Do people really think we’d vaccinate our entire healthcare workforce, who we rely on to keep us alive, with a vaccine that was not demonstrably safe? Our military? Our law enforcement? I’m curious why people think such a vaccine wouldn’t be safe enough for them.
— Milena Rodban (@MilenaRodban) December 13, 2020
Utter clown-level stupidity. They make Mr. Bean look like Paul Dirac.
A metallic green halictid bee on unknown flower. Photo I took with my new macro lens bought for me by my lovely partner:
Copyright law is bricking your game console. Time to fix that.
It’s not only game consoles (though that’s a good angle to cover), it’s many items.
Game consoles aren’t the only things that are illegal to fix. Philips is suing companies who repair medical equipment for hospitals, arguing that they have circumvented digital locks in the course of their work. Sound familiar? That’s because there’s not much practical difference between the software in your console, your smartphone, or a ventilator. They’re all just computers. But the Copyright Office insists on defining these categories so narrowly that we have to apply for separate exemptions for each type of product.
I’m still angry at the shit-for-brains mooks who said it was “impossible” that the DMCA would ever apply to physical products when I argued against the law for just this reason way back in 1998.
They were wrong and I was right. Didn’t matter, though. Idiots still won.
I stole some of this from a Reddit comment, but let’s talk about instincts in humans.
Anyway, people (mostly liberals) like to believe that humans don’t have instincts — that we share nothing in common with the atavism of animals. But, very obviously, that’s wrong. I think where libs steer from the path of wisdom is that they think saying “instinct” means that the action or response cannot be modified by culture or the environment. But of course it can and is in humans and many animals.
We have an instinctive response to things with a large heads, big eyes, and small bodies. We have an instinctive sexual response and (very, very, very likely) sexual attraction to quite particular characteristics. We have an innate fear response (mediated by culture) of the dark. All of this feels “normal” to us so we don’t see it as instinctive, but to an alien observing it’d seem no different than a cat instinctively scratching around a litter box or a monarch butterfly migrating. Because there are variations and modifications of these tendencies don’t mean they are not instincts. Animals have variation here, too, by the way!
So the liberal belief that “humans don’t have instincts” is extremely suspect, and I think we probably have far more of these than most realize. But we just call it “natural” or “normal” and thus misclassify what’s happening.
Personally I think we've gone too far against sexual jokes but this isn't really a fair comparison because you have to spend money on clothing, and it varies in price and comfort and practicality, and you have to wear it, whereas you can just not bring up sex in conversation https://t.co/IvOujBKGky
— Macro Misha (@drethelin) December 12, 2020
I think the campaign against sexual jokes was mostly positive at first (as many things are) but harms women now because it paints them as fragile flowers. And who wants a wilting delicate little blossom in the workplace who might melt down on hearing the world “dongle?”
However, fair comparison or not, which is more acceptable (revealing clothing or a sex joke) is mostly just cultural convention. It’d be perfectly possible to have a culture where everyone recounted ribald sexual jokes but dressed conservatively and conversely a culture where sexual jokes were verboten but all were literal nudists. Of course, liberals are the ones who say everything is relative and culture is not fixed but then completely cannot see how what I’ve mentioned is possible.
Funny old world.
This is amazing. December 2020. As late as this April, people—including Dr. Fauci—thought 18 months was probably too optimistic a timeline for vaccines. And we’d have been thrilled with ones much less efficacious than these. And multiple ones are in the pipeline. It is a triumph. https://t.co/g8y10YwFkN
— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) December 12, 2020
Yeah, that is amazing. Remember, not that long ago many experts said that a vaccine for a coronavirus was impossible. I saw that “wisdom” as recently as four months ago. Once, it was a fairly common take and only abated (and tweets got deleted) when it was clear not just one but many vaccines would be available.
That’s real tech there. Facebook is not.
The Democratic Party is a coalition of lifestyle brand promoters and HR compliance specialists.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 10, 2020
And the Republicans are just conmen and women grifting aligned with some also-grifty bible-thumpers.
Woe to all of us.
Look, no one wants a zoom holiday party. Send everyone on staff a pizza or cookie gift basket or something and they’ll be much happier. Everyone is tired of pretending these teleconference events are effective or fun.
— Milena Rodban (@MilenaRodban) December 10, 2020
Hey everyone, remember when the lib line was that Zoom meetings were just as good as being in person? That was only a few months ago, though it seems like years. How times and minds have changed. Was that just a cope or did they really believe that rubbish?
Anyway, it’s kind of sad yet fun to watch them go nuts now. (Milena was not one of those who was claiming this absolute hogwash, but she made me think of it.)
Firefox killing TabMix Plus meant probably a few million users who used that extension alone went to other browsers.
Brilliant strategy, there. Pure genius level.
Interesting that the same people who think “blacklist” must be deprecated because it has some sort of causal connection to racism also think literal robbery and destruction should go unpunished
— Macro Misha (@drethelin) December 9, 2020
I have to admit, that is a mite peculiar.
For once I enjoyed reading HN comments. 'There is a new kind of scarcity, because of the upcoming lizard war.'https://t.co/C39eRnLh2L pic.twitter.com/KtaMsM9ovr
— Lucy Keer ❄️ (@drossbucket) December 9, 2020
The…upcoming lizard war? Are the reptiles planning something?
This extension allows you to find and use most of the old, working extensions (that used XUL/XPCOM) that have been removed from the Firefox add-on site by the utter fucking idiot assclown numpty dipshits at Mozilla.
Install it, click the button, find software that actually works. Note that you must be using an older version of Firefox, Waterfox, Pale Moon, etc. (Back when browsers actually did what the user wanted rather than what corporations want.)
Glad this made the “best scenes” list.
I just have to gush about this opening again. The blocking, the patter, the delivery, the extras and their naturalness, the slightly otherworldly feel while still being perfectly uncontrived and organic at the same time — lord, that’s some feat of filmmaking right there.
That might be my favorite opening 15 minutes of any film I’ve seen in two decades. It’s just so incredibly good and fearless and smart. It demands a lot of the viewer but it also really pays off. Just so lovely, bold, and feels like you are dropped right into real lives and an actual functioning world, rather than observing some actors standing around a stage reciting lines and filling in backstory, as most films feel (even some good ones).
It was a really cool and fun time when the internet was relatively new, computers were still under user control, browsers worked correctly, and I didn’t have to battle to have even a tiny smidgen of control over what I can see, what I can do, and what I can know.
It was a better world, now lost forever. And it was and is all of our faults.
My first thought when I heard Marcia Fudge was the HUD nominee is that we're gonna get some $$ for public housing in Cleveland and we DESPERATELY need it omg.
Some of our biggest public housing projects were built by the WPA and haven't had substantial rebuild.
— Angie Schmitt🚶♀️ (@schmangee) December 9, 2020
So much of everything we use in this country was built by the WPA and CCC, those “useless” government programs, and we haven’t done anything like that since. We’re still coasting on the fumes of efforts from nearly 100 years ago. Meanwhile, dipshits abound claiming that government does nothing useful. Wild to think about.