As a person with fiber to the home and the DSLAM just a few blocks away, Stadia actually has the ability to work extremely well for me.

I’m still curious to see how a home in the middle of nowhere with a frontier cable connection will fair.

— Daria (@imhkr) March 19, 2019

Fiber doesn’t use a DSLAM. That is only for DSL. Typically, fiber use an optical splitter in a fiber distribution hub at a neighborhood node that then gets aggregated into a multi-fiber cable that goes back to the central office. This is called a PON or Passive Optical Network. It’s vastly cheaper than having an active fiber switch in the local node that then goes back the CO that would then require much more cable. (The latter is often how business fiber with high SLAs and guaranteed bandwidth is configured, though.)

In fact, PONs often use multiple, tiered optical splitters to more cheaply get fiber to more homes. PONs do have advantages, though — it’s passive so requires no power along the signal path which makes it again cheaper and potentially more reliable.

But no DSLAM in sight.

People are always surprised and shocked when data is lost from some cloud service, either by negligence or intent.

And I’m like, motherfucker what did you think was going to happen?

They’re also thinking too small.

VHS was how we’d preserve memories forever.
Floppy disks were the gold standard.
Blockbuster was ubiquitous.
Sears invented shopping from home.
We were all friends with Tom.

Things that are too big to fail just do, eventually. Even great ones.

— Lesley Carhart (@hacks4pancakes) March 18, 2019

She understands. Most people do not. There are people who think (some in that very thread) that Google, Facebook and Amazon will be functionally eternal. They won’t be. I’d give Google maybe 20 years. Facebook perhaps 10-15. And Amazon 30 or so, and then they’ll be gone.

We have all these dystopian stories where people compete in contests of wits/skill to continue living and we don’t connect that to people performing their pain online to avert a death sentence via GoFundMe.

The dystopia is calling from inside the house. https://t.co/H6hQANvH6q

— Bree (& 🐕🐕) (@mostlybree) March 15, 2019

Indeed. Someone averred that The Hunger Games was so very unrealistic; meanwhile, the Holocaust is a real thing that occurred on this planet in living memory, 50,000+ die from opioid overdoses a year, mass shootings are common, lack of health care kills tens of thousands more, we drone bomb people daily, and climate change is fairly likely to make the entire human race go extinct.

Their notion of realism is severely, severely fucked.

Death of the calorie.

The article is not that bad, as such articles go, but the diet advice that most people get truly is. But to clear one thing up, factually speaking, if you eat less than you burn you will lose weight. I know because I did it so don’t tell me anything else.

But you can’t trust calorie labels. As the article points out, most are wrong. What you have to do is to monitor what you eat assiduously and then respond to your body regardless of the labels. I guess this is a non-idiot version of intuitive eating that’s actually concerned with health rather than giving someone an excuse to eat that third slice of cake.

As I’ve already said, I never counted calories when I lost weight. At first, I cut my consumption in half and just watched what happened. Unsurprisingly, I lost a lot of weight. In fact, too much weight. Then I started eating a bit more until I got to a weight I wanted to be (in the 150-155 range). Now, I weigh a bit more but that’s because I have vastly more muscle and I am trying to put yet more on.

Also, even if you are not weightlifting, eating a lot of protein and fat is much more likely to leave you satiated for longer than eating a lot of foods with sugar and carbs. Also, avoid processed foods and buy the highest-quality food you can afford. Makes it vastly easier to lose weight, as I discovered myself.

People want a canned, easy solution. But there isn’t one. Never will be. To lose weight, eat less than you burn, but doing so depends on knowing yourself very well, how your body works, and adjusting to its needs and pursuing what’s working and rejecting what isn’t. A tall order, but better than losing limbs to diabetes or death from a heart attack at 60.

Following this literal 🙈🙉🙊 advice is great for helping Rush Limbaugh get away with promoting the lie that this white supremecist was actually a leftwing eco-fascist https://t.co/2AaDQWHa5l

— Nils Gilman (@nils_gilman) March 16, 2019

I’ve been completely astounded lately by the liberal “censor everything, report on nothing” approach to the Christchurch massacre. What do they believe this will achieve? It seems that my side has a really distorted understanding of the way the current media environment works, the way idea transmission works, and how best to contextualize such events.

Sticking your head in the sand and hoping for the best seems like one of the worst possible approaches.

I’m not saying that the shooter’s idiot manifesto should be posted everywhere, but examining why events happens, their causes, the ideas behind them, seems pretty valuable to me. Otherwise, there is no method of preventing such events, and no understanding of their etiology.

Having gone through both a science and literature degree, I can confidently say I forgot 80% of the science I learned but English lit taught me how to think and that will stay will stay with me forever. My time would have been better spent focusing more on English #university

— Megha (@lefthemisphere9) March 15, 2019

I think this would be true for most people, as a lot of what should be science education is really just math-obsessed pseudo-IQ tests that don’t really teach most people anything except math techniques they promptly forget in a few weeks.

This is not the future.

I’d guess that in 20-50 years, most of the math that is now obligatory will be viewed just as we see slide rules now, except not even with the mists of quaint nostalgia. Expert systems and near-AIs will be so vastly better at all but the most cutting-edge math than we are that it’ll be pointless to learn any of that, except the basics of how the approaches and algorithms work.

I say this not because I dislike math (I actually like learning about it), but because that’s just the way the future is headed, inevitably.

Focusing on math now is like if we taught every student how to build a car or a bus from scratch so they could get to school. Sure, they learn a lot, but what they learn is pointless, just as most math education is. (I know I’ve mentioned it before, but my partner resents all the pointless math she was required to take for her CS degree, although she is unlike me good at it.)

Jettisoning the baseless math obsession will also mean more diverse thoughts and projects are undertaken in science. This will be a very good thing and will probably help reverse the current near-stagnation.

It’s no surprise that young people are the ones most interested in protesting inaction on climate change. Many of the ones you see rallying are going to be killed by climate change, directly or indirectly, and they know this all too well.

The olds don’t care; they’ll be dead before climate change hits the hardest, and until then they seem intent on hoovering up as many resources as they can hoard and then dying in overfurnished houses with nothing to show for their lives save their legacy of acquisitiveness and neglect.

Has any generation ever been so burdened with so little acknowledgement by the previous ones still alive? It still shocks me when I think about how many of the Boomer generation in particular are just fine with allowing their children and grandchildren to suffer so much, with full knowledge of its likelihood.