This right here is probably my single biggest complaint with modern computing. It's a phenomenon I've taken to calling, in daily life, "tools trying to be too damn smart for their own good". I detest it. I despise it. Many of the evils of the modern state of tech--algorithmic feeds, targeted advertising, outwardly user-hostile software that goes incredible lengths to kneecap your own ability to choose how to use it--so, so much of it boils down to tools, things that should be extensions of their users' wills, being designed to "think" they know better what the user wants to do than the users themselves. I do not want my software, designed more often than not by companies with adversarial ulterior motives, to attempt to decide for me what I meant to watch, to listen to, to type, to use, to do. It flies in the face of the function of a tool, it robs people of agency, and above all else it's frankly just plain annoying having to constantly correct and work around these assumptions made based on spherical users in frictionless vacuums and tuned for either the lowest common denominator or whatever most effectively boosts some handful of corporate metrics-cum-goals (usually both).
I want my computer to do what I tell it to, not what it (or rather, some bunch of brainworm-infested parasites on society locked in a boardroom) thinks I want to do.
I can make exceptions for safety-critical applications. I do not begrudge my computer for requiring additional confirmation to rm -rf root, or my phone for lowering my volume when I have it set stupidly loud, or my car for having overly-sensitive emergency stop or adaptive cruise functions. These cases also all, crucially, have manual overrides. I can add --no-preserve-root, crank my volume right back up, and turn off cruise control and control my speed with the pedals. Forced security updates I only begrudge for their tendency to serve as a justification or cover for shipping anti-features alongside. Autocorrecting the word "fuck" out of my vocabulary, auto-suggesting niche music out of my listening, and auto-burying posts from my friends who don't play the game out of my communications are not safety-critical.
Let computers be computers. Let them do what I ask of them. Let me make the effort of telling them what that is.
Is that so much to ask>
That is perhaps the most insidious property of all when it comes to microplastics--it's incredibly difficult to work that out.
We don't have control groups, they're found in virtually every complex organism on Earth, including (best we can tell) all humans, so we can't form a control group.
We've only recently really started to notice, care, or study them, so we don't have strong historical data to compare against.
We don't have many isolated populations (especially of large enough size) where microplastic bioaccumulation is the only major difference in how their lives have changed in biologically relevant ways over the decades, so we can't effectively isolate the effects of microplastics from other confounding factors.
So you have these things that basically became completely ubiquitous--an unavoidable fact of not just human life, but all complex life on Earth--before anyone realized, with several other major global factors shifting concurrently. The end result is that, by the tools and methods with which we perform science, it's nearly impossible to study their exact effects. Maybe they're a slow-burning apocalypse subtly disrupting the mechanisms of life at their most fundamental levels and only getting worse with time, or maybe they do nothing or next to nothing like having a glass of sherry with your Sunday brunch once a week, or maybe they're somewhere in that vast, murky expanse in between the two extremes. Hell, there might even be a net benefit somehow. We just plain don't know, and don't know how we could know, so speculation is just about all we've got at present, and without knowing it's really hard to say if the messaging and literature surrounding the subject is aggressively over-alarmist or recklessly under-alarmist. The best we've really got is the simple fact that we notice them now, and thus have the chance to pay close attention, part of which is regularly taking basic measurements like these to try and correlate trends.
About all we do know is that they weren't here before, and "before" encompasses 99.9999% of all life that we know to have ever existed, so it's definitely weird and maybe probably bad.
There's definitely criticism to be had with the broader state of public health and science communication that harm, or at least the understanding that "we have literally no idea what the broader implications of this are but they're maybe probably not good", are considered to be implicit, either due to fallacious appeal to nature or the simple fact that alarmist headlines catch more attention, generating more traffic and revenue, and thus acceptance rates and grant money downstream. Which is, I think, the real core of the issue.
