It’s a difference of degree not kind. The constant audiovisual stimulus running through the internet is much more powerful than any of those things, and more widely available. Cable TV was close. It was always on in the room, but you had to be in the room, and you had to negotiate with your cohabitants over what to have on, or else you could go somewhere and be bored. There are no constraints anymore, with exceptions for the most impoverished among us - there’s always something close at hand to tickle your particular reptile brain until you fall asleep.
This is really going to mess with some highly stressed out, low digital literacy people in my life. I guess I'll need to help them move to something else - is there any other basic SMS app on Android that a) looks like it's from a legitimate developer, and b) doesn't skim your message content for ad personalization?
How long is your trip? George Guidall reading Don Quixote is good. Also there's this book called Death in Yellowstone, which is just hours of short descriptions of people who have died in various ways in Yellowstone. Something like that can be good if you're talking or concentrating on the road and can't follow a detailed plot.
Not enough Danes? He’s not doing demography, he’s telling a story. Should Nick Cave be playing more ragtime? Where are the Italian neorealist films of Guillermo del Toro? Complaining about Neil Gaiman over representing gay goths is like complaining about Kenny Rogers over representing gamblers.
I don't know where the meme came from but I've heard it from two independent Honda Element owners, and it comes up on random SEO-spam blogs as a benefit of the Element if you're searching for "dog-friendly" cars. I never thought to question it myself - the trunk area does look like something you could hit with a hose. Glad this made #1 on Hacker News before I bought one!
> do you mean not every tests positive for seroconversion months after infection
This wasn't your point but I'm trying to see whether this is accounted for in the study. I don't think it is, unless I missed something.
The study's self-reported long COVID group is people who in the past 4 weeks experienced any symptoms that had been ongoing for 8+ weeks. If these infections were 8+ weeks ago, these people would probably be seronegative anyway. To put it another way, seronegativity now doesn't rule out an infection 2+ months ago, so for some of these people their belief that they had COVID may match reality more than this article implies.
I don't know if there is a way to reliably identify a 2+ month old infection but I think you would need that to be able to say anything definitive about the linkage.
From their earlier posts it sounds like they're encountering some kind of MySQL performance issue, which in my (horrible) experience can be extremely difficult for your jack of all trades software engineer or SRE to troubleshoot.
I would hope a company Github's size would have MySQL expertise on staff, but if not I will say a prayer for the poor souls who are feverishly reading the Percona blog and trying to decide whether to tune the doublewrite buffer or redo log, or both, or neither.
This doesn't cohere into an argument, its like a loose pile of grievances and suppositions about...who, exactly?
For easier scanning I've extracted this author's ideas as to what constitutes "heresy":
- Accusations of politicians and celebrities
- Cheap pablum for frothing basement trolls and listicles of reasons never to let your kids leave the house
- Election conspiracy theories
- A new expose on why red wine and chocolate will cure Covid
- Corporate public relations expressing the deepest committment of the NFL to protect everyone and only good from here on out
Do these things sound at all similar to each other, like they would be produced by a homogenous group of people? Does it sound reasonable that these things are produced by low-paid writers in Brooklyn due to the financial pressures of middle age? As far as I can tell, the progressive unionized sports writers of Brooklyn have been more vocal than anybody against the public relations arm of the NFL, to take one example.
I wonder if the unidentified group of people this guy has a problem with - who do the "progressive cosplay" and produce "little in the way of insight or information" - are even that low paid. Journalism on the whole doesn't pay well, but some national outlets in NYC really do! Unfortunately, this article has no insight or information on the topic.
These niche groups for enthusiasts, tilde club or mastodon or neocities or aral balkan or whatever can't ever bring the old internet back. It's not coming back, it's really not, you just have to accept that the world you used to love is gone and find some new way to do things. Why make a dollhouse of your past. You must move on!
I would say it's not just you, 99% of jobs are totally pointless or actively harmful to the world, if you ask me. Like you say, squeezing profit out of people and absolutely nothing else. But it's not really relevant to wanting to off yourself.
Even if you get to a job with a point, like doing something meaningful or for the good of society, it's not necessarily going to feel great from day-to-day, and might be even more disillusioning (speaking from experience here). I find that I just care about it less when other things in my life are going well.
My dream feature would be for an interpreted language: when you start the program the interpreter would randomly choose one of the keywords in the language to be considered "hot lava", meaning when the program encounters that keyword the computer running the program would be shut down permanently. If this language were universally adopted it would only be a matter of time before all computers were rendered inoperable.
Freshman year of high school, middle of the country. I was walking to English class in passing period and people going in the opposite direction were chattering with excitement about something. I saw a friend and he said, did you hear? They blew up the World Trade Center. He was smiling not with happiness but with like crazy excitement.
Then I got to English class where they had a TV set up watching the news coverage and a few other teachers came in with their classes to share the TV. One of them said, there it goes, the whole world’s finance is in that building.
The horror of it all didn’t really kick in. Not it sure if that was due to being 14, or due to experiencing it all through TV, or just being kind of a bastard at the time. I feel a lot more sensitive to loss and human life now that I’m older, some of the old footage I’ve seen this week has affected me a lot.
Nobody knew anything about it until I got to social studies class where my teacher told us that bin Laden has claimed responsibility but having never heard the name before I thought he was saying “Ben Laden” due to his midwestern pronunciation of the vowel sound, so I was picturing perhaps an Englishman.
In science class I remember half of us were trying to convince the teacher that there was no way we could come to school tomorrow. Totally disingenuously.
The news reports all suggested nothing would be the same but as a kid from the suburbs far from NYC, everything seemed the same but we had the national anthem going off more often and people started to argue about the wars a couple years later. Only after many years could I see in hindsight how different our path has been from others we all might have taken.