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NoMoreNicksLeft

1,650 karma · joined May 2, 2014

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NoMoreNicksLeft··on Why American ambulance rides are so expensive
The problem with capitalists is that if you wanted, they'd let you go do your little commune thing somewhere. The problem with communists is that if you're not a communist and you can't be reeducated into becoming one, you must die. Or if you're the wrong kind of communist. Or if you're the same kind of communist, but you also want power. Or if you don't want power, but they think you might some day. Or if you're related to someone who might want power some day.

But no, I won't be a communist with you. And if you insist, things could get ugly. Fortunately for me, you're still in your hipster-college-champagne stage of communism, and you're both scared of violence and worried about the PR backlash of being found out to be a bloodthirsty savage.

In November when it becomes apparent that the Democrats won't win back seats, you'll all start to panic. But the real fun will come in 2028 or 2030, when Obamacare will be dismantled. I can hardly wait.

NoMoreNicksLeft··on How to read more books
1. Open book.

2. Point face at page.

3. Wait.

4. Turn page.

5. When last page, close book.

6. Acquire new book.

7. Repeat.

NoMoreNicksLeft··on AI content is everywhere on social media, especially LinkedIn
Is it? I'd never heard it until Claude (or maybe Gemini was where I first heard it from). Any idea of the time frame when it started being spoken?
NoMoreNicksLeft··on AI content is everywhere on social media, especially LinkedIn
The internet was dead before you or I or anyone else even realized that it could die. We're just zombies stumbling around in this undead wasteland, going through the motions that we used to do when it was still alive. Ironically, the thing that killed it were the tools people employed to keep the robots out.

Once those were in place, no one could ever follow in Google's footsteps, which meant search could never work again not even in theory. And the same robots that people were murdering the internet to keep out were welcomed in through the service entry and started writing all the content: now not only could search never work again, but there wouldn't be anything worth searching for. And if all of that wasn't enough to really depress you, there's the fact that social media made it impossible to ignore that none of us like each other very much.

NoMoreNicksLeft··on AI content is everywhere on social media, especially LinkedIn
Look, if the robot can write so goodly that I get more updoots, then how is that bad? I can trade in updoots for money, cars, and condominiums. It's about updoots, and I know your ideas are bad because I'm downdooting them.
NoMoreNicksLeft··on Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees
You could pick up a catalog from any of these places and find half a dozen different species of bees to cultivate for pollination. Blue mason bees come to mind. Anything that's even slightly domesticatable is being pursued. Some of these bees are loners too, perfect for the hipster crowd.
NoMoreNicksLeft··on How do wombats poop cubes?
Mojang should add them as a mob... and then have their poop be little spheres.
NoMoreNicksLeft··on Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech
If you're outside of New England (and Kentucky), your state could still ratify it. The quantity of effort needed to do that is bizarrely small. A dozen people focusing on a single state legislator might convince him or her to bring it to the floor.

The last time this happened (in the 1990s), it didn't even take that much.

NoMoreNicksLeft··on The case for physical media ownership
Just a few years ago, you could have gotten the three 30tb golds for that.
NoMoreNicksLeft··on Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech
>Increasingly wishing for this from a fictional constitutional convention:

There's an interesting, one-time shakeup that we could actually accomplish. While it's true that there will never again be another constitutional amendment... there's already one out there that will never expire, partially ratified. Completely beyond Congress's ability to rescind it or cockblock it. Article the First.

Were it to be ratified, nearly immediately (whenever the next Census is), the House of Representatives has over 6000 seats. So many that the existing party apparatus wouldn't be able to vet candidates or manipulate. Lobbyists, even, would have a hard time allotting the slush funds to bribe them all.

And what would it take to do all of this? Maybe 10 or 12 people hammering (gently) on some state legislator in Nevada or Kansas. Convince him or her to pass the resolution to ratify. Nothing more than that. A single state even attempting to ratify it would start the ball rolling, and no one would be able to stop it.

NoMoreNicksLeft··on The origins of the school system aimed to produce independent, critical thinkers (2024)
So, your take is that schools are:

1. Free government daycare

2. Inspection/interference with parenting

3. Surveillance towards prosecuting negligent parents

4. Evaluation of conscripts

I think I agree 100%. It is exactly those things, even if I can't be so cheerful as you about it. That's why my children have never stepped foot inside a school.

NoMoreNicksLeft··on The case for physical media ownership
>It seems like more and more people are moving back to physical media,

Your physical media should be hard drives. The 20tb drives are at my sweet spot, I don't feel like I'm wasting a bay to put one of those in it. haugene/transmission-openvpn in docker is bulletproof, you'll never get an ISP email. Stream it with Plex/Emby to any device anywhere, yours or friends'. Use RAID for some redundancy if you can afford it. Upgrade and expand. Build a library that will outlive you.

NoMoreNicksLeft··on The case for physical media ownership
>Common-sense stuff like barring DRM on content a year after its initial release date,

That's just bad. How about a better take: if a work is ever released with DRM, in any market (globally, even), that work enjoys no copyright protection. It's immediately in the public domain. You can have copyright protection, or you can attempt DRM protection, but you can't have both and your choice in the matter has consequences.

