nfh

if Pablo Escobar was still alive, he’d probably have been appointed head of the DEA

Cost cutting has made fast food restaurants worse in ways that aren’t essentially shrinkflation. Restaurants like Taco Bell cutting their beef with cheaper ingredients (though apparently it’s only 12% fillers). Chipotle giving you more of the cheap ingredients like rice, and less of the good stuff like guac. Even slower service and longer lines because they don’t want to pay as much staff during peak hours.

Smaller (especially privately-held) chains have been able to buck the trend, but cutting quality has been a popular option as of late.

Would a bunch of users entering garbage data, with not all of them being totally obvious, make it harder to sell that data? Possibly.

I’m excited for the fun gopher hole you’re gonna go down

Alright folks, in 2025 we’re bringing Gopher back

I’ll be honest, I never cared for him, and it was clear to me from the start that his optimized to maximize engagement with his target demographic vs being personally authentic.

He’s revealed himself to be worse than I’d ever expected.

It’s never too late

We can’t prove that the world we live in wasn’t created last Thursday, with our memories, the growth rings in trees, and so on created by a (near) omnipotent trickster to deceive us. But science and rationality give us tools for determining what’s worth taking seriously, and sorting out the reasonable, but unconfirmed, claims from the unverifiable hogwash.

Hasbro announces Magic the Gathering’s latest expansion, Universes Beyond: World War II!

I knew about ad blockers before I started using one. Small sidebar or header ads weren’t really enough to convince me I needed one.

Now the Internet has so many popups, ads, aggressive video players, requests to accept cookies, all because some people figured out how to make websites more profitable by making them worse. It’s sad, really. The Internet of old was great.

And even then it’s probably not a hard rule as much as a good heuristic: the older a source is, the more careful you should be citing it as an example of current understanding, especially in a discipline with a lot of ongoing research.

If somebody did good analysis, but had incomplete data years ago, you can extend it with better data today. Maybe the ways some people in a discipline in the past can shed light on current debates. There are definitely potential reasons to cite older materials that generalize well to many subjects.

Andrew Conru, founder of AdultFriendFinder, apparently.

Not well known, but good to name and shame anyway.

Or nationalized.

Knowledge is what happens when you’ve evaluated enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis that something is false. If you haven’t seen the evidence, but still think it’s true or false (you don’t lack belief), then you have a belief about it. As such, knowledge is a type of belief with extra justification.

If I’ve reviewed enough evidence I’m comfortable saying I can reject the null hypothesis, that is I have a belief that it’s knowledge, I’ll call it as such. If I haven’t, I’ll couch my confidence in my belief accordingly.

I’d stage a Research Ethics Committee, to make sure their data collection methods don’t have any unforeseen consequences for people who haven’t consented to them

I think he might actually be worse off with a hundred billion pennies for the full billion dollars. Not only would dealing with that many pennies in one place legitimately be challenging, but having that percentage of the total pennies in circulation suddenly removed could be enough to get the US Government to reconsider deprecating them, leaving him with the bag.

I say give him the full billion in pennies.

PiHole and a TailScale exit node so you can use it for DNS whether or not you’re on your home network.

I’ve been thinking about this for a minute, and I think a good standard here is making a list of (relatively) non-overlapping causes of death that have claimed over a billion human lives.

Infectious disease is almost certainly at least one entry on this list, primarily secular war as well, starvation/famine probably a few times over, cancer and heart disease are probably distinct entries, and death attempting to grow/hunt food. I suspect deaths by religion could be on that list as well, but it’s the entry I’m least confident in.

In every sense of the word, this is a bad list to be on, but I don’t think religion is near the biggest culprit on the list, even if you do a lot of special pleading, and group all deaths by religious cause together, but split each disease, war, etc up for some reason.

I mean some states have odd year elections for local issues, etc. After the precious election, they should do their diligence to find anyone who should no longer be registered, like people who they believe have died, or shouldn’t have been eligible to register. Anyone purged should get a courtesy notice via email or mail just in case.

Recounts happen sometimes, etc, so anytime between mid November and early January seems perfectly reasonable to me.

In my mind, the issue is that cars are incentivizing drivers to use high attention controls like touchscreens while driving. Actions that need to happen while driving, whether they’re directly vehicle operation, or something like air conditioning or media volume, should be simple low-attention controls, ideally with tactile feedback. Keep it simple for your brain, keep focus on the road.

I have volume buttons, skip, jump backwards, and a numpad on my dash that interact with phone apps via Bluetooth. Maybe there’s a physical (or voice) control that can be added to the dash or wheel to interact with map/navigation apps. Using the touchscreen is dangerous, and a car shouldn’t provide a reason to do so. I’d rather solve the problem another way.

But if a touchscreen is required to update the clock, or do Bluetooth pairing, that’s fine. There’s no reason to need to do those while driving.