Personally I've had loads of issues with YouTube music, largely in that it regularly makes a point of inserting various popular songs into playlists and radios of otherwise very niche genres (which they have nothing to do with) I strongly prefer to listen to. The more niche the genre, the higher the percentage of what follows is typically in line with it... for a while. Sooner or later everything gets infested with the same tripe I don't want to have to deal with listening to on my own time. It's not even good for discovery, as when I try to let a mix go off of a genre or artist that's new to me it isn't long at all before I spend more time skipping past the same nonsense than I do actually listening to music, new or old.
I work in a public-facing environment. I already hear every single one of these songs, none of which I liked to begin with, to a sickening extent over the radio. Leave me to my esoteric tastes and take the chart-toppers elsewhere.
This is an issue I've had across the board, though, be it Spotify, YT Music, heavily curated Pandora stations, or any other streaming service I've tried; nowadays I strongly prefer simply listening to my local library (which I've played to death, but at least it's to my own preferences) instead.
Show me a platform that stays in its damn lane where I can listen to what I want to, and I'll gladly hand over my cash; I'm not gonna do that to be made to listen to the same junk that scored me making that cash to begin with.
What was your experience with Tidal? I felt like it was better at recommending new albums and artists I want familiar with and there was much less of a focus on playlists.
I haven't used Tidal yet, myself. I've got a mind to, though, especially as it seems much friendlier to artists than most--I'd even consider publishing my own music there, whereas other streaming services (with maybe the sole exception of YouTube music for sheer discoverability) are hard "no"s that I personally explicitly refuse to touch.
It would appear to be a conversation between an experienced OpenStreetMaps contributor and a course designer for the golf video game PGA 2K23 discussing some in-depth technical details of representing golf courses in their respective domains via comments on an actual golf course in OpenStreetMaps. Pretty neat, especially given the aforementioned fact that such a huge commercial project sees its developers (ab)using the commons provided by the OSM project.
My favorite is to cover a wadded-up paper towel or two with a splash (or spritz, in my case) of vegetable oil. Dirt cheap, using things I already keep stocked in quantity in my kitchen, and even more reliable than those crappy $10/pack starter blocks.
Definitely want to find a similarly cheap source of actual pure charcoal, though.
I use egg cartons, newspaper/packing paper, and paraffin wax to make homemade starter cubes. It's cheap as dirt since the only thing you have to buy is the wax which is very inexpensive, and extremely effective.
You basically just wad up the paper into the egg carton cups and pour enough wax to hold it together (althernatively you can dip the wadded up paper in the wax then stick it in the cups before it solidifies). Cut a carton cup out of the carton, place it under the chimney, light it, and let it g.
We go through... a lot of eggs in this house, and I have other uses for waxes as well (such as waterproofing, candlemaking, and sealing wine bottles). This is genius, I'm stealing it.
...or so I'd like to say, practically speaking the minimal prep work of "grease a wadge of paper towel and spark it" is more realistic for my degree of laziness.
I use dryer lint and corrugated paper-board. The dryer lint catches fire if you sneeze in its general direction and once the corrugated paper board is lit, it burns very hot because the corrugation acts as a natural chimney.
Dryer lint is likely to be plastic particles rather than natural fibers, depending on the materials you’re washing. You may not want to use it indoors or to prepare coals for cooking.
I tried drier lint. My issue was that it smelled _horrible_ as it burned. I doubt this matters very much for the food, since the starter is long gone by the time you start cooking, but I just don't want to be around it. Newspaper/brown packing paper is plenty cheap and available for me.
Along with other issues stated, I already keep my dryer lint as an emergency tinder supply for survival situations (or the occasional campfire mishap).
That logic follows... right up until the leap to arboreal lifeforms with opposable thumbs being an inevitability (or even a prerequisite to tool use!).
Opposable thumbs are not a guarantee. Nor are tree-dwelling lifeforms, nor trees, nor thumbs, nor digits, nor four limbs. For all we know, intelligent life elsewhere might better resemble intelligent octopi using alkaline metals as their first rudimentary energy source as we did with fire.
Why even assume multicelluarity as some kind of inevitability?
