Is it just me, or does February have five Mondays in every week?

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Only tangentially related but @patrickhwillems.bsky.social said in one of his videos that Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is the movie that the Star Wars prequels could have been, and I've been dreaming of that alternate reality ever since.

I think people who see themselves as very logical are often the very gullible towards anything that plays into their self-image as a smart person. But that's also a common affliction of engineers and, as you point out, engineering doesn't really suffer from the same problems.

My theory doesn't explain soylent though, unlike yours.

Maybe one of your weirder articles but also one of your better ones; it definitely got me thinking. The tech industry attracts various kinds of "misfits" and maybe part of the credulousness comes from there being a lot of people in tech who just want to fit in and never have outside tech circles.

On the other hand "objectively more accurate sound reproduction" might not be what you're looking for. Vinyl has that je ne sais quoi. (But my own formative years correspond with the heyday of CDs so, to me, CDs have their own desirability.)

Also CD's can be easily stored on a regular bookshelf.

Lots of people subjectively love the sound of vinyl but CDs have objectively more accurate sound reproduction. Another advantage of CDs is availability-any artist selling vinyl is probably also selling CDs but I don't think the reverse is true, especially if you're talking about smaller acts.

This is, in short, an honour culture, where engineers compete for glory on the field of open-source software, aiming to be elevated in the eyes of their peers and the industry. It's a culture that would be recognisable to Achilles or Beowulf almost immediately once you got them caught up on the context: the goal is to make a name for yourself that will be remembered for ages to come.

This is one of those things where, as soon as I read it, I think "why didn't I see this before?"

Happy Petrov Day to those who celebrate. On September 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov made the correct decision to not trust a computer.

I've attached a short clip from a reenactment of the situation in the documentary The Man Who Saved the World.

1/11

Oh, thanks. I'll have to come check it out.

Or maybe there already is such a group that I don't know about?

Would anyone in Fredericton be interested in a board game club? Thinking about starting a group that would get together a couple of times a month at a local brewery or cafe to play some games.

OMG emdashes! Am I AI?!

I was wondering if there was something going on or if it was just random chance. The last three times I've been on Prospect street, my phone says reception is good but I can't reliably send texts or access the internet.

Who was it who said that if the average person in the street knew how money really worked, there'd be riots?

I think MacOS, Windows and Linux all have reputations that reflect what they were like 20 years ago more so than what they're like now.

100%. My brother-in-law asked me recently why more people don't use Linux and I couldn't quickly think of a good answer. I think there are lots of reasons why people *don't* use it but no good reason why a "normal" person *shouldn't*.

So in the last century increasing computing power meant better (or at least slicker-looking) user interfaces for everything, but in this century the graphics improvements really only show up in games and some other specialized software.

And I realized that computers in the 80's didn't have GUIs and in the 90's they barely had the power to run a GUI. But by the early-mid aughts home computers had enough power to run a very slick hi-res GUI.

I was thinking the other day about how progress in computing power hasn't slowed much in the last 20 years, compared to previous decades, but it *feels* so much slower. When I was a teenager in the 90s, each new generation of computer felt like such a big improvement.

I mean sometimes the problem is that I, the listener, am too stupid. But often people just haven't thought very hard. The challenge is telling which.

I also remember the time before the web, never mind social media, and I was already then surprised by how often people made arguments that didn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny.

I think social media is naturally biased towards people who say more, exacerbated by the way engagement algorithms and "virality" work. Unfortunately that means the conversation is often dominated by people who are willing to spout off about anything.

How to understand the stock market if you only watch Fox News

I also wish politicians, city planners and the media would talk about how, even if *you* don't want to take transit, convincing/allowing *other people* to take transit is the best thing you can do to reduce traffic.

There are lots of places in Toronto that are a pain to get to on transit but it's genuinely baffling to me why anyone drives to downtown.

As long as we're still using FPTP, I think for any new party to have a chance it needs to be either: 1) more right-wing and/or socially conservative than the CPC 2) more left-wing and/or socially liberal than the NDP, or 3) built around a core issue the way the Greens and Bloc are.

I think a centrist party built around consensus building with a platform of reducing partisanship and being "nicer" in parliament would at least have a vision people could understand. But positioning yourself as a centrist party with an abrasive leader like Cardy just doesn't work IMO.