• 1 Post
  • 24 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 19th, 2023

help-circle


  • Correct me if I’m wrong, OP, but it sounds like you’re talking about retreating to the axioms of the particular belief system, as in there is a point where reason breaks down because you get to things that you (the person whose expressing their opinion) have accepted that’s different than me.

    To me this is a bit of a Motte and Bailey fallacy as your question was whether or not you have a good argument and then someone replied to that and then moved to the set of assumptions which has nothing to do with argument.

    For me personally, the other person has to demonstrate some level of critical reasoning for me to respect their opinions, even if their assumptions are different than mine. Beliefs that are entered into using reasoning are more useful than ones without because they can be changed which is what discourse is all about








  • No in the strictest definition of SAD, where the winter and fall depress you. I have reverse seasonal affective disorder, where the same happens to me but in the spring and summer. The sun saps all my energy away and I thrive in the cold and the dark. All of my positive emotions dull from April until around mid-October every single year. Give me snow and clouds any day over shorts and sunlight


  • Think it’s just a familiar form factor for the product given that most are used to how the former birdsite’s apps (both first and third parties) looked and operated. A few of them are even made by the same developers who had made third party apps. May eventually drift towards something else, but at least for the time being, telling people “instead of logging into this website, you log into this website” and everything else works and looks the same is an easier sell especially during the mass adoption and scaling phase of the platform


  • My degree and professional training is all in physics. Biggest one for me is that they use “high temperature” when relating to superconductors like we’re going to have superconducting phones next year, when in reality high-T superconductors are still colder than 100 K (-173°C, -280°F). Also they gotta stop flipping out over Water on Mars. That’s so passe, there’s a literal list on wikipedia on how many times that’s happened. On the plus side though, most have just stopped trying to explain anything around physics and instead go for a more “x does y cause physics” approach







  • In my opinion, most Mountain Goats songs. John Darnielle is an amazing songwriter, and he tackles very difficult subjects, especially in his earlier stuff. The Sunset Tree album is all about growing up with an abusive step-father, Tallahassee about a couple who fall apart, Full Force Galesburg about a small town you can disappear in, etc. Some of my favorites include “The Mess Inside” about two people that can’t find the love they lost, “No Children” about a couple that hate each other, and “Jeff Davis County Blues” about a sort of meditative experience after a breakup. I’d give it all a listen. To go even deeper, the albums All Hail West Texas and In League With Dragons have sort of companion podcast seasons (I Only Listen To The Mountain Goats) where Darnielle and Joseph Fink of Welcome to Nightvale go through each song, the inspiration, the meaning, stuff like that.



  • Depends a lot on your interests! Some good ones I’ve aggregated over the years:

    • Pluralistic by Cory Doctorow: Daily links for reading by a very pro-decentralization and free web person
    • A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry: History and Pop Culture, usually one post per week on Friday
    • Pedestrian Observations: Public transportation and urban design
    • People’s Policy Project: RSS feed for articles from the only crowd funded think tank (Lefty if you’re interested)
    • Bartosz Ciechanowski: Great blog with interesting animations, all very well researched. Only downside is that you usually have to use the RSS feed as a method of knowing when the article is posted and following the link to the website, plus he usually only posts one every 3 months or so
    • xkcd: Old guard web comics, always fun to read

    There are a lot of great RSS feeds out there though! I encourage you to see if your favorite blogs or news sites or things like that also have RSS feeds and suggest consuming them on there (for example I read CBC and Radio Canada exclusively through RSS) as it usually streamlines the whole reading experience.

    If you use Apple’s Ecosystem, I would also suggest using MacStories’ Find RSS Feed Shortcut which will grab any available feeds from any website you feed it and let you copy the link to your clipboard to add to your favorite app. Enjoy!


  • Someone who lives in California not originally from here chiming in. For me personally, I hate it because of the weather. I live in SoCal, which people claim to have good weather, but to me it’s hell. It never rains, the sun is always shining, and it’s always hot while most apartments don’t have AC. This may sound lovely to you, in which case more power to you. I’m the kind of person where the sun saps all energy out of my body and I prefer being cold to warm, so this sucks. Other main downside is housing cost. My 650 square foot one bed apartment in suburban LA costs over $2000 a month and it’s cheap for the size and area. Maybe Northern California is nicer, but SoCal ain’t it