public's recent activity

  1. Comment on US to require automatic emergency braking on new vehicles in five years in ~transport

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    Finally, a solution to the “I’m not bothering biking to work if it makes me sweaty” problem that doesn’t involve every business installing showers.

    bikes are great for fitness but eBikes are the practical answer for commuting

    Finally, a solution to the “I’m not bothering biking to work if it makes me sweaty” problem that doesn’t involve every business installing showers.

  2. Comment on Former US President Donald Trump will speak at the Libertarian National Convention in ~misc

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    Personal observation. Not sure how you found that implication when I gave one of the examples of a non-leftist exit from the LP being by people who made it and wish to sandbag competition.

    Personal observation.

    Not sure how you found that implication when I gave one of the examples of a non-leftist exit from the LP being by people who made it and wish to sandbag competition.

    1 vote

  3. Comment on Former US President Donald Trump will speak at the Libertarian National Convention in ~misc

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    You do it by offering louder cheers when he says what you want than what he consistently said before.

    You do it by offering louder cheers when he says what you want than what he consistently said before.

    1 vote

  4. Comment on Former US President Donald Trump will speak at the Libertarian National Convention in ~misc

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    If it were intentionally designed to attract them, the small-l libertarian philosophy would do considerably worse at attracting neurodivergent college boys than it currently does. That’s the time...

    If it were intentionally designed to attract them, the small-l libertarian philosophy would do considerably worse at attracting neurodivergent college boys than it currently does. That’s the time when they’re both old enough to vote and still in an environment where results at the stated objectives (think following the rubric on your term papers) closely align with success at larger goals (maximizing GPA). Structuring society in a meritocratic manner is the just thing to do.

    A lot of them who exit left do so because they’ve been hit with situations where the nominal medium goals don’t make a difference at the larger objectives. Most of those scenarios involve dating or job hunting where the stated requirements are both absurd and ignored—their entire purpose is to pretend to be objective when cutting the applicant pile down to something manageable.

    The non-left exits (they’re not necessarily to the right) are by those who found early success (regardless of it was earned, luck, or nepotism). It is no longer in their material interests to foster an environment where someone can beat them by being objectively better. Their exact destination depends on all kinds of factors, personality and industry where they “won” being the top two.

    5 votes

  5. Comment on Former US President Donald Trump will speak at the Libertarian National Convention in ~misc

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    I became blackpilled on the LP sometime between 2017 & 2020. As you said, a bunch of their base were happy to ride the Trump train. Unprincipled losers who have a compulsive desire to be part of...

    I became blackpilled on the LP sometime between 2017 & 2020. As you said, a bunch of their base were happy to ride the Trump train. Unprincipled losers who have a compulsive desire to be part of the winning team once it’s clear the perpetual underdog stays marginalized for a reason. It’s clear many of them want small government so they can by tyrants of their petty kingdoms, be the family or SMBs. Absolutely not lovers of liberty.

    The true believers are deeply unserious about realpolitik and electoral strategy. I have mixed feelings about them, depending on which area of government overreach has a been in their bonnets. Some days, it’s clear they’re insane. Others (more by outside events than any action of the LP core), you can’t help but agree that drivers licenses are fascism (or perhaps a Soviet database, depending on who has the microphone).

    5 votes

  6. Comment on Google lays off hundreds of ‘Core’ employees, moves some positions to India and Mexico in ~tech

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    They’ll have cashed out long before then. Their ownership stakes only vest in the immediate short term (or they have enough from the early returns that the potential increase in long term wealth...

    They’ll have cashed out long before then. Their ownership stakes only vest in the immediate short term (or they have enough from the early returns that the potential increase in long term wealth doesn’t mean much as front loading a smaller golden parachute)

    2 votes

  7. Comment on I made a mistake, I started using Reddit again in ~talk

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    Sounds like you have a good excuse to do some actual ban evasion.

    Sounds like you have a good excuse to do some actual ban evasion.

  8. Comment on Tildes Book Club second nominations thread in ~books

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    It’s available on the Kindle store, among other places. I don’t know how faithful it is in the special bits. However, those parts are nowhere as pervasive and central as in the House.

