You can escape the . in a URL to break the markdown auto-linking: bit\.ly/customurl displays as:
bit.ly/customurl

Your welcome ;)

*lose
*losing

America died with a whimper!

Do you get royalties every time you say this or something? You’ve had an account for ~3 days and you’ve already used variations of that phrase at least 8 times. I’m not attacking the sentiment, it just feels forced and isn’t a particularly witty comment worthy of that much repetition.

There was a TED talk by Zeynep Tufekci in 2017 (“We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads”) – (YouTube*: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI) that briefly talks about this:
(*I’m aware of the irony in linking there)

So in 2016, I attended rallies of then-candidate Donald Trump to study as a scholar the movement supporting him. I study social movements, so I was studying it, too. And then I wanted to write something about one of his rallies, so I watched it a few times on YouTube. YouTube started recommending to me and autoplaying to me white supremacist videos in increasing order of extremism. If I watched one, it served up one even more extreme and autoplayed that one, too. If you watch Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders content, YouTube recommends and autoplays conspiracy left, and it goes downhill from there.

Well, you might be thinking, this is politics, but it’s not. This isn’t about politics. This is just the algorithm figuring out human behavior. I once watched a video about vegetarianism on YouTube and YouTube recommended and autoplayed a video about being vegan. It’s like you’re never hardcore enough for YouTube.

So what’s going on? Now, YouTube’s algorithm is proprietary, but here’s what I think is going on. The algorithm has figured out that if you can entice people into thinking that you can show them something more hardcore, they’re more likely to stay on the site watching video after video going down that rabbit hole while Google serves them ads.

These days it might also be about politics, but the motivation to capture attention to serve ads is still the priority.

Designed and built for a better society, to bring us closer together without tracking or surveillance.

And the Kickstarter link is posted with a referral code.

voulaa

voilà

Just wanted to point out how awesome Tom Lehrer (wikipedia) is as a musician/satirist/teacher as well as just a decent human – he relinquished all copyright ownership over his music catalog and currently* has his songs, sheet music and lyrics available for free download at https://tomlehrersongs.com/.

Here’s the link to Wernher Von Braun where the parent lyrics come from.

*At the bottom of the homepage is the note:

NOTICE:
THIS WEBSITE WILL BE SHUT DOWN AT SOME DATE IN THE NOT TOO DISTANT FUTURE, SO IF YOU WANT TO DOWNLOAD ANYTHING, DON’T WAIT TOO LONG.

Billy likes to drink soda.
Miss Lippy’s car is green.

Tombstone is more expensive than Jack’s but it’s definitely a huge step up in quality. When I’m just focused on maximizing my budget Jack’s is the lowest I’ll tolerate. But if the goal is taste and quantity of toppings, Tombstone is certainly the better option.

It’s not like specific items always being unavailable, it’s just different random things being OOS necessitating a second grocery stop. It happens everywhere, but at least post Covid, and in my region, it happens consistently with Target.
e.g.:

• Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup
• Kraft mac & cheese
• (any) Butter sticks
• Jack’s frozen pizza

There’s multiple Targets much closer to me than the nearest Walmart but I can’t recall a single time I’ve gone to one and they’ve had all the items in stock I was looking for. Simple staple items that shouldn’t have scarcity problems that just aren’t being adequately ordered or stocked on shelves.

Now that I’ve finally vented about this problem I’m now also imagining the monkey paw curling and all the customer service complaint comments will just be replaced with LLM generated pro-WM propaganda :(

The Amazon situation was the first I’d heard about this problem so I assumed it was the same reason it happens on WM (and elsewhere). And while I certainly don’t expect Walmart to actually read reviews, I would think they would be concerned about potentially losing sales due to projecting a bad image and try to at least (poorly/cheaply) implement a system to address it.

Assuming it’s not like an email based feedback system but something with an asynchronous connection, it can’t be too hard to look for a handful of keywords (dent, missing, broken, spilled, delivery …) then throw up a Clippy-style message - “It looks like you’re talking about a problem with your order, would you like customer service to assist?” and then route the message/user in that direction.

I know I’m expecting a lot from our primitive technology in 2025 but I refuse to stop dreaming, dammit!

Principiis obsta et respice finem — ‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’

It’s an important thing to be mindful of when handling a deadly device and far too easy to become complacent if you don’t strive for 100% compliance.

It’s not wise to wipe your nose while holding a loaded gun with your finger on the trigger.

From The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu:

Later, other Adventists based their hatred of the human race on other foundations, not limited to issues such as the environment or warfare. Some raised their hatred to very abstract, philosophical levels. Unlike how they would be imagined later, most of them were realists, and did not place too much hope in the alien civilization they served either. Their betrayal was based only on their despair and hatred of the human race. Mike Evans gave the Adventists their motto: We don’t know what extraterrestrial civilization is like, but we know humanity.

Thanks for updating the link :)

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/googles-mysterious-searchapp-links-leave-android-users-concerned/

Link points to search.app instead of actual source.

The Chicken and the Pig

The fable of the Chicken and the Pig is used to illustrate the differing levels of commitment from project stakeholders involved in a project. The basic fable runs:

A Pig and a Chicken are walking down the road.
The Chicken says: “Hey Pig, I was thinking we should open a restaurant!”
Pig replies: “Hm, maybe, what would we call it?”
The Chicken responds: “How about ‘ham-n-eggs’?”
The Pig thinks for a moment and says: “No thanks. I’d be committed, but you’d only be involved.”