selfsimilar's comments

Hashcash was a proof-of-work system that would have put a computational tax on email. I don't know what kept it from getting more traction other than simple chicken-and-egg network effects, but it's a good idea, and worth resurrecting.

http://www.hashcash.org

I know nothing about this author, but this reads to me a lot like late Philip K Dick but without the "what is real" element. After his religious event in 1974, he wrote some real bangers - A Scanner Darkly, Valis, The Divine Invasion - alongside his religious exegesis. This feels a bit like an alternate timeline where PKD saw even more drugs as the way to chase this feeling, but somehow came out the other side.

Number one indicator? A single punctuation mark that's trivial to make on most keyboards (option-dash on macOS). And generally people who write software are extra fixated on punctuation for obvious reasons: missing semi-colons break your build, etc. Maybe in some other niche message board people will use dash and em dash interchangeably, but here?

Also, if the a single character is how you're red-flagging LLM output, do you know how easy it is to avoid? I didn't use it here at all, but how do you know I didn't run this through some slop-machine to tighten my prose? It's really low-effort take to say "just avoid em dashes so we know you're not an AI".

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-em-dash-responds-to-...

The best training for immune robustness is going outside and get exposure to a wide range of stuff. But for indoor spaces, air quality is going to be dominated by the microbes and viruses of the people in the space itself. For public spaces and shared residential spaces with poor airflow this would be great - grocery stores, nursing homes, etc. For condos, apartments, SFH, etc. it's probably less necessary, but probably wouldn't hurt. Or nice to have when company comes over, or someone in the house is sick and "polluting" the air.

"The language is intentionally neutral and apolitical, without any stance on social or political issues."

I don't applaud or condemn this, but it's strange that it's on the home and history pages. Putting this in a code of conduct document for collaborators might make sense, but on the home page? Maybe I'm the weird one, but for most languages I consider them a tool. So it's like going to the hardware store and seeing a hammer that has a label "This is not a Liberal or Conservative hammer." Yeah, buddy I know. It's just a hammer.

I think the word you're looking for is "astigmatism".

Here’s a Propublica article about a Louisiana town that exists financially from traffic fines.

https://www.propublica.org/article/fenton-louisiana-brought-...

Octopodes don't actually have a very long lifespan, as adults die shortly after mating. Which is only to say that the decision to consume is more complicated for this creature than others, because if the goal is to minimize suffering, an ethically aquaculture-farmed octopus harvested after mating will not live much longer anyways.

And I've always found the argument that "more intelligent/sentient creatures deserve more protection and rights" to be basically a post hoc defense against cannibalism. We can't know what "suffering" feels like to less intelligent and "simpler" animals so why make our sentience a criterion for the morality of eating? Just from a safety concern we shouldn't be eating humans, but not because we "suffer uniquely more" than other species.

The same impulses of MAGA culture warriors to protect US history against "woke" is explored here. Our cultural icons are all flawed, because they're human, but examining them critically is very hard because we project so much on them. Navigating this moment is very hard because of "cancel culture" and "anti-cancel culture". We can't and shouldn't erase these men (and it's overwhelmingly men) from history, but trying to add any nuance or criticality to their story is very difficult in our current moment.

There’s an obvious religious element to this. Whether it’s the idea of Maya or that this realm is but a precursor to heaven or hell. I think that at least some people believe that morality is more arbitrary if this realm is not ”real”. And just as people seek refuge in religion or other ideologies in order to give their life meaning, if this realm is not, in fact, real, then the meaning they thought they had established evaporates.

It's in Puerto Rico, a US territory that has toyed with formally joining the union as a proper state. This is NOT a developing country.

Walabot DIY 2 in expert mode looks great! Definitely a bit more single-purpose for walls - only works on flat surfaces and probably has trouble w corners. Great suggestion, thanks!

Dogs eat other dogs' excrement in part to keep a healthy and diverse gut culture. I prefer kissing.

[citation needed]

TLDR: it's harder to have more kids when the law demands we keep them safe to a certain standard when children ride in cars. Car seats take up more space than children. This is a financial pressure against larger families.

If your problem is low birth rates in America, sure, car seat laws are a small but measurable and possibly easily-remedied contributor to said problem. But really that's one of like a thousand things[0] including car culture generally. Trains, light rail, and busses don't add that pressure, and bikes are cheap.

[0] TFA mentions a bunch of other pressures, but that list is certainly non-exhaustive, and seems very facile, tbh.

It's a "lie" in that of course there's a server, what else would your code run on? But we "lie" all the time by omission or shorthand or euphemism. "Cloud" computing doesn't really occur in the stratosphere, and "serverless" still runs on servers in the "cloud", and by "server" I don't mean waitstaff ;-)

I agree that it's a dumb name that doesn't really say what it means and "ephemeral" might be better, but "serverless" is better than "clouds-you-rent-by-the-second".

WCAG doesn't define a maximum contrast.

edit:

Interesting discussion about the effect of fonts, dyslexia, and dark-mode wrt "too much contrast" in this UX StackExchange thread. https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/123504/maximum-contra...

I've often thought this makes a lot of sense not just for medical devices/software, but for any government and financial software as well. But it's somewhat predicated on the 'provable correct' part, which is not well adopted.

What's the difference between this and Diffusion Bee besides a nicer website?

https://github.com/divamgupta/diffusionbee-stable-diffusion-...

Home insulation has a longer useful life than most packaging, but you're right that it still usually ends up in a landfill. However the current incentives for home insulation are very different - usually to reduce home heating/cooling costs and reduced energy consumption is usually an environmentally sound policy. Should there be further incentives to encourage insulation alternatives which have a more eco-friendly end of life? Absolutely. And that is likely a harder problem given the productive lifetime of an average home, but definitely a worthy place to also put further incentives.