    It’s available on the Kindle store, among other places. I don’t know how faithful it is in the special bits. However, those parts are nowhere as pervasive and central as in the House.

    2 votes

  9. Comment on Tildes Book Club second nominations thread in ~books

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    It’s available on the Kindle store, among other places. I don’t know how faithful it is in the special bits. However, those parts are nowhere as pervasive and central as in the House. Why did this...

    It’s available on the Kindle store, among other places. I don’t know how faithful it is in the special bits. However, those parts are nowhere as pervasive and central as in the House.

    Why did this post here instead of your other comment? Surfboard must’ve acted up (or I didn’t notice which reply I clicked)

    1 vote

  10. Comment on Tildes Book Club second nominations thread in ~books

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    Since I saw House of Leaves floated as a suggestion, may I suggest The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall? It's 425 pages long but……50 of those pages are a flipbook of a shark swimming in to attack....

    Since I saw House of Leaves floated as a suggestion, may I suggest The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall?

    It's 425 pages long but……50 of those pages are a flipbook of a shark swimming in to attack.

    It's all about words, erased memories, and climbing through adult-size book forts with multiple cavernous chambers in hidden backrooms. Places the shark can't find you.

    3 votes

  11. Comment on Tildes Book Club second nominations thread in ~books

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    Replying here instead of as a top-level since it's not an actual book recommendation: is nonfiction welcome in this batch, or is this to solicit fiction only and nonfiction may be considered in a...

    Replying here instead of as a top-level since it's not an actual book recommendation: is nonfiction welcome in this batch, or is this to solicit fiction only and nonfiction may be considered in a future book club suggestion thread.

    1 vote

  12. Comment on Tildes Book Club second nominations thread in ~books

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    House of Leaves is quite possibly my favourite book. I'm certain someone has made an eBook out of scanned PDFs of the pages, but this is a book that cannot have the usual eBook experenice (let...

    House of Leaves is quite possibly my favourite book. I'm certain someone has made an eBook out of scanned PDFs of the pages, but this is a book that cannot have the usual eBook experenice (let alone an audiobook). It'd also be nice for laziness b/c I wouldn't have to read it for the first time. That takes a lot of work compared to pretty much all other books.

    3 votes

  13. Comment on US Congress approves bill banning TikTok unless Chinese owner ByteDance sells platform in ~tech

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    Building an echo chamber for you and your 100,000 closest friends is easy. Building recruitment funnels and megaphones that can reach normies is massively challenging. Some interlocking reasons...

    Building an echo chamber for you and your 100,000 closest friends is easy. Building recruitment funnels and megaphones that can reach normies is massively challenging. Some interlocking reasons why a group of malcontents may partner with potentially hostile foreign powers as a host.

    1. Access to the masses. The problem with building your own home is that it tends to be too focused to invite passers-by to stay. Sure, the forum may have an off-topic section, but that's for people who already know each other. Instead, like TikTok, there's plenty of other stuff—perhaps even competing mutually exclusive fringe narratives—on the platform. There's something for everyone here, so people might stop by your stall to chat.
    2. Money. The hosting bills for all the regular people's content and mass adoption require state-level actors or sympathetic billionaires (Musk using Twitter as his personal playground is the closest example) to foot.
    3. The sympathetic billionaire problem: just because the billionaire is willing to hand you a megaphone now doesn't mean they will still share their platform once our material interests diverge. Perhaps the ideology you wish to spread is anathema to the billionaire class.
    4. Ideological governments end up on the spectrum of the sympathetic billionaire problem to building yet another echo chamber no one visits. Even if they had the money of China, North Korea could not make the moderation decisions necessary to let TikTok grow in the west.
    5. Both American social media & TikTok run on an attention model where anyone who can rile up others is handed the megaphone. The big difference I see is the definition of "wrong kind of riled up" they use to decide when to remove someone's megaphone. TikTok will turn off the engagement for direct CCP criticism and for making it anything other than a happiness hug box. There's a reason people threaten they'll be "unalive" if this ban is implemented. Domestic social media isn't as ideologically driven in whose amplifier it turns off; it seems more to do with creating too much stink in newspaper headlines or advertiser-unfriendly content than any political strategy.

    Tangental to the original point of this post, but TikTok's straightforward censorship feels far more comprehensible: if you want to discuss the joy of s-x without silly substitution letters or whatever it was that happened on 4 June 1989, don't do it there. If you were to be targeted for muting (not necessarily YOU in particular, but your general content category got on the advertising shitlist for the week) by a domestic social platform, it would be impossible to distinguish from a string of bad luck.

    4 votes

  14. Comment on The tech baron seeking to “ethnically cleanse” San Francisco in ~life

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    Even when the nominal rates at the top bracket were 92%, the effective rate was closer to 46%. Significantly more than today, but not some mythical 90% that it was on paper.

    Even when the nominal rates at the top bracket were 92%, the effective rate was closer to 46%. Significantly more than today, but not some mythical 90% that it was on paper.

    7 votes

  15. Comment on The tech baron seeking to “ethnically cleanse” San Francisco in ~life

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    Citation needed about centrism being reactionary drivel.

    Citation needed about centrism being reactionary drivel.

    6 votes

  16. Comment on US Congress approves bill banning TikTok unless Chinese owner ByteDance sells platform in ~tech

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    The added specifics make Nara’s response tangential, at best, to my point.

    The added specifics make Nara’s response tangential, at best, to my point.

    1 vote

  17. Comment on On surveys in ~science

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    When I get e-mail survey reminders, I like to mark them as spam in hops it hurts future deliverability across all Gmail users. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Be doubly funny if it impacted...

    When I get e-mail survey reminders, I like to mark them as spam in hops it hurts future deliverability across all Gmail users. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Be doubly funny if it impacted order confirmations as well as the marketing spam.

    3 votes

  18. Comment on US Congress approves bill banning TikTok unless Chinese owner ByteDance sells platform in ~tech

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    If it weren’t for pages and groups, the blue app (as it’s called by Meta employees) would be about as culturally relevant as MySpace. I first noticed the shift sometime around 2015Q3. That’s when...

    If it weren’t for pages and groups, the blue app (as it’s called by Meta employees) would be about as culturally relevant as MySpace. I first noticed the shift sometime around 2015Q3. That’s when my news feed stopped being a place for fun(ny) updates from my friends. At first, it got taken over by wedding & baby photos from people I haven’t thought about in five years: their friends & family understandably went nuts on that like button and pushed the posts as highly engaging popular content to my screen. However, once the people who got married were married and the couples who wished to reproduce have reproduced, there wasn’t anything left from organic content made by real (former) acquaintances. Enter meme pages with names like “Memes so dank they make you commit suicide” and their associated groups. They filled the void of no new content when refreshing the News Feed. That era peaked by 2019 but had a long plateau before declining thanks to the pandemic. Now, it seems most pages have degraded to Taboola and Outbrain level chum boxen. There are still good groups to be found, but one must be on the lookout for new groups to join as the old ones become stale or taken over by political ranters.

    As our non-Fey friend pointed out, the main uses of the Blue App are as a neighborhood calendar and as the rolodex login service for Messenger. Anything in the News Feed is filler.

  19. Comment on US Congress approves bill banning TikTok unless Chinese owner ByteDance sells platform in ~tech

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    In the US, it depends on who won that various elections as well as the personality priority quirks of executive branch appointments; in (or from, if we’re discussing foreign influence) China, it’s...

    In the US, it depends on who won that various elections as well as the personality priority quirks of executive branch appointments; in (or from, if we’re discussing foreign influence) China, it’s the message Xi & his CCP friends wishes to push.

    2 votes

  20. Comment on US Congress approves bill banning TikTok unless Chinese owner ByteDance sells platform in ~tech

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    Perhaps there’s something in that briefing that would make me change my mind. Until it’s declassified and I can read it, it’s reflexive principled unthinking contrarianism from me. No amount of...

    Perhaps there’s something in that briefing that would make me change my mind. Until it’s declassified and I can read it, it’s reflexive principled unthinking contrarianism from me. No amount of “surely it must’ve been important” without actually sharing the contents will inspire reactions other than spreading further anti-government distrust.

    3 votes