Yandex is great. When you want to see news/sites/whatever that does not conform to what the western mainstream powers "accepts as acceptable", you can go to Yandex and you will find it there. When Google search went to shit some years ago I discovered Yandex and found out how much of the web was being deliberately kept away from my eyes. You need search engines from every major power broker in the world to get a full picture of what we arrogantly like to call "truth".
Bullshit. This was the reason the industry gave for why they were removing battery replaceability support. Everybody hated it when it was first introduced, and to this day I only buy phones which have easily accessible ways to put a new battery on when the day comes. Fuck this BS of "people wanted thinner phones".
HN is heavily populated by and biased towards left left leaning west coast IT adjacent people. But it still makes me wonder for how long can the US keep it's dominance on the world stage with so many people that think this way in positions of power on the arguably most important econonomic/social area from now on.
If everything is deterministic, i.e. determined, there's no free will, so you/I are just a NPC. I prefer to live in a universe where my conscious decisions matter, or at least can't be predicted beforehand.
To me, the fact that quantum mechanics is intrinsically "random" and unknowable beforehand, is what makes living bearable in this universe as a sentient being. If we, two legged viruses that we are, could reach a level of understanding that could show the universe to be fully deterministic and every future state to be knowable given that you know the current states, then this human condition would be impossible to stand. I love the fact that we just can't predict the future. It's what makes existing be a good thing instead of a bad one.
These Minessota videos are classic examples of what Scott Adams used to call "two different movies being played on the same screen", in this case quite literally. From the point of view of a left leaning person, that movie shows a man being assassinated for no reason at all, nothing justify what happened. From the point of view of a right leaning person, Alex Pretti was actively interfering with law enforcement, and he entered a conflict situation while carrying a gun. If a cop is in the act of fighting you, and see a gun, you carry the risk of being shot, it's just reality. The right leaning person, just based on these facts, already reduces the charges from murder to manslaughter, max. Two movies on one screen, and there's NOTHING rational that can be said to change the mind of anyone. Everybody is watching the same damn screen, but the movies are completely different.
Abnormal = non normal / non normative. Words have meaning. If for you it causes a bad reaction to it, you are the one that needs to deal with it. That's excatly the problem, normal people are tired of being called bad for seeing the world through normal, reasonable lenses. When a behavior does not follow the norm, it's abnormal.
Yes, the analogy to the bell curve doesn't fit this use case very well, I didn't noticed it before. But the point still stands: non heterosexual behaviour is a tiny minority compared to the norm. So, abnormal is a perfectly good word to describe non-heterosexual behaviour. Once again, it doesn't make it bad per se. I just can't stand word police, which is just another facet of thought police.
If something falls out of the center of the normal distribution, it's by definition abnormal. Once again, that doesn't make it bad per se. But trying to police perfectly good words just makes people become more antagonizing to the position you want to defend.
I used to assume that the average Joe would be amazed at the way my Youtube/Facebook/whatever looks and works, with no ads and with a lot of annoyances removed. Then I saw, more than once, people complaining that THE ADS were gone, and then I gave up. The average of the whole population of humans is a very dumbed down version of what I always imagined the average would be.
Not a "guy novel" at all. I read it around 20 and just thought it was a waste of time, nothing happened, just wandering around aimlessly like 90% of my buddies on their teenage years. The whole beat movement was just style over substance, pages and pages of nothing.
The most infuriating case of shrinkflation I've encontered yet is abot the "Oreo" style cookies, that were used to be sold on packages where each cookie was stacked on top of another, "laying flat". Over time, rhe packages started getting lighter, the cookies itself started getring smaller etc. Then, a couple years ago, those packages started having the cookies "side by side", instead of laying one on top of the other... I refuse to buy any brand that uses these types of shenanigans. Fuck shrinkflation.