Rhaedas

Don’t forget the sound, that clunk with every step is what sold it as real.

And magnetic shoes.

Been using my dad’s MacBook from 2009 (that he had obtained from a pawn shop long ago) as a secondary laptop. Had tried to update the existing OS, but it was too old, Apple had already abandoned it, so I installed Linux Mint XFCE. Now it’s modern again. Slow as hell for some tasks like browsing the web, but it’s the memory that’s the bottleneck, planning to go from the stock 2GB to 4GB or 8GB soon, which will fix that, possibly another SSD later too.

That’s what happened with ours. They were pushing to have longer and more complex passwords, which was great, since forever they had stuck with an eight character requirement (which I couldn’t believe, that’s breaking a few basic rules of security that I knew about, and this is a large corporation).

So I figure okay, I’ll make my next password something that’s finally decent. Except when I go to use the older terminal based systems that are still crucial to operation, they won’t take anything past eight characters… because that’s what they were programmed for. Turns out IT had jumped on the better security bandwagon before they either had gotten to migrating things at the core level, or they didn’t think that far until the tickets started hitting. Likely the latter.

It all works now, but it was funny having to go back to a less secure password for a while because of a slight oversight or assumption on IT’s part.

Seems most things are. Just being realistic.

Less total carbon. It’s morbid, but burning ourselves out faster ends up with a smaller number than if we persist in this. If you go with some assumption that economic collapse allows us to survive… well I guess you have a point.

True enough. But even if we had gotten a magic benevolent dictator decades ago, the damage was already done. We’re just piling it on at this point. In some aspects, maybe a speed run into hell will work out better than a long braking. Better overall, but still a disaster.

This may be a common human thing to do. The difference is the buffer zone that someone has before things become unbearable. Not an excuse, the right thing to do in a society that’s interconnected and educated is not to wait until that point to take action. But… we could probably argue how interconnected and educated people are with echo chambers and propaganda designed to keep them in control.

At some point things do break, regardless. Hopefully sooner than later.

Then Britain and friends jumped in and drew new borders for everyone because that’s exactly what wasn’t needed.

As a sidenote to things flying off, if you’re in an area that’s had snow, ice, or even just freezing temps, stay far back from any semis pulling a trailer. Guarantee that they don’t get up there to remove what’s there, and large chunks of ice can not only do damage to a following car, it could be lethal. It is absolutely the responsibility and even maybe the legality of the truck driver, but that doesn’t help the dead.

I think most people using them know that there’s not something there, and yet when using it they’ll still act as there is. Even giving it that benefit of doubt in what it outputs as valid, as if it’s from another person, maybe even one who knows more than they do. So it’s a gray area of “not believing”.

Many popular writing experts say to write messy. You want to get the ideas out, even if they’re ugly and imperfect, and go back later to fix the mistakes. Same can be said I suppose for any art. It’s what Bob Ross used to talk about in painting. Music, you can’t experiment and find what works without making some noise.

Sam Harris had a video on free will, and in it, he asked the audience to think of something (a color, or something simple but spontaneous). Then he asked them to try and think when in their thought process did that choice make itself known and get picked? I don’t think it’s as simple as there being free will or not, but I think what we experience is a bit of both coming together to give a sense of choice and self, when actually some things are deterministic by who we are or have become through life and experience. The wiring in the brain and its software. We’re not so hard wired that we can be perfectly predicted every time, but we do have preferred pathways created over time that influence any actual choice that’s made at the core.

So in answer to the title, it’s yes and no. There are some things that are far more fixed in our personalities that we understand at least partially why we do what we do. Then there are others that we don’t or can’t, or take years of therapy to figure out. But it’s a mix.

Of course they’re stealing; they have no morality in anything else they’re doing.

Some might say thumbs up works for that, but there’s also an up or down arrow, which suggests a vote either way.

Where the peak is depends on how you measure it. Wavelength or frequency gives different curves. If measures as a perfect blackbody the peak is green (which is connected to why chlorophyll took off, even though it’s less efficient for energy capture). But we get all visible light to some degree, so its color is white. Classification has a different meaning than what it looks like.

I’ve found the only long-term, totally happy dual boot system is where you autoboot into Linux. And never boot into Windows. Every now and then I have to go back into my Win10 to do something (much rarer now, almost ready to reclaim some space). Boy, Windows hates having any signs you’ve been somewhere else.

“Lockdown” in quotes, because it wasn’t a full lockdown. They started, but then realized that the economy would really tank, so they loosened it up a bit and made some nice PR (“6 feet” and “15 days”) to convince us that things were fine and under control.

This is good parenting. You can’t always be there to guide them or restrict them, nor should you want to be. You instead help them understand how to navigate the world themselves smartly. This is true for anything, not just what they see on the internet.

That or the price of advancement has made things impossible to fix without swapping out entire components or just get a new one. Which has been taken advantage of by making things fail a lot sooner. So much easier to make it cheaper so it gets replaced, and it keeps the company in business and is more profitable.