Repeating what they heard is very different from automatically processing the chat to harvest personal information about the participants.

Just because some data is publicly available doesn’t mean all processing of that data is legal and moral.

You’re both getting side-tracked by this discussion of recording. The recording is likely legal in most places.

It’s the processing of that unstructured data to extract and store personal information that is problematic. At that point you go from simply recording a conversation of which you are a part, to processing and storing people’s personal data without their knowledge, consent, or expectation.

There are LED bars for mounting in your rear windows to display text to those behind you

Gay.

It’s the Gay Intersex Marxist Program. Obviously.

This is an outrage!

Coq was such an excellent name. Short, memorable, unique, related to its origins and logo, as well as funny.

Aluminium smelting is so energy intensive that Iceland, a country with a population of less than 400 000, is the world’s 12th largest producer of it, even though the raw materials aren’t mined there. Iceland just has cheap geothermal and hydroelectric power.

Any url that ends in .io is pronounced as if it was Italian.

One common misconception about meditation is that meditation is and end goal, not a practice. That to meditate is to sit down and have your brain be quiet, and if you can’t do that, your session was a failure.

But that’s like saying weight lifting is about deadlifting your body weight, and any session you don’t manage do that was a failure. That is something you might be able to do after years of training. But you start with the smaller weights, learning form and technique, setting reasonable goals, and find a practice that you can make a habit out of. Because a five minute walk every day beats a day at the gym/retreat once a year.

You are stuck with yourself for the rest of your life. So just like when you have a coworker or classmate that you don’t like but must work with, you just have to get a working relationship going where you can get stuff done and not fight.

Try to not get annoyed at yourself, reward good behavior, be kind even when you don’t deserve it, be the bigger person etc.

More generally, feelings do not care about facts. We must accept how we feel, even if those feelings don’t “make sense”. Trying to reason with feelings is a fools errand.

That doesn’t mean we can’t change how we feel. It just doesn’t happen by denying reality.

A simple experiment to get an intuitive understanding of pulleys:

Take a piece of string and hold one end in your right hand, then hold your left hand higher and let the string run over it and hang down.

Now as you move your right hand up or down, the free end will move the same distance. But if you move your left hand up or down, the free end must move twice the distance, because you have string on either side of the hand that must both move that distance. So you are amplifying the movement, getting twice the movement at half the force.

If instead you wanted to amplify the force, as in a pulley, then stand on the free end of the string (so it’s no longer free) and pull down with your right hand. You are now amplifying the force exerted on your left hand, because it moves only half the distance of the right, so you get double the force. And this is exactly how a pulley works. Add more loops to get even more force at the cost of even more movement.

I figured this out while playing with the cats, and it made pulleys just make sense. Hopefully it can do the same for someone else :)

Or it measured how rare it was for them to get candy. The most interesting thing about the experiment is honestly the many ways in which it was flawed.

Then change the keyboard shortcuts of your terminal so that it does that. If you can’t, then switch to a terminal that lets you change the keyboard shortcuts.

A neat thing is that a lot of command line programs use readline. So learning and configuring it will also be useful in for example the Python REPL and calc.

Here are some neat configuration options you can put in ~/.inputrc

set completion-ignore-case on
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
set completion-prefix-display-length 9
set blink-matching-paren on
set mark-symlinked-directories on

And if you are a sensible person who is used to vim

set editing-mode vi
set show-mode-in-prompt on

Pigeons are actually a domesticated animal that used to be bred for (among other things) food. So you re-domesticate a few of them, and then eat their offspring which you feed household scraps.

You might also save on heating in the winter by having larger cattle in your house and sleeping on a loft above them.

Pretty much all Germans with any experience post WW2 were in some way nazis. As I understand it, you had to be a party member to hold any important job.

Something like an actual true NATO-nazi conspiracy is how nazi chief of staff and war criminal Franz Halder ended up avoiding the Nuremberg trials and working with the US Army Historical Division and the coming founder of the CIA to create the myth of a clean and non-political Wehrmacht.

But any reasonable person will understand that that was an enemy-of-my-enemy kind of deal. (We all know NATO are secretly Islamists as proven by Operation Cyclone.)

I could change it in the settings. I just hadn’t used it in a long time and it took me a bit to realize that this default was why I suddenly had trouble telling the tools apart.

But if the differences are that big I’m probably still on 2. Looking forward to seeing what 3 will bring then :)

I found Inkscape when I needed to make some diagrams, and even though that’s not really what it’s for, it blows dedicated diagram tools out of the water.

Inkscape is actually fun to use because it strikes a nice balance between easy and powerful.

My only problem with GIMP lately has been that by default it’s used monochrome tool icons which are really hard to tell apart. Which seems like a real form-over-function decision (likely made by the distribution though).

My experience with Jetbrains was that they did not rely on vendor lock-in, but on actually making a product worth paying for. I could move my projects away from their suite easily, the build tools and scripts where all third-party open-source. I just didn’t want to.

But perhaps things are different in other spaces. I can imagine using Kotlin might lock you in more.

Just shifting the tax burden from salaries toward capital should make it less of a problem. When capital income is taxed less than salaries wealth concentration gets worse as workers are replaced.

But hey, GDP line goes up, so it must be good right?