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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • The difference is that Uber’s model of using an app to show you the route, give driver feedback, be able to report problems and monitor and track the driver, etc. is actually a huge improvement to both rider safety and experience compared to calling a cab company and then waiting who knows how long for someone to show up and hopefully bring you where you want to go.

    Not saying that their model of gig workers, or dodging up front training is good, but they legitimately offered up a fundamentally better taxi experience than anything that came before, which I think encouraged regulators to really drag their feet on looking into them.







  • They claim he made a threat. The article failed to print his side of the story for some curious reason. It isn’t printing any testimony from the bystanders, either.

    Fair enough, supposedly they were wearing body cams so hopefully some of what actually happened can be answered objectively, I’m just pointing out what the article said. If he didn’t make a threat or have a knife, then tasering him is a wild escalation, it’s just that if he did, then the police can’t really just let him get on a train.

    Cops will often lie about the danger of a suspect in order to justify elevating their use-of-force. That said, they weren’t that concerned by his unreasonableness when they deployed tasers into the crowd first. They didn’t switch to guns until they realized the tasers weren’t going to work.

    Again, assuming what the article says is true, which is a big assumption, it’s not that crazy to taser a guy who just got onto a train with a knife and threatened to you. At that point you’re looking at a potential mass stabbing incident if you do nothing.

    Again, who knows, maybe the cops are blowing his behaviour wildly out of proportion, I’m just saying that, based on the article, it sounds like he wasn’t just gunned down for jumping a turnstile.





  • “This isn’t a meeting about the budget per se”

    “This isn’t exactly a meeting about the budget”

    If you finish those sentences, it becomes clear why per se is used:

    “This isn’t a meeting about the budget per se, it’s a meeting about how much of the budget is spent on bits of string”

    “This isn’t exactly a meeting about the budget, it’s a meeting about how much of the budget is spent on bits of string”

    In this situation, using per se provides a more natural sentence flow because it links the first part of the sentence with the second. It’s also shorter and fewer syllables.

    “Steve’s quite erudite.”

    “Steve’s quite intellectual.”

    I think intellectual might be a closer synonym, but intellectual often has more know-it-all connotations than erudite which seems to often refer to a more pure and cerebral quality.

    “Tom and Jerry is a fun cartoon because of the juxtaposition of the relationship between cat and mouse.”

    “Tom and Jerry is a fun cartoon because of the side by side oppositeness of the relationship between cat and mouse that is displayed

    For those to say precisely the same thing it would have to be more like the above which doesn’t really roll off the tongue.

    “I don’t understand, can you elucidate that?”

    “I don’t understand, can you explain?”

    Elucidate just means to make something clear in general, explaining something usually inherently implies a linguistic, verbal, explanation, unless otherwise stated.

    Honestly, these all seem like very reasonable words to me for the most part. I can understand not using them in some contexts, but for the most part, words exist for a reason, to describe something slightly differently, and it takes forever to talk and communicate if we only limit ourselves to the most basic unnuanced terms.


  • When people use industry specific jargon and acronyms with someone not in their industry.

    It is a very simple rule of writing and communication. You never just use an acronym out of nowhere, you write it out in full the first time and explain the acronym, and then after that you can use it.

    Artificial diamonds can be made with a High Temperature, High Pressure (HTHP) process, or a …

    Doctors, military folk, lawyers, and technical people of all variety are often awful at just throwing out an acronym or technical term that you literally have no way of knowing.

    Usually though, I don’t think it’s a conscious effort to sound smart. Sometimes, it’s just people who are used to talking only with their coworkers / inner circle and just aren’t thinking about the fact that you don’t have the same context, sometimes it’s people who are feeling nervous / insecure and are subconsciously using fancy terms to sound like they fit in, and sometimes it’s people using specific terminology to hide the fact that they don’t actually understand the concepts well enough to break them down further.



  • Suda suggested that one reason is publishers and developers focusing too much on Metacritic scores, and deciding to play it safe and stick to what is conventionally known to ‘work’ instead of taking risks with new ideas.

    I think most people are missing that they’re talking about them from a dev and publisher standpoint, not consumer / gamer.

    And from that perspective it is problematic whenever things that are supposed to be used to assess something become targets to shoot for. Oscar bait, teachers teaching the test and not the subject, etc.




  • The scale of what you just described is really goofy.

    The word you’re looking for is “big”. As in, it embiggens the noblest spirit.

    I don’t think it’s feasible to protect a mars-diameter disc of massive magnets from damage by either normal objects traveling through the area or from some human engineered attack.

    It’s also not possible to protect the ISS from either of those and yet it’s operated fine for 30 years. You do not need every little bit of it to be perfect, you just need to deflect enough solar wind that it allows Mars atmosphere to build back up which is what provides the real protection.

    If you’re imagining the capacity to create such an emplacement, don’t you imagine that such phenomenal effort and wealth of resources would be better spent solving some terrestrial problem?

    Like I said, we waste more resources than that all the time. I’d rather we didn’t build yachts and country clubs and private schools, yet we do. There’s no reason to not get started building that array, especially if it will take a while.

    There’s a real difference between e-waste, which is mostly byproducts of the petroleum refining process with electronic components smeared liberally on, many of which rely on petroleum byproducts themselves and electromagnets, which are, at the scale you’re discussing, massive chunks of metals refined, shaped and organized into configurations that will create magnetic fields when dc is present.

    That is not what e-waste is. E-waste primarily consists of silicon chips and the metal wires connecting them. Even the circuit boards themselves are primarily fibre glass, not petroleum.

    And no, we wouldn’t be creating those using actual magnets, we’d be using electro magnets, which is just coils of wire connected to PV and logic chips.

    I quite frankly flat out do not understand why people on the left are so against space exploration suddenly. You know that Elon Musk is not the only billionaire right? And you know virtually that all of them just sit on their wealth, and do nothing with it but wast on luxury lifestyles for themselves right? Yeah it would be better if billionaire’s did not exist, but as long as they do, why are you upset about their money going to space exploration as opposed to just yachts and $20,000 a night hotel stays?