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.
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.
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.
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.
Along with other issues stated, I already keep my dryer lint as an emergency tinder supply for survival situations (or the occasional campfire mishap).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama