I think of it exactly in terms of the trolley problem. The whole premise is that if you do nothing (don’t vote) more people die. By flipping the lever, fewer people die but you’ve taken an action that leads directly to their deaths. The philosophical question isn’t just “is it better for fewer people to die” but “in pulling the lever, are you directly responsible for those deaths?”

My answer would be that inaction is itself an action. In this scenario, you have found yourself responsible either way. Suppose you pull the lever, though, to save as many lives as you can… Wouldn’t the ones who die as a result of this have loved ones that absolutely do blame you?

As a nerd, I don’t expect my parental control settings to work forever. They’re more there to prevent childish naivete from getting them into trouble, they probably won’t stop dedicated teen horniness. And I won’t even be mad, figuring out how to get around them requires learning more about how technology works.

You are correct that a reboot will trigger a full rescan. I’m always on the lookout for better sync. I just don’t think it’s out there right now for easy bidirectional sync.

Basically, if you want to set and forget, Syncthing is the best option. If you want more control, you’ll need to look into setting up rsync scripts or similar, which will at least better let you control how often to sync.

I like async but dislike await. I spend entirely too much time on everything I build trying to maximize how much I can do in parallel because I find it tremendously satisfying.

He’s always been a contrarian. It was harmless and even enjoyable in the 90s and early 2000s when, to him, that meant eating vegetarian and believing in some Hippie woowoo bullshit while being firmly against organized religion and generally distrustful of corporations.

I miss hippie Scott Adams. Weird right-wing Scott Adams is not enjoyable.

My city has both, and they’re decorated the same. I just wonder whether a really good burger place did this first and then crappy ones showed up to copy the decor and forgot to make the food good.

So in 16 years, they produced two games and a remaster. Am I missing something? Of course you can’t keep a business alive when it doesn’t actually make anything.

I think people are placing too much on this. Being registered is just sending a piece of mail with a checkbox checked, I think. You don’t even have to donate or anything. I registered as a Republican to vote in their primaries a long time ago, and I have literally never voted for a Republican candidate for any office.

Video games. Don’t get me wrong, there are still some great games, but the entire experience has degraded on average.

• The inclusion of obnoxiously long, often unskippable, intro sequences with studio credits and such. There used to be maybe a logo, maybe a very short sequence at worst, and almost always skippable.
• Most of the big budget games are intended to be a grindy slog, often to get you to spend more money on micro transactions. Fun takes a back seat to intentionally addictive but objectively less enjoyable experiences.
• Others are intended to be cinematic experience. Some of that can be fun, but sometimes I just want something like the old Sonic or Mario games that I can just pick up, play for a bit, and put down.
• Enjoy a game? You could talk to friends about it at school, or buy a magazine that talks about it. The experience now is largely an unregulated online wasteland… If you find a community, it may quickly be beset by people that you really don’t want to associate with, posting crap that no magazine ever would have published. Except for some of the funnier magazines, which may have published it just to rightfully mock the person.

The graphics have improved. In some cases the gameplay has improved. I don’t want to downplay those. I’m just annoyed with how the overall experience has gotten worse on average.

Generally when people bring up some personal detail, my immediate reaction is to assume the opposite. Especially if it begins with “as a.” For example: “as a woman,” this person is a man. “As a black person,” this is the whitest person you will ever meet. “As a 60 year old,” definitely ten.

In theory I guess it provides better security in some ways, but certainly not all over giving you hardware and a VPN. So there’s that. But yeah, it sucks.

My fear is them going public or selling. If that happens, it’ll probably be Microsoft willing to spend any amount, and the government hasn’t really been in a “preventing monopolies” mood for a while now.

I feel like this does a great job of explaining why I hated it, at least. https://youtu.be/DxFPmF1puW4

I don’t know what your particular situation is but if you’re just using it on computers you could use LUKS or BitLocker or FileVault. Then if you want to wipe it, you only need to destroy the key and the data is rendered effectively gone.

To be fair, I bet some percentage of those that don’t use an ad blocker ARE using something like no script and just don’t need one as a result.

There’s some inherent risk in the ad blocker as well, though. If it’s an extension, you’re trusting that this thing you installed, that can read and modify every website you visit, isn’t going to do anything sneaky. Yes, maybe it’s open source, but every once in a while something sneaks into open source projects, too. It will get caught, but it could be after the damage is done.

I mean, I use an ad blocker. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to value security and not use one.

It’s not entirely unlike my plan: No more externalities. That’s the big problem with the environment and with a bunch of other things. Economists call it an “externality” when the things you’re doing have side effects that you don’t have to account for, such as pollution.

The thing is, we let industry and capital get away with it for a long time. And there’s no doubt that fixing it would also impact people. If the cost of properly disposing of a tire was built into the price of the tire, it would be passed along to customers. But it’s the only way to rehabilitate ANY system that uses currency.

And that’s becoming it’s own problem with search, especially with technical questions. The good answer is also old and out of date.

Honestly, I think some of it is a bit over the top. At the end of the day, they’re a company producing a product and not the chosen savior. But as far as giant companies go, they’re almost everything you could want.

• Lots of pro-consumer policies. From making returns a thing, to never taking away access like some stores, to big sales. If the idea of buying a digital game in 2004 and still having access to it in 2024 doesn’t sound revolutionary to you, it’s because you haven’t paid attention to how other companies run their stores.

• Open source contributions. Gaming on Linux is getting a huge shot in the arm from Valve, Steam, and the Steam Deck, both through direct contributions and indirectly through showing it’s viability.

• Employees, by all accounts, are well taken care of and enjoy their jobs.

They aren’t perfect, but the bar for a company, especially in the gaming industry, being ethical is so low that the way Valve operates makes them basically saints by comparison.

Is it easier or is it just shifting the cost? We’re talking thousands of cars needing electrification in any given city, at let’s say they get it to an average of $35k each.

Picking a random city, let’s say Cincinnati. They already have some infrastructure but it’s largely car dependent. They have 148k households, of which 44.1% have one car, 25.2% have two, 6.8% have three, and 2.4% have four. So roughly 65k + 75k + 30k + 14k = 184k cars * 35k each or minimum 6.4 billion to electrify them all.

I don’t know how much good public transit costs, but I have to imagine $6.4b can buy a fair amount of it.