corrral

I gave up on this years ago when I realized the only valuable things coming to my email were transactional emails, anyway. The rest is... newsletters and shit.

If you're only checking your email to use the "search" function for something very specific, or to find an expected transactional email sent within the last minute, there's not much reason to bother setting up filters.

Text is probably the best way for non-friends to get through to me, because I mostly ignore email and calls since they're overrun with crap, though the current campaign season is really trying to make text useless, too. So many damn fundraising texts, usually from candidates in other states entirely.

> Doctors and soldiers get such cool uniforms, but us programmers are just business casual.

Programmers' uniforms are excessively-expensive hiking clothes, or selvedge jeans with flannel and full-grain leather boots, ideally in a work- or jump-boot style.

Yeah but we can't expect them to be able to handle a problem that ( checks notes ) many other kinds of business have been solving since the earliest days of commerce.

I'd be more sympathetic to this argument if all that info weren't a couple subpoenas or search-warrants away at most—in fact, the government can often just pay for access to these things, usually with the implicit threat that if access isn't granted at a reasonable rate, the business may find itself in some trouble. Like, if we banned private parties from collecting tons of info about us, then maybe that concern would have some merit, but we don't, so it doesn't.

Point is, they don't need a national ID to pin you to some cell phone records that place you at location X at time Y, to get your CC usage data, to find out pretty much anything they like, to connect that to a license plate, to snag toll and other photo records of the vehicle from various sources, et c., and the only reason there are any restrictions whatsoever on that ability isn't because we don't have a national ID, but because we're not yet living under a tyranny. Difficulty IDing people isn't the limiting factor.

The public-private hybrid ID we have now is terrible and also carries all the same risks under tyranny as a national ID, which is at least not-terrible.

It's not like having a national ID would mean all the spying-data companies collect on us would automatically be shared with the government—more than it already is, anyway. It'd be the same as now, except with fewer ID-related problems for people.

If you want anyone to find your project, you're gonna need to at least mirror on GH regardless.

This is a difference in attitude between Americans and French when describing their countries: the French tend to regard overseas territories as more vitally part of their country than Americans do. Not sure why, possibly it was a deliberately-cultivated attitude by the government at some point, or maybe the difference arose organically. Meanwhile I think a lot of Americans kinda-unconsiously barely even consider Hawaii and Alaska really parts of America, let alone the numerous non-state territories.

Actually, now that I think about it, the sense of "Metropolitan France" is very similar to the term "the continental United States"

Toys—even Lego—are damn near free if you aren't picky and will accept whatever you can find used. Often they're literally free. Kids often outgrow toys before they're worn out or broken, and for some reason people hate giving used toys as gifts so there are just tons and tons of them always being dumped on the used market, with relatively little demand.

You could set out with a $20 bill and outfit a 6-year-old with a totally adequate set of toys, from scratch, by just walking a neighborhood on a yard sale day.

I don't get it either. Every single non-Ikea flat-pack thing I've assembled has had much worse instructions than Ikea. Plus usually been more expensive and lower quality than the Ikea equivalent.

An aid for anyone else who found the usage "knowledges" unfamiliar and distracting:

Knowl"edge (?), n.

2. That which is or may be known; the object of an act of knowing; a cognition; -- chiefly used in the plural.

There is a great difference in the delivery of the mathematics, which are the most abstracted of knowledges. Bacon.

Knowledges is a term in frequent use by Bacon, and, though now obsolete, should be revived, as without it we are compelled to borrow "cognitions" to express its import. Sir W. Hamilton.

To use a word of Bacon's, now unfortunately obsolete, we must determine the relative value of knowledges. H. Spencer.

- Webster's 1913

I figured it was some probably-from-critical-theory-because-aren't-they-always liberal-artsism, but looks like it's just an unusual-bordering-on-archaic sense.

> In fact, they (partly) ate passenger pigeons out of existence.

Mann's 1491 suggests this may be a myth, as passenger pigeon remains are nearly non-existent in native refuse piles, so they don't seem to have been a normal part of their diet (at least, before contact). Rather, he paints both their incredible abundance and subsequent demise as consequences of contact with Europe: the boom in the passenger pigeon population may have been a sign of an ecosystem experiencing a catastrophe, resulting from large areas of cultivated land falling out of use as entire cities were depopulated by disease, causing a temporary but enormous increase in easy, available calories for animals positioned to take advantage of it, and of course their decline and extinction is entirely a post-contact event.

[EDIT] I misread you as having written that the native people contributed to the demise of the pigeons, but I think the info's still broadly relevant so I'll let the post stand.

Lakka boots Linux on an RPi and loads a (DRM—not X or Wayland) GUI in under 5s. Off an SDCard, at that.

I wish I could figure out the secret handshake that gets you hired to one prominent, presumably high-paid, spitballin' and chattin' and "idea person" role after another, despite a track record of apparent mediocrity in actual results. Seems like it'd be really fun and—plainly—not very hard work.

> Whereas I now struggle to find pictures I took 7 years ago.

The only reasonable solution today with the current volume of photos is to put them all in some service and let it use machine learning to auto-tag everything for you, and compile highlight reels, organize things by person/location/event, et c.

As with everything else, the only solution that doesn't eat tons of time (so, will actually be accessible to most people, who'll neglect hand-organizing thousands of photos) is turning out to be search, and letting AI find the important stuff.

I took it as:

Prove (?), v. t.

1. To try or to ascertain by an experiment, or by a test or standard; to test; as, to prove the strength of gunpowder or of ordnance; to prove the contents of a vessel by a standard measure.

Thou hast proved mine heart. Ps. xvii. 3.

(Webster's 1913)

Which makes sense to me. Try something you think might work, then test it—is just plain old experimental science.

The new ones are much clearer than they used to be in the 80s and 90s.

I'm convinced the old-style ones were the reason I buried the needle the one time I was given a cognitive test that specifically tested spatial reasoning. The old sets' instructions were basically 3d spot-the-difference puzzles, in which orientation might even change between states, so they were pretty much training for that kind of test.

The new ones have a little of that, but a lot more arrows pointing things out, little insets highlighting important parts, et c. Plus they put the pieces in numbered bags so you don't have them all out at once, for medium-sized or larger sets! Much, much easier than they used to be.

Flip side is the old ones used larger pieces, on average. The modern sets are all fiddly, tiny bricks, which does make them a little harder to assemble (and much harder—nearly impossible—to repair from memory if they're damaged during play)