arensb

Don't listen to the raven. Switch to BSD!

When the Internet was created, not only did phones not have batteries, they had their own power grid, separate from that used by other appliances.

That 15% battery status is giving me anxiety by proxy.

Downvoted for misleading description: the beans aren't fucking. Not even snogging.

The algorithm decides what you read and how you engage, even if it’s negative content or something bad for your mental health.

This may be the wrong place to post this, but it's something I've been thinking about for a while. "Algorithm" isn't a dirty word. And in fact, IMHO Mastodon could benefit from a few alternatives to its most-recent-first algorithm.

For instance, I might want to see posts by emergency services in my area first, followed by posts by friends, and posts by a bot that posts a cat picture every minute further down. Or someone might be going off on a rant, and I'd like to turn their firehose of posts down to a trickle for a few hours. Or maybe I'd like Mastodon to just stop showing me anything after a few hours of activity, to encourage me to take a break.

The reason Twitter's, Facebook's, algorithms are evil is that they encourage you to do things you wouldn't want to do, and because they show you content you don't want. Not because they're algorithms.

In a perfect world, every user on every instance would be able to choose how posts are presented. But that may be too computationally expensive, especially for large instances, especially when you start trying to figure out things like the mood of a post. But maybe each instance could decide which algorithm it wants to use, and user can migrate from one instance to another, depending whether they like how things are presented.

C++, C#... And maybe, some day, D.

He believes that the things he does are always right

I'm not sure he believes that. Although it's clear that he says he believes them, and it's probably true that he believes he can get away with anything that he's not physically restrained from doing.

I assume this means that John DiMaggio got the raise he was asking for. Yay.

I'd say that a circular room should be viewed as having an infinite number of 0° corners. My reasoning is: on one hand, 0°C is rather cool. Also, a circle can be approximated by an oval, and being in the Oval Office would be pretty freaking cool.

Just remember:

Fahrenheit:

• 0: too cold!
• 100: too hot!

Celsius:

• 0: somewhat cold.
• 100: you're dead.

Kelvin:

• 0: you're dead.
• 100: you're dead.

undefined> I see a lot of overlap between urban fantasy fans and science fiction fans.

This makes a certain amount of sense, I think: to me, the defining line between science and magic is that, at core, scientific phenomena have an explanation, while magic ones don't. You may not understand how Star Trek phasers work, but the premise is that in-universe, there's a good explanation that someone understands. Whereas the reason Harry Potter can wave his wand and make an object levitate is Just Because. There's no ultimate explanation.

I'm simplifying to make the distinction clear, but of course human literature is vast and varied. And urban fantasy, in particular, tends to straddle the line between SF and fantasy: the action doesn't take place in A Land Far, Far Away, where the rules are different; it's London, or Chicago, or Mogadishu, where guns and cars obey Boyle's law, and carpets don't just hover in the air without a really good reason.

I'm not familiar with all of the worlds you cite, but in The Dresden Files, for instance, magic obeys certain rules, so that if you know how a spell works, but you don't have all the components, you can figure out a substitution. Or in The Laundry Files, you start with the premise that there are Lovecraftian horrors out there and work out the consequences, in the finest tradition of SF, and come to the conclusion that there will be paperwork.

And that these chips are in COVID vaccines.