I’m generally anti-tipping since it gives shitty employers a fig leaf to pay their workers an unlivable wage, but I still tip if I’m at an establishment where workers depend on tips. The system ain’t their fault.

I’ve written a few popups. Yes, we are aware, I generally dismiss them too. They’re almost always an anti-pattern / anti-user design anyway, so I try to avoid them. They are, I think without exception, thought train breakers and annoyances, even in cases where they may actually be useful.

It makes sense to me to have low power chargers on a UPS. Once your power comes back online, it needs to deliver enough juice to power everything plugged into the UPS plus the battery charger. A fast charger would be more likely to trip a breaker.

Requests per second getting higher, and higher, then they level out – but the server is just barely hanging in there, frantically serving as many requests as it possibly can, and then all at once they come crashing down into warm, gentle waves of relaxing human pings.

Yeah I think so. Also checked with another browser and the page seems to be loading fine so I think whatever’s making the content disappear is on my end. I’ll make an edit.

EDIT: as of this edit the Wired page is loading normally, seems to be some plugin interference in my browser. I’ll leave this up just in case anyone wants a quick tutorial on how to defeat sloppy censorship, even though I don’t think that’s what’s happening here.

— ORIGINAL POST —

Thanks for copying the info. The mirrors are 429ing, and if I just open the Wired article, I don’t see the contents of the article, just the headers and footers.

Not sure if this is Wired’s attempt at a takedown or if I just have a bunch of plugins interfering with their site, I don’t visit often. However, the body of the article is still appears to be there in the page source. You can open the inspector by right-clicking and (in Firefox) clicking “Inspect”, then search the page source for your city.

I’m still working on my first one, apparently :/

N0o one is happy about this.

I am so mad right now

haha same. I went years knowing from technical osmosis that it meant “supporting other languages” but I never knew what it represented or why it had numbers in it. There are so many acronyms in tech I think inevitably some of them fall by the wayside for everyone.

Still at a loss as to what "“Sk8er Boi” is short for.

It insists upon itself.

I don’t think it’s as simple as there being “good people” and “bad people”, and that only the worst people are capable of extreme wealth. I think wealth just happens to some people. Some people are born into it, some stumble into it, a lot of people seek it out and a few of those people “succeed”, though I’d argue even then it’s mostly chance. Of the people who get substantial wealth, some give it away, some retire into a wealth cocoon and are never heard from again, some lose it, and some actively grow it because they love the feeling of gaining wealth.

I don’t know if it’s addictive in the same way that some chemicals are addictive, but I bet it’s addictive in the same way that gambling is addictive, and wealthy people can get hooked on the feeling of “winning” more wealth the same way people get addicted to slot machines. I also think that it’s not strictly wealth addiction, but power addiction, which is why some super wealthy people tend to extravagantly flaunt their power: building megaprojects, influencing or simply taking over governments, violating laws with impunity, forcing the working class to work in extreme conditions if not outright enslaving them, etc. The use of power is their drug and they won’t stop themselves because they can’t. Does that make them bad people? It makes them harmful people who need intervention, the same way an alcoholic needs intervention before they get behind a wheel. I feel bad for kids born into wealth, who never had the chance to just be a human without the veil of power being drawn between them and the rest of humanity. The Don Jr.'s of the world. That doesn’t excuse their actions, nor does it mean that they don’t need to be stopped. But I think it hurts us to think of them as fundamentally “bad” in the same way I think it’s unhelpful to categorize alcoholics as “bad”. The real horror is that the monsters are just like us, and treating wealth hoarders and power addicts like they’re a different, less human kind of human is the same thing that they do to rationalize their own abuses.

I’m unhappy at how hard it’s become for me to tell the difference between Weird Al and Weird AI. When I was a kid it was easy because it was always Weird Al. Now every time I see either I have to take a second, closer look to convince myself I got it right, and sometimes even then I get it wrong. And I resent that.

I think oppressors have a conscience already, they’ve just been taught to ignore it or accept exceptions to it. Or rather, I think it’s more that oppressive leaders are in on the game, but the vast majority of their coalition has to be hoodwinked into following along. Look at the modern American news media machine: we kind of forget how expensive it is because it’s also profitable, but that’s a huge amount of concerted effort directed at making white americans afraid of and angry at non-white people. If people were just naturally OK with oppression none of that would be necessary, they would just do it and not bother trying to justify it with scare tactics. It’s also fragile to argument, which is why books get banned and civil rights leaders get assassinated.

Have there been cycle breaks? I’m not trying to be combative but I am curious to know what examples you have in mind. I don’t think human history has ever seen a break in the cycle of violence as I would define it. The active bloodshed has waxed and waned over the centuries, or at least moved from place to place, but violent oppression has been alive and malignant in every chapter of human history that I can think of.

That’s a hard question and I don’t know. I don’t know that a strictly nonviolent movement can work if there’s a critical mass of oppressors who believe that those they oppress deserve to be oppressed. I think the theory of nonviolent resistance is built on an assumption that, deep down, we all know that what oppressors do is wrong and that there is a contrivance of convenience that allows oppressors to except themselves, or simply ignore that knowledge. I don’t know if that deep down knowledge is universal. But I know from personal experience it’s quite easy to ignore it, especially when one’s own life is hard, or when the oppression is mostly hidden from view, or simply when the problem of oppression seems overwhelming and unassailable. I believe that most people who don’t try to resist oppression either disapprove but feel helpless in the face of it, or they benefit from it and therefore try to justify it, or usually a combination of the two. If that belief is correct, then the answer I think is one of education. Give people the tools they need to fight nonviolently: Educate about local elections, form citizen watchdog groups, show how propaganda uses common tropes to reinforce ideas about the “inherent criminality” of the oppressed, teach the history of how oligarchs use flunkies like trump to implement favorable policies while deflecting blame onto minorities, and the million other things that people need to know to have a well functioning society. Use shame to dislodge the privileged from their comfortable niches and force them to answer for the consequences of their actions or lack thereof.

I think, especially now in America, this seems so far away that even to seriously consider it seems fanciful. Maybe it is. Maybe we’re at the point where violence is necessary to jerk us back from the cliff of autocracy. It certainly seems like trump and his goons want a fight, and it seems likely that sooner or later they’ll get one. But I don’t think violence can be solved with violence, and even if America goes through some violent convulsions I don’t think they’ll end us in a place where we aren’t doing violence to each other. Nonviolence requires nonviolence.

Yeah. The question is whether to work to continue the cycle or work to break it.

There’s something nice and showerthought-y about a relationship so mundane and inconsequential that it barely registers as a discrete idea being rendered as a factoid.

Around 2000, graphene was a very hot material. I was pretty excited by it and thought carbon-based high-Farad capacitors would essentially replace lead acid and lithium ion batteries in most consumer electronics within a decade, maybe two.