The privacy issues are nasty, but a smart toilet could actually be an incredibly useful device.

Can you imagine if every time you went to the bathroom, your toilet could do some of the basic stool / urine tests you get at the doctor’s office? Certain diseases could be caught extremely early, and you wouldn’t have to do anything different.

And then there are bidet functions. Forget smearing poop all over your ass with paper, wash the poop off with nice warm water every time.

I wouldn’t want to have to use a smartphone app for that, but there’s no reason you couldn’t have a simple set of buttons on the toilet itself. You could keep the manual flush lever and only use that if you preferred, but if you wanted an even better experience and a better clean, that option would be available.

Reminder: never go have pancakes at wise_pancake’s house.

It’s also the system administrator and SRE mindset.

While there’s a lot of disagreement on where bands belong, I think Rage Against the Machine as the pinnacle of Angry Music is one we can all agree with.

I’m not sure Cake qualifies.

But Facebook has network effects that basically lock people in. If they leave they leave their friends and family behind. It causes a collective action problem. If you leave, your friends and family stay behind. You want some way to move everybody all at once, and that’s really hard.

But, because Reddit is based on pseudonyms, people don’t tend to form attachments the same way, at least IMO. That means you feel less locked in. As long as you can find people talking about those same subjects elsewhere, you aren’t as locked in.

In addition, Meta is part of the online ad duopoly along with Google. They’re really good at monetizing their users. Reddit is just a smallish website and can’t compete with that.

For now, random google searches take people there. But, that’s based on the idea Reddit isn’t going to lock results behind a paywall / registration wall, or Google isn’t just going to slurp up the results and present them so someone never has to click on the Reddit link.

They’re not below the IPO price yet, but they certainly aren’t growing all that fast. They spent most of the time since the IPO barely moving, then they had a 3 month growth in their stock price, followed by a huge dip. The investors want growth, and growth requires enshittification, and enshittification will make people leave.

I seem to remember that they were just barely making it on one measure, and failing heavily on another. Like, they were just barely cash flow positive, but had massive debts and weren’t turning a profit. Or they were turning a profit on paper but their cash flow was massively negative.

They’re always measures that can be gamed. Like, you can be cash flow positive if you sell a bunch of debt for cash. You’re temporarily cash flow positive but definitely not profitable. Or, you can sell a bunch of widgets and mark down the revenue, but since you’re still waiting to get paid your cash flow is negative. That can be deceptive if you know a high percentage of sales are going to be returned.

IMO, anybody who invested is a fool. AFAIK the only user-generated content companies that have made the model work are Google (YouTube) and Meta, and that’s because they’re the advertising duopoly that controls the Internet. Maybe TikTok, but that one’s a mess. Twitter couldn’t do it, even before Elon they were a big money loser.

So, what does Reddit have that other companies don’t? Nothing really. And now that they did their IPO their investors are going to start demanding growth, which means enshittification. But, unlike YouTube where there’s no viable competitor, or Facebook / Instagram where there are network effects locking people in. Reddit users are mostly pseudonymous. IMO that also means much more likely to jump to another platform like Lemmy.

The only thing they have of value is content created by other people

This works great for YouTube, but Google is arguably the biggest ad company in the world. Just because an ad company with a sideline in user-generated content can make it work doesn’t mean that a user-generated content company trying to figure out advertising can make it work.

Do you mean “fell”?

These days I use a pen maybe once a month. I’ve probably used some of these, I vaguely recognize 1 and 7. I use pens so rarely that I don’t really have a preference. I guess if one of them is best for avoiding dried-up ink, that’s the one?

It can’t just be me, right? I don’t use pencils either. I use keyboards, either virtual or physical. Other people must also do virtually all their writing electronically.

To me this is like choosing your favourite buggy whip.

It’s funny because it’s hardly an inspiring or memorable 14 word sentence. It’s just awkward and clunky.

Like, why “secure”? Why not “safeguard” or “defend”? IMO those are stronger, more emotionally resonant words.

And why “existence”? Why not something stronger like “survival” or something more than survival like “prosperity”?

And just “a future” for white children? Not “a glorious future” or “a triumphant future”?

And, why “white children”? Not the white race?

Also, how is “a future for white children” distinct from “the existence of our people”? Are white children distinct from “our people”?

I could get it if it were framed as: we must defend our survival now so that our children can prosper. In that case you’re saying that the present might be tough but the future will be bright. But they’re not painting the future as bright, just “a future”, which is really the same as an “existence” so it’s basically saying “Our people must survive and so must our children, who are also our people, but smaller.”

Like, they memorized the first draft of some dumb saying and revere it as “the 14 words”, but it’s just badly written, nevermind all the racism.

oh people where killed

Ukraine.

It’s pretty telling about how much Americans know about other countries that the assumption is that Jus Soli is the norm.

Yeah, I love that one.

“Try” is too hopeful. “fuck_around” makes it clear that you know what you’re doing is dangerous but you’re going to do it anyhow. I know that in some languages wrapping a lot of code in exception blocks is the norm, but I don’t like that. I think it should be something you only use rarely, and when you do it’s because you know you’re doing something that’s not safe in some way.

“Catch” has never satisfied me. I mean, I know what it does, but it doesn’t seem to relate to “try”. Really, if “try” doesn’t succeed, the corresponding block should be “fail”. But, then you’d have the confusion of a block named “fail”, which isn’t ideal. But “find_out” pairs perfectly with “fuck_around” and makes it clear that if you got there it’s because something went wrong.

I also like “yeet”. Partly it’s fun for comedic value. But, it’s also good because “throw” feels like a casual game of catch in the park. “Yeet” feels more like it’s out of control, if you hit a “throw” your code isn’t carefully handing off its state, it’s hitting the eject button and hoping for the best. You hope there’s an exception handler higher up the stack that will do the right thing, but it also might just bubble all the way up to the top and spit out a nasty exception for the user.

Sure, but it makes up for that by having an idiot proof design.

Be concise. If someone misinterprets, apologize. Continue to be concise.

The problem is that too often people interpret tight emails as being rude or angry. But, LLMs aren’t the solution. The solution is to adjust people’s expectations.

Summarizing requires understanding what’s important, and LLMs don’t “understand” anything.

They can reduce word counts, and they have some statistical models that can tell them which words are fillers. But, the hilarious state of Apple Intelligence shows how frequently that breaks.

So, the American populace are fools. That doesn’t really help matters. This isn’t some minority thing, it’s half or nearly half of the population.