Yeah, well, it’s awful and annoying and shitty and I wish it’d stop doing that. I wish it’d stop doing a lot of things, to be honest, but that’s beside the point.

I don’t use it, but my GF does. She’ll have the volume up for some video that does interest her, then be scrolling through and treat me to the audible part of that trend without even seeing the funny / cute / insightful / boring picture to accompany and potentially compensate the acoustic pollution. She’s thoroughly numbed to it, but I’m not and I hate it.

(I’ve dropped the idea of getting her to quit the app, that battle just isn’t worth fighting.)

Half the time, people seem to upload otherwise perfectly complete still pictures as reel with some dumb music over it because if you’re not constantly assaulted by the same popular song snippets over and over on every post, are you even paying attention?

Particularly pernicious are ones with some sad or bittersweet content that will have some variant of “generic slow piano with a female, breathy voice singing some words that sound sad but you couldn’t actually tell what it’s about without listening to more than the five seconds used in this looping video”.

You need a link to the post to prove the tweet is real, and an archived link to prove it was real in case it gets deleted.

Corporate management often seems to think of changes as isolated, independent events, where the measurable impact of each change can be attributed to that change. I think it’s a symptom of the pathological need for KPIs and Data-based decision-making. Making big decisions is scary, and data can help with informing them, but I get the impression some managers grow so dependent on using numbers as a crutch to spare them from having to justify their decision with their own best judgement.

They didn’t fully hand it to Linux yet. We still have to earn that. Ideological appeal / privacy concern alone isn’t enough for many people if the jump seems too scary, particularly if it feels like a one-directional leap of faith. What if they don’t like it on the other side? Better the devil you know…

We need to build bridges, in both directions: help and encourage people to switch to Linux, but also promise them help to get back, basically an “out” if they don’t like it. I see plenty of guides for migrating to Linux, but how about getting back to Windows?

It’s okay not to like Linux, it’s okay to be scared or apprehensive, and it’s okay to get cold feet and return to the familiar. Maybe some time in the future they’ll try again.

That’s the usual case with arms races: Unless you are yourself a major power, odds are you’ll never be able to fully stand up to one (at least not on your own, but let’s not stretch the metaphor too far). Often, the best you can do is to deterr other, minor powers and hope major ones never have a serious intent to bring you down.

In this specific case, the number of potential minor “attackers” and the hurdle for “attack” mKe it attractive to try to overwhelm the amateurs at least. You’ll never get the pros, you just hope they don’t bother you too much.

Still illegal. Not immoral, but a lot of our laws aren’t built on morality.

That was my point, actually, expanding on the previous point of the policy being designed to kill small businesses. The big corps can do that, pretending to be ever so regretful about the firings, while small ones face insolvency.

Everything about this seems almost designed to murder small businesses.

Those with enough capital backing, resources and funds can take the hit, maybe cut some expenses, shedding crocodile tears about how terrible the economic impact of this trade war has affected them while dispassionately watching scores of no-longer-employees pack their things and try to figure out how to tell their kids that the promised trip next month they’d been looking forward to all year is cancelled.

Edit: This might have been ambiguous. I was trying to highlight how big corporations can survive by doing what big business does to protect the bottom line. Small businesses, obviously, can’t do that.

The point is that the company being sued has to pay those millions in the first place. The law firm does pay itself rather well for that work, but I’d consider class actions to be one of the more defensible legal actions.

The “Contain, Verify, Explain Foundation”, dedicated to the study of and protection against cyber-anomalies

Satin undies?

Close. Soiled undies.

Is it me or does that post author name look like a lot of the bots named “WordWordNumber”?

Edit: let me rephrase. Your original comment didn’t mention what you did. You made a snide remark about reading comprehension when you didn’t even reread your own comment. That’s just hostile for no reason.

– Original reply:

Because that’s what the other person asked. “Secluded myself” isn’t really an answer. I can seclude myself counting leaves in the forest, lay down and stare at the ceiling, walk circles around my room and try to make them perfectly circular…

It’s not that you have to tell; saying “I don’t know” or “I’d rather not say” would be an answer too. But you made a snide remark regarding the other person’s reading comprehension (why?) and fail to properly comprehend their question (or mine).

I’m autistic, which results in me deconstructing and analysing jokes instead of laughing (often to the displeasure of the people who think I didn’t find their joke funny – I promise, if I’m taking the time to disassemble your joke that means I found it funny and want to understand why).

The flipside is that I occasionally crack out carefully engineered bangers, because I understand the importance of a setup, building expectations and putting the brain on one track of thought, then capping it off with the “derailing” of those expectations. The shorter you can get it, the less time the brain has to get off track on its own, diminishing that derailing effect.

Of course, getting the inspiration and figuring out a way to put that into practice is it’s own unpredictable beast, and some jokes just fall flat despite my effort. Sometimes I misread the room or the audience too. I’m not a particularly talented comedian.

But at least I’m not a setup without a punchline.

A particularly nasty version of absurdism, more like. If nothing matters in the grand scheme, might as well go and make the best of your life. Except most people can still acknowledge that empathy does matter for your life at least, while he doesn’t give a shit.

A definitional concession to make exponential series work. xⁿ for n ∈ (0, 1) is the nth root of x, which gets ever closer to 1, while x^n for n < 0 equals 1÷ (xⁿ). Between them lies the neutral element with respect to multiplication 1 (neutral meaning that x × 1 = x; a factor of one doesn’t actually change anything). Hence, x⁰ = 1.

That rule breaks down for x = 0, obviously. Negative exponents don’t work at all because they’re division by zero, while all exponents > 0 result in 0. Semantically, 0⁰ probably should be undefined, but the neutral element rule does provide a definition. There also isn’t really any reasonable use case where you’d need that to be consistent with anything else.

…and what did you do while high?

Not me. I don’t care. The version of me that I’ve got right now is alright, I’m in no hurry to “find myself”. Either I’ll come across myself by chance or it can’t have been that important.

huffs excessive amounts of Copium

It’s a cargo cult. They don’t understand, but they like what it promises, so they blindly worship. Sceptics become unbelievers, visionaries become prophets and collateral damages become sacrifices.

They may use different terms, but if some job became obsolete, that’s just the price of a better future to them. And when the day of Revelation comes, they’ll surely be among the faithful delivered from the shackles of human labour to enjoy the paradise built on this technology. Any day now…