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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • As with alcohol, I think it really depends on the individual.

    For me, I find that too much regular pot puts me in a dim, slightly dissociated place. But it might also be that in the past I may have smoked too much cannabis at times when I was already headed for dim dissociation, so bit of a chicken and egg situation maybe. Meanwhile I have friends who swear that cannabis has saved their life, helping them cope with anxiety, OCD, etc.

    Either way, if I had to choose between a pot or alcohol abuse problem, I’d def choose the former. It’s not ideal, but it’s far less likely to kill you or ruin your life.








  • Apple is great at polishing and packaging things that already exist. The iPhone was a better Blackberry, the iPod a better MP3 player, the iMac a better all-in-one PC… I have a hard time thinking of stuff they truly pioneered. The Newton maybe? That did not end well for them.

    If I had to bet, the Vision Pro will turn out to be a burnt pancake, but long term I have no doubt that something like it — something that augments reality one way or another — will become a thing. And in the meantime Apple has pockets more than deep enough to survive a failed Vision Pro.

    The backlash against them trying to innovate is kind of dumb though. They aimed high for a change, and taking risks like this should be lauded not laughed at.



  • I won’t argue about whether this is dystopian, but the practical reason for the face projection is that they wanted to make this not just something you wear sitting alone in your basement, like most other VR headsets. They wanted it to be usable around other people, at a workplace, with family, etc.

    Interacting with someone wearing a full face blind is just weird, so they thought that making the eyes visible would help make this a bit more socially usable.

    I’m not sure that’s really going to work out — seems at least as awkward as Google’s failed Glass project — but Apple’s design decision has some merit.


  • This is due to Biden needing to go to Michigan, with its huge arabic population. His campaign people wanted to avoid loud and awkward protests from members of his own party, so they threw a tiny bone that they knew would make a big headline splash.

    I hate to be this cynical, but listening to his campaign managers making the rounds on the political insider podcasts… they are overwhelmingly “professional” and entirely inauthentic.

    Even if biden himself is earnest, this campaign is shaping up to have all the stage managed authenticity of Hillary’s 2016 run.

    I’m worried.


  • His actual name is written in Cyrillic so the latinized versions are all just ways of trying to write a bunch of latin letters that roughly correspond to how his name is pronounced. That’s going to be quite different across languages that use the latin alphabet, even across different accents in the same language.

    If you were to write a word like 🚽 the way it actually sounds, would it be toy-let (canadian), tuy-leht, (if you’re from parts of britain) tay-let (if you’re australian), tee-let (new zealand)….?



  • Termination with “cause” has special meaning in employment law. It usually means getting fired for theft, fraud, harassment, causing irreparable harm to the company, etc.

    One consequence of getting fired with cause is you don’t get severance or most other protections you’re normally entitled to by law. So, the bar for this kind of termination is (rightfully) very high.

    Poor performance or even not showing up for work at all generally don’t meet the requirements for “cause”, so I dunno if making it illegal to let people go for anything other than straight up committing illegal or harmful acts makes sense.






  • I’d have no issue with you calling me ma’am or whatever you feel comfortable with, but that’s only because that part of my identity is not something I’ve struggled with for much of my life.

    I totally understand and empathize with people for whom perceived gender is not what they identify as, and I’m 100% in support of ensuring that everyone has the right to be referred to by their chosen pronouns.

    My point is that I worry that this issue is overshadowing other issues that I think are existentially threatening to our entire way of life.

    We’re busying ourselves over respectful word use, while the world crumbles around us.

    Do you think anyone will respect anyone’s pronouns when the world’s superpowers are run by fascist governments or our ecosystems and food production have collapsed?