the dumbest things I've seen a small company do. Even if you try and call it marketing cost (no name on the shirt makes that hard), there's no way it was the most efficient use of money for marketing.

And setting up infrastructure for it wreaks of "I'm bored with search let's do t-shirts." it completes goes against "do one thing really well" and just seems like a waste. If I were one of those investors and my money got spent on that I'd be really upset.

I think their problem with open source is more that they can't have complete control and make every user's decision for them, security is just a nice tag along to that.

One of those values is "ISS total mass." Is that calculated using launch/deorbit weights or is there some kind of sensor on board that can measure that? I figure if you did a specific type of burn you could calculate the weight from that, but I'm wondering if they have something more clever.

This feels different. As a tax payer don't you want your city to work to get more funds? That feels far more acceptable than a private entity lobbying so they can increase profits, possibly at the expense of the payer.

Did LLMs not take time and effort to create? There's this ongoing sentiment in the AI detractors that for something to be meaningful it requires a human to have spent time making it. Meanwhile we live in a world where the overwhelming majority of things we see and interact with are already made by machines or are machines themselves.

I'm excited for the day when Google finally bites the bullet and makes their biggest UI "upgrade" to date, removing the search bar and keeping pesky user input from interfering with targeted ad revenue.

Now there is the biggest incentive in human history to invest in long distance space travel and communication tech.

Before the americas were discovered by Europeans, sailing and travel tech was nothing compared to what it became after there was a new undiscovered area that caused for a major shift in the mindset of where to pool resources.

I'm the same way with 90% of games and that's how I can tell a well written game: if I watch the cutscenes. The most striking example of this was TLOU where I expected a fun zombie shooter and ended up completely enamored by the story, atmosphere, and characters.

If nix/home-manager documentation wasnt awful this site wouldn't be needed. And the level of detail should be way better than a one line sentence with no examples.

I think that's part of the problem. It seems like the only way to have a good nix experience is to go all in with NixOS. The problem is that is a huge sell for someone who already has an OS they like and the fact that testing out nix standalone is such a pain means you end up with very little confidence in the prospect of migrating everything over. Plus, at least when I considered NixOS a few years ago, the setup instructions seemed not well ironed out and made me really hesitant that it wouldn't brick my system.

All in all I think nix falls into the category of great idea in theory, but the implementation is so lacking in ergonomics and ease of use that I don't see how it could be anything other than a niche build system without major UX updates.