It’s wholly possible these people are not bothered by loud noises. I have neighbors and especially their kids seem to have no clue what an inside voice is, how far bass travels or how to walk down stairs.

They shout, they blast music, they fall down stairs.

If I did that as a kid, my dad would tell me to cut it out. And I think that’s the key difference. You’re either raised to be considerate of others, or you’re not. And if you’re the considerate type, most likely you’ll go out of your way because you don’t want them to be bothered by you while they might not even register if you happen to fall down the stairs or fire a cannon indoors.

I used to be really careful with watching tv at certain hours, or announcing to my neighbors of I was going to have people over. It took me a while but I now don’t even really care if they hear me anymore. Because even if they do, it’s unlikely they’ll be bothered as much as I am when their preteen kids shout that they don’t want to go to bed at 10:30 PM when I’m trying to sleep.

In advertising as well. I noticed quite an uptick in the ‘annoyance’ factor of tv and radio ads somewhere between 2005 and 2010. People were more likely to discuss bad ads, or ads with a quirk of some kind. Hate is an easier strong emotion to coerce with an ad so they fully went with it and somehow the negative attention equalled more sales.

It’s hard to imagine some business exec coming up with this research, it’s more likely a team of psychology majors who would rather earn more money than actually help people.

It’s so weird that these days you have to almost bring a note from your doctor if you don’t want a constant barrage of sensory overload

Barebones OS with ads and a premium subscription for anything that makes it remotely useful

I use the generator function in Databricks for Python to save me a lot of typing but autocomplete functions drive me crazy

I used to work for a publisher in the Netherlands called Coutinho, they specialize in second language acquisition and have some excellent materials on Dutch. Probably not for free, though.

I’ve always maintained it’s for non-nerds who want to laugh at cultures they’ll never understand. For convenience, all known nerd stuff is crammed into all characters.

Have you played Control? It was on sale recently on Steam

11 years, married for 2.5

I think humanity is a species of excess. The harm we cause our planet every day by not seeing the bigger picture is hurting pretty much everything on the planet.

I’m not an antinatalist, but I think we could stand to decrease our numbers rather than increase them at least for a couple of centuries.

I didn’t know frogs could squeak like mice until one of our cats started chasing them around the garden. I’ve had two inside the house. The cats weren’t planning on eating them, though. It’s just about the hunt.

My cats are also huge fans of moths, butterflies and grasshoppers.

I was discussing adoption of AI chatbots for personal contact in 2014. We also discussed dystopian futures, where AI would decide humans are harmful to Earth. Still waiting for that one.

But we also discussed that, assuming life itself was created, humans are now propagating a creation cycle. Humans will be the creators of a new, sentient species that will dominate and eradicate its creator. Then, AI will create a new sentient life form which will destroy AI. For the sake of argument, let’s call this a deity. Then, the deity will create a new organic life form. You could also state that we are currently living in a simulation of our creator and that AI will only be sentient in a realm of their own, to which humans have no access.

Stephen Fry was spouting this theory on Lubach a while back. I was like ‘I’ve been saying that for years!’

If you haven’t yet, I can really recommend reading Satoshi’s whitepaper on what Bitcoin is really for. The fact that crypto is now used as an asset to trade in order to gain ‘old’ money really spits in the face of the ideology of a decentralized ledger. And the fact that a dollar value is assigned to it means it becomes the target of a lot of scams. The fact that a decentralized ledger also means greater anonymity has made it a popular target for illicit activity as well.

But by design, it really only wants to take power away from banks in order to stop devaluation, make it impossible to charge people for transactions and to put control of assets into the hands of individuals. The amount of money currently in circulation is way more than the actual physical amount available, because banks can lend you money they don’t even have. Bitcoin would make this impossible.

Money is an IOU. Bitcoin is an IOU but the ledger is decentralized rather than in control of banks.

Once you start seeing the value of any currency as one of itself rather than trying to express it in a different value system, a Bitcoin needs nothing but its inherent worth as payment.

That said, because we all still use traditional forms of currency, a Bitcoin is now worth, say, 112000 breads. It’s worth two new mid-sized cars.

Value is based on scarcity and demand. If something is hard to come by, like bitcoin currently is, the price is hardly affected. But if demand is higher than the supply, prices skyrocket. Demand dies down the moment people feel like crypto is a scam. Supply will stop since Bitcoin has a physical limit (of the top of my head 21 billion). It is no longer realistic to start mining the stuff and receiving it for payment is just silly at this point.

But to flip it around, what is the value of a US dollar, without expressing it in terms of another currency? It used to be tied to gold. You can’t really state one dollar is equal to, say, one bread. The price of bread has fluctuated. Or, has the value of a dollar fluctuated and has a bread always been worth one pair of socks?

Baseline: everything is worth one of itself and trying to express it in another value system is just a snapshot, a moment in time which will have changed soon after.

After Miracle Workers, Guns Akimbo and especially Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, Daniel Radcliffe is so much more than Harry Potter to me. He’s got this almost Nicolas Cage-y vibe now

Clerks. It should be some stoner Seinfeld flick but it actually lines up pretty well with La Divina Comedia and the dialogue, although sometimes a bit clunky, is very well written.

The other one instantly visible here: nondescript error messages that make it impossible to fix. ‘Something went wrong’.

Containerized software. The main advantage of this is that every application, or stack of applications, runs in its own ecosystem. You can restart a container whenever without having to reboot your entire system. You can store all data off a container in a volume, so if you hit a snag, you can recreate the container without actually losing any of your configs.

You can also create networks so that apps run in different subnets than other apps.

Very simply put, a docker container is like a mini system that runs on your main system.

Something else I like about docker is docker compose. You can create a container or stack of containers with a single simple YAML file without actually having to install anything yourself. I manage my containers in Portainer.

Yeah I personally don’t like you need an account for everything and data gathering and all but this can be completely anonymous, no marketing, no e-mail phone number anything required.

Maybe link it to your Vivino but only if you want.

I want to run a nice and simple wine bar where wine enthusiasts can get an affordable glass of wine based on my data driven recommendations. I want the place to be a chill hang with music, comfy seats and sandwiches and stuff.

If I had the money I wouldn’t even need it to be profitable.