Hell, it took 2 billion years to get to single celled eukaryotes on earth. But the earth was teaming with prokaryotes the whole time, two entire separate branches of them, too, and they seem to have sprung into existence almost as soon as the earth cooled enough.
There's still a lot more of them in terms of total weight than animals and protists. A lot.
I was describing the most probable path, not the only path.
I do think that developing more sophisticated tools under water is difficult. Once you have plants on land, taller “trees” are very probable, because they are competing for light. Once you have trees, it’s likely that animals will climb then for safety or food. Once they climb, they will likely develop better gripping, etc…
I guess another way to look at this is that life on Earth is not special (although it is still an insanely amazing occurrence).
I usually do. Problem is, to do that at all, I usually have to buy men's clothing. I buy men's jeans by default, because they have pockets and the fit and comfort aren't my biggest concerns for rugged practical wear. If I want to indulge in feminine fashion or, gods forbid, look professional, I quickly find that I'm out of options. Most pants that do have pockets, they're barely large enough for my phone to fit halfway in them (and I'm using a G7, not a phablet or something). Many just don't, or even worse, they're sewn on decoratively without actually being open and able to hold anything. Some skirts and dresses, sure, they don't really make sense, but why in the world would decorative non-functional pockets be a staple of so many pairs of women's pants if we didn't like how they look?
If all women did that, women clothing as they are now would not sell and designers would figure out that women want (real) pockets and begin to design women clothing with them.
GP's point is that women don't do that and in fact do prioritize fashion over function.
> why in the world would decorative non-functional pockets be a staple of so many pairs of women's pants if we didn't like how they look?
Because functional pockets require the pants to be loose fitting, which is not as attractive as more form fitting pants (based on what women and men in society have collectively decided through their actions).
It... really doesn't, though? Cooking is hardly by any means trivial, and achieving recipe-quality results based on a quick skim and winging it from there is certainly more difficult, but I'd argue that anybody who can't make something decent without religiously following a recipe isn't even of "middling kitchen experience".
I may be biased though, "skim a recipe and wing it" is my default style anymore after all.
I’m not talking about skimming a recipe and wringing it.
Think easting something in a restaurant then replicating something similar at home the next day just based on the flavor. Doing that for a few things is easy, but it takes significant time to get to that level across a wide range regional cuisines.
That's no guarantee either, especially with increasing consolidation of land under larger corporate umbrellas. I recently moved away from Columbus after getting on the bad side of an investment group that seems to own nearly all of the publicly-listed apartments in the area within my price bracket, and are still actively buying up more. Said bracket is fairly low, granted, but it's all I can afford on even a decent full-time income, especially with other expenses spiking as of late.
Columbus has recently found itself to be the new largest city and center of economic growth in the state, and changed rapidly and radically over the past couple of decades. As a result, it's nowhere near as seasoned and well-established as many other major metros, and the massive influx of new monied interests into the area quickly cornered their respective markets.
Moving back to the Cleveland area, which was quite the boom town a century ago but has infamously been in near-perpetual decline ever since (with many residents, like I had, migrating to Columbus), has much healthier competition in the rental market.
Perhaps in a few decades as new assets are built and today's ones slosh around the economy, Columbus will have healthier, more diverse competition and see your point ring true. It's certainly healthy in other sectors—one of my favorite things about living there was the great wealth of hole-in-the-wall bodegas, ethnic grocers, restaurants, and food trucks around me that meant even on my last dime I could always try new cuisines—but at least for those of us for whom even a high five-figure income is a distant dream, options are very limited.
Hey man, I agree 100% on the point you're making. BUT if you're reading hacker news in your spare time for fun, you can definitely find a remote gig that pays a comfortable six figure income and elevates you to membership in the class of people putting the squeeze on middle America. I don't know you or your situation, so I can't provide any real advice, but I can say with absolute certainty that something is out there for you
So I'd like to think. In reality my skills don't exist on paper save for basic helldesk work, and even that's been a crapshoot. Loving the positivity, though.
Should probably throw more work into networking and portfolio pieces in between shifts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama