I’m a big fan of contronyms, words with two opposite meanings. I first learned looking for a word to describe the change in “literally” from meaning, well, the literal meaning of something to also the figurative meaning.

Another good one is dust. You can dust your house to remove dust, but you can also dust a cake with powdered sugar.

I interpreted “old reddit vibes” to be more about there being an actual discourse on posts more than being about the subject matter of the posts. If you look at the comments on reddit, they all just agree with each other because they’re the most popular opinions so they get the most upvotes. The thing I like about here is that I can still read that popular comment, but there are few enough total comments that scrolling down a bit leads to discussions that would have been buried in downvotes there. But since they didn’t define “old reddit vibes” I could be misinterpreting as easily as you!

If you haven’t read it, this blog post greatly increased my appreciation for mechanical watches: https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/

This begs the question “why did enough people start accepting that it was valuable?”

Even if Google stopped paying Mozilla, the organization has enough in savings to operate for several years. That’s plenty of time to cut back on spending and find other revenue sources. My only concern would be that they cut back on Firefox development rather than what I would consider a side project.

I listened to the soundtrack for about 4 years before getting around to watching the movie. Very fun. For how slow the build-up is, Playtime is Over is one of my favorite workout songs, always gets the endorphins running.

Caffeine has a metabolic half life of 6-12 hours. This means that after a 24 hour period, there could be 1/4 of the original caffeine amount you drank in your system. If you drink the same amount of caffeine again at that point, now after a 24 hour period you ‘ll have up to 1/4 of that 1.25 amount in your system. If you consume caffeine daily, this can lead to an accumulation of caffeine that your body adjusts to always being there, becoming the new baseline normal. This would feel fine until you stop, at which point the caffeine your body expects to be there is gone, and it needs to take time readjusting to that absence. That leads to withdrawal symptoms.

I’d like to point out that you have only talked about hope without personal action to support a statement about hope as a whole. A better term for that would be wishful thinking. While I agree that not acting while hoping for change is foolish, I believe acting on hope can drive a person to perform beyond what would normally be achievable.

If the world is truly hopeless, then why would anybody put any effort into saving it? It seems to me that at least some level of hope for a better world or life would be a prerequisite toward making that world or life a reality.

It’s a myth so widely pushed and accepted over the decades that just calling it a myth won’t be accepted as an argument against it at this point.

What I think is interesting is that this sense of fiduciary duty can be used by a company to do whatever they want. Mass layoffs are part of a fiduciary duty to cut costs. Mass hirings are part of a fiduciary duty to expand operations for growth. At this point it’s less a myth and more an excuse for doing whatever.

One of the few series that I love for making me want to be a better person, then hate it because that’s hard, then love it all over again because it’s worth it.

The first thing that comes to mind is that if they’re custom they can put the driver seat on the right side, which makes stopping at mail boxes much easier. I don’t know of any non-import vehicles that are street legal in the US outside the USPS. It makes sense at this scale as well. A quick search shows that one line of cars, the Nissan Altima, sold just shy of 60,000 vehicles in a year. I don’t know if that’s a good benchmark for sales needed to make designing a vehicle worthwhile, but there are already 60-80,000 new USPS trucks ordered, and at that point since the designers would be working with one organization instead of trying to market to thousands of consumers it’s probably easy enough to build a custom car for that organization’s needs.

UFO, not that that’s a super relevant question if we’re already admitting that our opinions are “just cause.” I think at that point the better question is “if just cause, why is there such a split in opinions?”

I think the reason GIF is so contentious is that if we can there’s a tendency to make acronyms sound like words if possible. FUBAR and SCUBA are pronounced the way they are because we’re trained from words like tuba to see the UBA and use a long U. Something like “oofo” (or “uh-fo” as you would likely argue) for UFO sounds like half a word, hence pronouncing the letters individually. The thing about GIF is that both pronunciations sound like a word, and so both feel valid enough that there can be a split in opinions. Any arguments one way or the other is just trying to justify a gut feeling about which way is “proper.”

Let me spoil part of the Foundation series for you. In one book, the cast visits a planet where they encounter one person with psychic powers surrounded by robot servants. He reveals that the planet is evenly divided by I think 128 people like himself who want for nothing and live comfortably. They only reproduce asexually, and only in preparation for their own death or when another dies.

What this illustrates that’s relevant for you is that yes, not hitting the replacement rate could lead to significant population decline, but only until people are comfortable enough and want to have kids or feel it is the best way to maintain their way of life (think farmers having kids to help on the farm).

There would definitely still be people that want the money/authority that comes from a CEO position, they would just be held to a standard. A company is not an organization or the processes that it follows, it is the people that create and carry out those processes. If you separate the responsibility for the company from the people that make up that company you allow mistakes without real consequences for those that had a part in causing it.

Based on what I have heard the last day, the CEO of Crowdstrike created a culture of cutting corners in the organization he is responsible for that led to a reduced focus on QA testing which in turn let this bug slip into the production machines of a significant number of other companies and organizations counting on that not happening. If the responsibility for that mistake lies with something as nebulous as “the company” then the organization may close, but the people that were responsible would be separated from the consequences of their negligence and free to move on to any other company having learned they can do the same things without being harmed personally. That sounds less than ideal.

I think the CEO should have some consequences. Maybe not jail time (although maybe if there were people in medical situations that died because the machines being used to keep them alive were bricked) but a real fine that impacts him personally may prompt a greater drive to organize the company to avoid the issue in the future, or prevent it at future companies.

I’m not too surprised. The last show of theirs I heard about was a generic magical girl show, except it was sponsored by some car company so their broomsticks had tail lights and blinkers on the back.

The legacy of Evangelion is in Studio Khara ran by Hideaki Anno, and the legacy of Gainax has been in Studio Trigger since 2013 when Kill La Kill came out.

One of my philosophy professors described philosophy as a bunch of people trying to convince themselves they’re not nuts.

Humbling? That’s going on in my head. I’m that complicated! Or at least the “hardware” I run on is. I think having a brain that beautifully complex is more empowering than anything! I wonder what new discoveries will stem from this.