I feel like this objection makes the most sense in a particular context, like a culture that views beef as some sort of prize, or a marker of being ahead in the competition for social status with one’s neighbors. (U.S. culture very much views it that way.)

If Person A eats only 1 unit of beef per month, what would make dropping to zero “unfair” is if we assume that they are too poor to afford more (“losing”), or engaging in asceticism, but holding on to that one unit as a vital connection to the status game, or a special treat that they covet.

But what if it’s just food? Person A may just not be that into beef, and probably not even miss it, just like Person B probably also wouldn’t notice a difference between 100 units and 99 units. In the sense that neither A or B really would notice a small change all that much, it’s fair

Anyway, random thoughts from somebody who thinks steak is just kind of meh.

I appreciate the gamer aesthetic when scientists need to buy gear with the power to run scientific calculations for relatively cheap. The RGB lights under the case windows bring a bit of pizzazz to the laboratory.

Different strokes for different folks, as they say. That’s precisely one of the things that I value most in social media— exposure to people and ideas outside of my day-to-day experience. I don’t understand the femcel memes, or c/ich_iel, for example, but that’s what makes them so fascinating. I was thinking of leaving Reddit even before the API fiasco, because the feed changed daily while not changing at all. I didn’t find it valuable to see the same breaking news story posted to 15 different subreddits, nor the same “Men of Reddit: Do you pee through the underwear flap, or over the waistband?” question posted (literally! I watched and counted one day!) every 5 minutes. I didn’t replace Reddit with Lemmy, I just stopped using the former when Apollo stopped working. Lemmy drew me in over the course of a couple of months. It’s quiet, but you can have conversations instead of shouting into the void.

For me, Lemmy is far more successful.

That just makes it worse! (From my point of view here.) People behaving reprehensibly because an authority figure asked them to do it? That’s just the Milgram experiment, but without any apparent hesitation!

The Milgram experiment. The Zimbardo prison experiment. The bystander effect. At the end of the day, humans are just monkeys with smart watches. As social primates, it’s really hard to be the one to stand up against the crowd. Our brains decide how to act based largely on the reactions of other humans around us.

It’s disheartening.

All logic breaks down at the grocery store.

One of life’s profound truths!

I used to think that as well. But what if it turned out that over-showering was actually the thing that makes you stinky?

I’m picturing testicles wearing a cowboy hat.

Simple: Visibility and speed. You look at a parking spot, and if it’s empty, it’s definitely empty. It’s virtually guaranteed to stay that way as you back in, so you don’t need to monitor what’s in it. No cars, cyclists, pedestrians, emergency vehicles, et cetera, are going to enter the parking stall as you back in. That’s not true of a street or lane when you back out into it. It’s often difficult to even see traffic coming, as backup cameras don’t have the wide-angle coverage, and there’s always the possibility that you didn’t see somebody.

As a result of both of those factors, with practice, backing in can be done in seconds, and pulling out is a breeze. Pulling in forward is a breeze, but for most people, backing out is a slower, more nerve-wracking maneuver. (At least that’s my assumption from watching how long it takes.) On the other hand, the people who just YOLO it back out into traffic are psychopaths.

You can use UTC, right now. Nothing’s stopping you.

I would go further. Most cars don’t belong in places where people live. They injure and kill people on the regular, the noise pollution causes mental and physical health problems, the light pollution disrupts sleep, the particulate pollution causes cardiovascular disease and dementia, as well as damaging ecosystems, driving adds to obesity and issues related to a sedentary lifestyle, the physical space they take leads to sprawl and ecosystem destruction, and the sprawl also bankrupts cities and towns. As well, driving in traffic just plain sucks as an activity, and makes people angry and miserable.

And you should back in.

That’s the leftist ideal. (Which, true, few people fully reach.)

It’s a good question, though people tend to treat it as a thought-terminating cliché rather than exploring the implications. Why should murderers be punished, actually? Enacting punishment is an external incentive, a stimulus, supposedly structured to make the cost to the potential murderer higher than the benefit they hope to get by killing. Belief in punishment, therefore, is consistent with the non-free will position. But if there’s no free will, then why not instead try to “solve” murder, and not have murderers anymore, by discovering the root causes that drive people to murder, and mitigating them? We’d all be better off!

On the other hand, free will implies that the mechanism of punishment may or may not be punishing to the murderer. We don’t know what they feel in response to stimulus; they have free will! Like in the story of Br’er Rabbit, trying to determine a foolproof method of punishment that’s hateful to the murderer is an exercise in futility, since we can’t know their mind.

It seems to be that it depends entirely on the intent of the simulation: an experiment to find out what happens after setting the clockwork in motion, or a carefully stage-managed zoo. I say that because the partial simulation would require complete understanding of and integration with consciousness a priori, intent to mess around with conscious minds, and the Great Makers giving a shit whether we knew it was a simulation or not. That is, some sort of cosmic fishbowl for minds.

I’ll go extra-spicy and point out that there’s no such thing as “ownership” as we know it without government. Legal-wonkishly, ownership is enforceable, transferrable, exclusive title to property. I can “own” land that I’m only physically present on for a few days per year because my name is on a piece of paper in a file cabinet in a government office, and it’s backed up by a court system and police force that’s constituted and willing to enforce my title.

I just mention it because a lot of the deregulation whiners are the same people as the “taxation is theft” whiners.

Steve Biko died in prison in 1977. There were a bunch of movies about Biko that came out in the late '80s to early '90s, the most famous was Cry Freedom starring Denzel Washington. Nelson Mandela was famously imprisoned, and released around that same time. My guess is that since most Americans don’t really pay deep attention to the news, especially world news, it just got all blended into a miasma of vague memories about some South African anti-apartheid activist.

Has it? My complaints are: I have to use VPN software for work that replaces /etc/resolve.conf with a symlink to another location, one that sandboxed snaps can’t access. There’s no way to grant them access; the “slots” that you can connect are fixed and pre-defined. You can’t even configure the file path; it’s defined right in the source code. Not even as a #define, but the string literal “/etc/resolve.conf”. That seems like poor practice, but I guess they’re not going for portability.

Also, I have /usr and /var on different media, chosen for suitability of purpose, and sized appropriately. Then, along comes snap, violating the File Hierarchy Standard by filling up /var with application software.

Minor annoyances are the ~/snap folder, and all of the mounted loopback filesystems which make reading the mtab difficult.

Thanks. That is what I’d expect, and highlights the disconnect I saw in this comment chain: I think what some other folks were trying (less-than-artfully) to say is that there’s a difference between what one might expect case-insensitive means as a computer programmer, and what one might expect case-insensitive to mean in human language. All three of those should be the same filename in fr_FR locale, since some French speakers consider diacritical marks to be optional in upper case. While that might be an edge case, it does exist. English is even worse, with a number of diacritical marks that are completely optional, but may be used to aid legibility, e.g. café, naïve, coöperation. (Whether that quirk is obvious or not, or whether it outweighs any utility of case-insensitivity is not something that I have a strong opinion on, though.)

I don’t have Windows here to test, so I keep wondering, are all of these forms the same?

• facture-février.pdf
• FACTURE-FÉVRIER.PDF
• FACTURE-FEVRIER.PDF