Copyright in the US isn't "intellectual property". You don't own it, you just have a long term lease to exploit it... but the public always owned it and they will return to reclaim it at a future date. DRM is nothing more than an attempt to make sure that it cannot be reclaimed and is invalid on its face. Attempting to use it should be discouraged very harshly under the law.

I might even go a step further and define attempts to lobby for the repeal of such a policy as treason subject to the death penalty. Just to keep things fun.

NoMoreNicksLeft··on The case for physical media ownership
>Eventually your NAS hardware will be outdated and you'll have to get a new one and migrate your files over.

I know. The little watchdog process on the NAS sees that it's 10 years old, and locks it so it won't work anymore. So annoying.

Or do you mean that you will have so many movies and shows that you yearn for more storage? Because these two things aren't the same. The latter is "this is so good, I want more of it". It's like telling someone to subsist on pumpkin seeds and rainwater because if they eat anything more flavorful they'll become gluttonous.

>Nothing like just having a disc that can last 50+ years if properly stored.

There are no commercial disks that last that long, and no one can properly store them. Cold, dark, climate-controlled, pure nitrogen atmosphere? Give me a break. And how many can you even store?

NoMoreNicksLeft··on How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?
One.

The question is, does this refer to types or count?

NoMoreNicksLeft··on Why does kinetic energy increase quadratically, not linearly, with speed? (2011)
> What makes this intuitive?

20 million years of evolution hard-wiring it into our primate brains on a genetic level, from every thrown rock and fall from a tree. That's what made it intuitive. But not everyone gets the same batch of genes, I guess..,

NoMoreNicksLeft··on Why are we so obsessed with lawns?
10,000 years of agriculture has given us profound instincts to want to grow crops and harvest them. But you don't need to, it's a waste of your resources when you can head to the grocery store. So you grow grass that you can't eat and dutifully harvest it once a week. To satisfy that itch.
NoMoreNicksLeft··on An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
My god, but that sounds wonderful.
NoMoreNicksLeft··on An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
How many scrolls are intact (worldwide, rather than just France) that might still be recoverable?
NoMoreNicksLeft··on LastPass notifies users of yet another data breach
>At some point people started making it into a SaaS, because

Wait. That's a thing? Like, there are drooling, mouth-breathing stooges out there that would trust not just one of their passwords to such a thing, but all their passwords to it?

NoMoreNicksLeft··on Dostoyevsky isn't difficult
Dunno. I can't read Russian for shit (pre-kindergarten level, I'd guess), but it seems like cheating to read it in English.
NoMoreNicksLeft··on Crawling BitTorrent DHTs for Fun and Profit [pdf]
High Times is mostly on archive.org, if you need that one. I'd sort of like the film-making one, I'll put some time into that. On my list of periodicals, I think the count's up to 500 that I consider important enough to archive and I'm nowhere near done with it.
NoMoreNicksLeft··on Crawling BitTorrent DHTs for Fun and Profit [pdf]
Which magazines?
NoMoreNicksLeft··on A deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading
Candida is already antifungal resistant in many cases, or so I remember reading.
NoMoreNicksLeft··on A deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading
Why are we allowing immigrant cats into the country?
NoMoreNicksLeft··on How many of the 170k English words do you know?
Ok. "Partial" means "unfair". You've cracked the code. My bad.
NoMoreNicksLeft··on How many of the 170k English words do you know?
Never forget that we live among a bunch of B+ students that were told they were geniuses all through grade school. I'm actually surprised that I don't have five angry replies telling me that I'm wrong and stupid... this place can be worse than reddit when it comes to that stuff.
NoMoreNicksLeft··on Court Records Should Be Free
Lawyers don't use PACER. They'll have a LexisNexis or Westlaw terminal. That gets them all of the rulings and so forth, but annotated.

PACER is more or less journalists, activists, and so forth.

The fees PACER charges doesn't reflect the cost that the government bears to make it available (it's much higher). It's a poor service, seemingly designed to discourage its own use. And the bureaucracy within the court system obligated to provide it seems to feel that it's far more than a burden but even an intrusion into matters that the courts would keep from the public, were it allowed.

NoMoreNicksLeft··on How many of the 170k English words do you know?
They got the second word wrong, I got it right, but still scored against me. Haha.

Impartial does not mean "treating all parties equally". It means "uninterested in the results". Fair would be "treating all equally". That's why there's a phrase "fair and impartial". "Partial" of course, doesn't mean "unfair", so negating it can't turn it into "fair". Partial means to favor one side or the other.

This is why when people tell me I'm wrong, so often I feel smarter than they are. HN quizzes are conditioning me for some antisocial attitudes, I think.

NoMoreNicksLeft··on Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)
If the space is commercial, it's more valuable for the tenants. More traffic, more random sales opportunities. If half-occupied, it looks like a ghetto, and they only get deliberate traffic.
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