bamfly

Mono Papyrus next?

(I find no sign of such a thing existing, with a search)

"One more turn/match" is bad enough for sleep & life when it's not supercharged by actual gambling mechanics designed by a team of professionals to keep you playing. Yeesh.

Set up store on device before kids, or when they're very young and not gaming. Do not set require-password because putting it in with a controller for every single should-be-locked-to-kids action is very slow and annoying. Forget to change that when the kids start messing with the device.

Lost about $100 a while back because my 8-year-old didn't realize he was spending real money in some F2P game on an at-the-time unlocked PS5 (though I didn't realize it was so unlocked that you didn't need a password to make purchases—I do most on my phone, for all consoles, because it's much smoother than wrestling with on-console game stores).

Shame on me for not locking it sooner. Shame on every goddamn company that knows for a fact this is happening—probably a lot—and prefers to keep robbing people rather than do something about it (say, something ethical—like shut down their company). $100 doesn't mean much to me (like, I'm not well-off enough that I don't think a thing of spending $100, but unexpectedly losing that much every now and then has basically zero effect on my life) fortunately, but that could really screw over a lot of people, in a ruin-their-whole-month kind of way ("why do they even have a playstation to begin with if $100 can really mess them up?!" PS4s are pretty cheap, used, or may have been handed-down for free or very cheap from a better-off relative or friend, and have basically the same store and most of the same games—besides, a planned expense is very different from an unplanned one)

Jellyfin user here. Started on Roku, moved to a Shield because I needed more codecs (my server's too weak to live-transcode anything above ~720p) and wanted to get there cheap.

Should have just gone straight to the AppleTV, which is where I ended up. Better UI, not shitted up with ads, less jank and crashing (friggin' Android), and none of the problems I'd see with playback of certain combos of audio and video codecs on the Shield. If not for the weak codec line-up, even sticking with Roku would have been better than the shield (yeah, it's shitted up with ads, too, but not as bad—hell, the Apple TV kinda has some, but again, less bad).

Looking back on high school, no wonder I was so damn bad at it and hated it so much. And depressed all the time. And probably picked up SAD that took me a decade beyond it to shake.

I'd quit a job as soon as I could find another, if it demanded of me what high school did. Hell, I'd quit based on the consistent 10+ hour days and constant due-tomorrow deadlines, let alone the rest of it like the before-the-sun's-up start time, having to ask permission to go take a piss, sitting in crappy chairs in bad lighting for back-to-back ~hour blocks all day, and having to keep "working" indefinitely with people who won't stop being shitheads in ways that'd get them fired from most any job inside a week. It's insanely terrible.

Like, there are multiple bad things about it that I've never had to tolerate in such abundance and variety even in low-skilled jobs I've held. WTF.

College and adult life are so much more chill than high school. It was a real shock, leaving there for the wider world. So glad the people who were like "this [shitty thing] is to prepare you for the real world, which is way harder and less forgiving!" or "enjoy it, because this is the best time of your life" were entirely wrong. I'd probably have offed myself by now, if they'd been right. Four years was barely tolerable—a lifetime of that, or worse? No, thanks.

One contributes to building a public institution accessible to all, and the other does not.

I'm also OK with taxes for public libraries, but wouldn't like my taxes going toward vouchers to help people pay for access to private libraries.

OK, yeah, I think we're basically in agreement.

The core problem is that the effective route to massive improvements in equality of access to quality public education is basically "solve poverty, and concentrations of poverty", which isn't within the scope of schools' mission and is going to be far harder to sell, politically, take a long time, and be incredibly expensive.

We tried "bussing", which directly confronted parts of this, and it fucking worked, which makes it practically unique among attempts to address this problem, and it was relatively cheap compared to other things we might try that could work, but literally everyone hated it (yes, even the poorer families) so I guess that's out.

> By grouping parents with like-minded parents, we'll amplify groups and clusters, leading to not only further stratification but also further decoupling society and greater inequality.

This effect is super obvious if you've ever sent kids to a private school. A big part of it is that you're opting in to a certain approach and set of attitudes and beliefs, even in secular ones. If you're not a fit for their program, you don't get to meaningfully agitate to change things as you might in a public school—they just tell you to go somewhere else, then pluck another candidate off the wait list to replace your family.

This can be awesome (though still risky, in some ways) if it's a good bubble, but of course they aren't all good ones....

Sure. Lots of people have ideas or preferences I think are terrible. I hope they lose at the ballot box.

[EDIT] To make this more substantive: I think there's a distinct difference between collectively funding a public system, and redistributing money to folks to go toward private entities—this goes beyond not liking the values or environments of some of the schools private-school-preferrers might spend their vouchers on. That's why I suggested that if we must do vouchers, it ought to be limited to what a given person paid in themselves, not other people's money—I think there's a fundamental difference between funding a public good available to all and giving people cash so they can get past a private paywall to access a similar good.

The funding thing's a red herring. The best-funded schools in my state, with by far the highest spending per pupil, excluding special cases (e.g. schools that are also correctional institutions or otherwise not an ordinary school, so obviously have sky-high costs), are also among the very worst we've got, and it's looked like that for years. Throwing more money at schools in poor areas has had little effect on outcomes—not to say we shouldn't even out funding or even give poor-performing schools extra funding (which we already are doing, and if we just evened out funding, we'd be taking money away from the schools in very-poor areas and giving it to "richer" ones) but it very much does not look like doing that will have much effect on educational outcomes.

Money is part of the cause, but where it comes in is letting parents sort their families into expensive-to-live-in school districts with other parents who could also afford those expensive areas. Their kids tend to be easier to teach for a whole bunch of reasons—which does make the schools more effective, but is not because of extra money spent on the schools. The sorting enabled by money does matter, but the funding itself (received by the schools) does not appear to be a major factor.

Basically, a family pays for school quality in the US no matter what, either directly or indirectly—you pay either with tuition for expensive, good private schools if you're fairly rich, or with real estate and transportation costs if you're not that rich, with a sliding scale all the way down to "practically destitute". The extravagant spending of expensive private schools might result in better education (I'm thinking especially of the very-small class sizes, like 4-8 students per class, and the ability to pay for content-area PhDs as teachers in higher grades—we'd have to triple public school budgets to do that stuff, and that actually wouldn't even be enough because demand would so badly outstrip supply, should we try it) but beneath those relatively-few outliers with far-higher spending, moving spending/budgets up or down a (relatively) little doesn't seem to do much.

Yeah, I'm OK paying taxes to get to live in a society with universally-available (mostly) fee-free primary and secondary education that aspires to some set of standards.

I'm not OK paying taxes to help Bobby Baptist send his kids to Jesus Is Lord Day School. Or kick in to rich parents' budget for Phillips Exeter. If we must have vouchers, let people keep their own tax money that would have gone to schools and use that for the vouchers. I'm not interested in handing people my cash to fund private education. I'm interested in having a public education system. That, I'll pay taxes for.

Yeah—but part of the reason for this is because we aren't capable of addressing the actual causes of educational inequality (among other forms...) which have very little to do with schools. Instead we focus on schools and ask them to do the impossible. The results are, predictably, absurd, and harmful to other worthy goals schools ought to have, because the only way to make serious progress is by faking it one way or another, or just getting lucky.

But this is far cheaper than actually fixing our entrenched poverty problems, screwed-up justice system, and terrible social safety net, and school reform programs are easy and often fairly popular (as opposed to what we actually need to do, which is guaranteed to be controversial and probably end up sabotaged no matter which plausible set of solutions one proposes) plus the real solutions would take many years to yield results, which is far too long for our political cycle—so we keep trying, then act surprised and/or outraged when the results are very stupid, when we've set things up such that we're basically asking for stupid results.

I think a new rise of trusted publishers is more likely than professional information-vetting services/jobs becoming widespread. It's sort-of the same thing, I guess, but with the due diligence up front rather than trying to sort out what's good from the vast sea of information pollution after the fact.

Most really good material is already better found in books (even if ebooks) from real publishers than by trawling the Web, anyway. Even before the LLM apocalypse, the Web has always been rather disappointing at the whole "all the world's knowledge" thing. Great for trivia, great for a few aspects or presentations of a few topics, kinda shit for the rest. AI garbage wrecking the Web doesn't seem like a complete change of the current state of things, but a shift in where exactly the "Web is good for this / Web is not good for this" line falls.

Right—I'm sure they won some business because they were actually a better experience in some ways, but I've ridden in like three taxis ever in my nearly 40 years on this planet, and never in the place where I live, but have taken probably thirty or forty ubers/lyfts, most of them near home. Why? Taxis were too expensive, so I never even considered them an option. Ubers and Lyfts were stupid-cheap for a long time.

I just mass-bookmark mine into a new bookmark folder periodically. Keeps it from getting anywhere near 2k.

I've been doing this for years and have never, not once, looked at the bookmarks. But it gives me the peace of mind I need to close all tabs and start over.

Interesting, thanks for the context.

[EDIT] Worth noting that (and, yes, I checked Wikipedia because I don't trust my mental timeline on this) US aid dates back to 2011, before even that 2012 article about Euro allies agitating for intervention, but overt direct action (air strikes) by the US didn't start until 2014. Probably one of those things that only the youngest of us will ever get anything resembling a full, clear story on, given some of the early intervention ('12 and '13) beyond non-lethal aid was evidently by the CIA (unsurprisingly) and carried a price tag (I gather over ~4-5 years, to be fair) of perhaps a billion dollars. Maybe in my twilight years I'll get to read an account of this whole thing that makes any amount of sense. I'm really hoping it's not just one of those "yeah, we fucked up and couldn't admit it so we kept fucking up for quite a while longer, on the taxpayer dime and at the cost of immense human suffering" things we do sometimes. But at least it looks like, if it was a mistake, the UK and France were making the mistake with us. Which is... something, I suppose.

[EDIT EDIT] Looks like Jordan and Israel played a key role in tipping the scales for getting Obama to agree to that early CIA op, and the Saudis were also participants once it got going. Sigh. The usual players, for US intervention in that region, I suppose. Israel and the Saudis make sense, but I'm not well-read on Jordanian foreign relations. I'd suppose they're just broadly Saudi-aligned, and I know they're relatively friendly with the Israelis.

US intervention turned Syria from a relatively quick civil war (to be won by Assad and his Russian pals) to a conflict of interminable duration. Elements of the fight against Assad were connected to groups arising from the chaos in Iraq, in the wake of the US invasion (remember ISIS?) complicating matters and surely leading to even more suffering for non-combatants. IIRC the bulk of the refugee waves came after the initial clashes, when US aid and air cover let the resistance dig in for the long-term rather than getting quickly crushed by government forces and their allies. Somewhat later, the ISIS mess made it all even worse.

Whether all this was in some sense worth it for mysterious realpolitik greater-good reasons—I dunno. Looks pretty bad on its own, anyway. Not enough help to win—but just enough to keep the fight going forever. Doesn't make much sense to me unless the point was to accomplish exactly that (to disrupt Russian and/or Iranian interests in the area without pushing too hard? To keep Syria too distracted to mess with Israel? Destabilize Syria so it can't interfere with Iraq's fledgeling state? I have no idea what the real motivation is or was, but it sure as hell doesn't seem to have been "help the Syrian people"—if it was, we've screwed that up pretty badly)

You're not wrong. They pulled the A ports way too early. I upgrade more aggressively than a normal user (though less than a real cutting-edge enthusiast) and have only recently passed the 50/50 mark for devices in semi-regular use that use A vs C. A-terminated cords are still at least as popular on devices on store shelves, as C. This, years after Apple made a hard transition.

If they'd at least brought the rest of their line-up over at the same time, that'd help sell me on that having been a good idea. But no, have to carry at least two types of charging cable when traveling, still, even with an all-Apple set of equipment.

Stories of people's hundreds- to thousands-of-applications journeys make it on here what seems like a couple times per year, pretty consistently.

All I can figure is I've been in a totally different part of the market from these folks. I've never once had a job search that looked like that. Typically, I do 1-3 interviews after 1-5 applications, and come out with 1-2 acceptable offers. I don't think my total application count in a given search has ever come very close to 10, let alone 100 or 1,000. Or, the last couple times, I've just gone, "yo, I'm looking" and had someone in my network hand me a job (I get that's a later-career thing—but my early-career searches never, ever looked like these application-gauntlets, either).

I doubt I've sent 50 total applications in a 20+ year career, which career includes most of the usual job-hopping-for-more-pay, so it's not because I'm doing very-long stints with single employers.

Similar here, 20+ year career. I think it's because I've never targeted the FAANG tier. Started in the low hump of the trimodal dev comp distribution before I'd ever heard of it, noticed there was a middle hump and moved into that before long, expect never to make it to the top one. I don't think I could handle an entire day of their interviews, as being in high-pressure meetings like that for hours on end wipes me out and turns my brain to mush in short order—and that's if I put in a ton of prep time first and were prepared-enough for the material to pass.

Heh—my favorite prose Odyssey's kinda a bad one, from many perspectives, as it's an even less a literal rendering than most: TE Lawrence's 1932 translation (publishing as TE Shaw—you might find it under either name). It's not so far off it'd be at all fair to call it a retelling, but it's also less-close to the original than most translations. It's also guilty of some of the deliberate archaism in its language that I just accused Butler of, but is more to-my-taste regardless—I make no claim to consistency :-)

I find it clean, unassuming, and to read at a nice modern-feeling (but not too modern-feeling) clip without resorting to abridgment.

> Any specific reasons why?

I don't think it reads very smoothly, and Butler adopts a kind of archaic tone (even for the time, I mean—not just that the translation is, itself, now old) that does more harm than good to the text. Not literal enough to justify the clunkiness, not distinctive and skilled and poetically-sublime enough to be a great English work in its own right (see: Pope) despite putting some effort into it[1]—basically, just a rougher read than other options, without much benefit to offset that. It's not terrible, I'm just not sure there's anything to recommend it—I'd say read a different Homer, and if you want to read Butler, read Erewhon or one of his other novels.

[1] For instance, from the link:

"So saying she bound on her glittering golden sandals, imperishable, with which she can fly like the wind over land or sea; she grasped the redoubtable bronze-shod spear, so stout and sturdy and strong, [...]"

He's trying with all that alliteration and the meter, and at times it works quite well for the space of a few words, but the wider a view, if you will, one takes of it, and as one proceeds with the reading, the worse it looks—to my eye, anyway.

[EDIT]

Other Butler, for free.

Erewhon:

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-butler/erewhon

The Way of All Flesh:

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-butler/the-way-of-a...

If you read and like Erewhon, you'll probably also like the sequel Erewhon Revisited. Didn't see it on Standard Ebooks, but I assume PG has it.

I wouldn't defend it as the best, but I'm personally a fan of TE Lawrence's 1932 translation, writing as TE Shaw.

Odyssey only—he didn't translate the Iliad.

I read Butler's Iliad (mercifully, with the gods' names restored to Greek by an editor) and concur—avoid.

It's often the case that there are multiple still-covered-by-copyright translations of ancient texts (and sometimes more-recent-than-ancient ones, as with e.g. almost anything Russian, or Jules Verne) that are better than anything PG has, by just about any standard of "better". Not their fault—that's just how it is. I'd definitely recommend anyone tackling these sorts of works shop for the best translation for their purposes—it can make a huge difference. