For some reason, that one didn’t annoy me as much. Maybe I saw that season only after it came out on DVD, and thought “yeah, this is dated, but I see how it landed when it was still fresh. This season, I’m watching the episodes within a day or two of them coming out, so it feels like getting stale bread at the bakery.
So they name this episode Parasites Regained.
Not sure if everyone here knows that Paradise Regained is Milton’s sequel to his earlier Paradise Lost.
A big part of why this season feels stale is that its topical references are several years old. Like Dune and Ivermectin, in this episode. Was this season written two years ago and is only being released now?
Yeah, there’s a lot to be said for letting the hosting be done by people who know what they’re doing.
I splurged for my birthdays a few years ago and got a Waterman Expert, and then a Carène. Combine that with a Clairefontaine notebook, and it’s completely frictionless, like writing on room-temperature ice.
All your base are belong to us!
What I really want is the corporate phone numbers so I can call the fucking jackass CEO at home and direct my fuming fucking self-righteous anger right under his stupid worthless ass. Because I’m well aware that they record calls and don’t give one flying fuck about our complaints.
For that matter, I want to see the productivity data on the top executives. AIUI, companies like Amazon monitor and push employees to get maximum productivity. Okay, so if Bob the warehouse worker takes an extra five minutes on his bathroom break and misses his last delivery of the day, that’ll piss off the customer and cost Amazon, say, $100 in sales. But by the same logic, if Andy Jassy takes an extra five minutes on his bathroom break and doesn’t finish everything on his daily to-do list, that might cost the company $1M. So all the more reason to monitor his movements to make sure he’s not slacking off.
I do appreciate that recent versions of Android (and iOS, I think?) allow granular control over permissions, so you can gleefully shout “fuck you” as you fail to grant notification permission to some game.
You can just tape a maxi-pad under each armpit.
AIUI (but IANAL), the bit on bills that says “Legal tender for all debts, public and private” means that if you owe someone $5, and you hand them a $5 bill, then you have discharged your obligation. If the other person doesn’t accept cash, too bad; you tried to pay what you owe, and if they don’t like cash, they can’t demand that you pay by check, or in Euros, or whatever.
What it doesn’t mean, though, is that a business can refuse to deal in cash. If a shop wants to be paid before they make you a latte, that’s not a debt, and they can demand that you pay electronically or not at all.
So while AFAIK (again, IANAL) cashless businesses are legal in the US, I personally don’t like them because that’s a form of discrimination against poor and homeless people. Plus, cash is more private.
I prefer the feel of a fountain pen, myself.
Don’t listen to the raven. Switch to BSD!
When the Internet was created, not only did phones not have batteries, they had their own power grid, separate from that used by other appliances.
That 15% battery status is giving me anxiety by proxy.
The algorithm decides what you read and how you engage, even if it’s negative content or something bad for your mental health.
This may be the wrong place to post this, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. “Algorithm” isn’t a dirty word. And in fact, IMHO Mastodon could benefit from a few alternatives to its most-recent-first algorithm.
For instance, I might want to see posts by emergency services in my area first, followed by posts by friends, and posts by a bot that posts a cat picture every minute further down. Or someone might be going off on a rant, and I’d like to turn their firehose of posts down to a trickle for a few hours. Or maybe I’d like Mastodon to just stop showing me anything after a few hours of activity, to encourage me to take a break.
The reason Twitter’s, Facebook’s, algorithms are evil is that they encourage you to do things you wouldn’t want to do, and because they show you content you don’t want. Not because they’re algorithms.
In a perfect world, every user on every instance would be able to choose how posts are presented. But that may be too computationally expensive, especially for large instances, especially when you start trying to figure out things like the mood of a post. But maybe each instance could decide which algorithm it wants to use, and user can migrate from one instance to another, depending whether they like how things are presented.
Also known as the Wal-Mart business model.