optimalquiet

A major example is the US drinking age. Federal highway funds, which provide money for interstate highways, major US routes, etc, are partially contingent on states (who are given authority over alcohol laws both by the general police power and the 21st Amendment) setting the minimum age for the legal purchase of alcohol at 21. The National Minimum Drinking Age Act withheld 10 percent of highway funds from states that didn't comply. The fact that it wasn't 100% let the Supreme Court allow it to slide, but eventually all the states did comply, and effectively the US has a drinking age set by the Federal government instead of the states even though the states technically have the power to set an age themselves.

The Federal government using the withholding of funds to get the states to do what it wants is a well-documented phenomenon.

I've found they are increasingly doing this in ways that are somewhat creepy. For instance, you might share something, and the AI will say, "One of the things I most frequently notice..." or "What I often feel..."

It used to be that the "you are not an I and you must not pretend to have experiences" training that produced the "As a Large Language model, I don't have experiences like humans do, but..." in replies I remember from the early days of LLM chatbots kept these to the minimum.

But one of the things I most frequently notice is that LLMs increasingly make those claims, about things that are very obviously out of their wheelhouse as far as even theoretical experiences, like pretending to have played a video game.

If Canada is similar to the US, a mixture of SMS, Discord, and iMessage. The kids use Snapchat, your aunt uses Facebook messenger or iMessage, and occasionally someone might be into Telegram although mostly scammers. Teams or Slack for official workplace or college chat groups. GroupMe was popular for college groups when I was an undergraduate though that’s long since gone by the wayside.

Most importantly, if you show up as a “green bubble” person you will be lightly teased about it, including on a date.

Interesting, I’m an American English speaker but that’s how it feels natural to me to use dashes. Em-dashes with no spaces feels wrong for reasons I can’t articulate. This first usage—in this meandering sentence—feels bossy, like I can’t have a moment to read each word individually. But this second one — which feels more natural — lets the words and the punctuation breathe. I don’t actually know where I picked up this habit. Probably from the web.

Inevitably windows search fails to highlight what I’m looking for almost all of the time, and often doesn’t even find it at all. If I have an application installed, it picks the installer in the downloads folder. If I don’t have an app installed, it searches Bing for it. Sometimes it even searches when I do have the application installed!

Microsoft seems not to believe that users want to use search primarily as an application launcher, which is strange because Mac, Linux, and mobile have all converged on it.

My interpretation of what happened here is that a legislator who opposed the bill inserted the names of the lobbyists as a joke against the bill, which has now paid off. The article says that the original list did not include the names, they were added during the legislative amendment process by a legislator.

While corporate authorship of bills is a concern, I don’t think this particular mishap is a direct result of that and in fact seems to have been an attempt to subtly criticize it.

You’re entitled to your experience and spirituality, but nothing about Twitter or Bluesky has ever struck me as ‘divine.’ Rather than being a nihilistic flight from value, I think there’s far more value to be found in cultivating friendships and companions in the real world. There’s more divinity in a single hug from my wife than in everything I’ve ever read on the internet. Words have to bend to flesh at some point; we are embodied creatures. I’ve found my mental health improving massively when I take a step back from the firehose of social media and focus instead projects where I can use my hands and spending time with people I can eat with and hug.

Not quite. In order to make TLS certs work on a per-site basis, requests sent over HTTPS also include a virtual host indicator in cleartext that shows the hostname of the site you’re trying to connect to, so if the IP on the other end is hosting multiple domains it can find the right cert. For this reason some people feel that DNS over TLS is pretty pointless as a privacy measure.

Yeah -- it's happening as we speak.

For what it’s worth, I’m a student, and have had the benefit of seeing both the AWS and Azure web interfaces for the first time in the past couple of years. Azure was astoundingly more intuitive and less bizarre than AWS as someone with no experience working with the big clouds.

Even doing classwork involving AWS was an exercise in frustration. I couldn’t actually believe the sort of button trails and on-hover menus I was told to use to access various functions.

I don’t have the experience to evaluate the technical functionality, or whether AWS’s interface is better for experienced users, but I can definitely say it was far less approachable as a novice.

> Imagine what we could have had in our communities if we hadn’t wasted $3,000,000,000,000 on Iraq.

What we would've had was $3,000,000,000,000 less debt, and still no splash pad filtration.

The Iraq war was put on the credit card.

Microblogging is one of the many aspects of the internet where the only winning move is not to play.

I see it used more often by hobbyists interested in crowding out alternatives they don’t like. “Why are you using snap? Flatpak is the future!” “What, you’re still using Xorg in nvidia? But Wayland is the future!”

And I like flatpak and Wayland! But the contexts I’m discussing aren’t “We’re creating the future of x at Company Y”… of course that’s a sales pitch that can be ignored. But there is a context where it’s more like bullying.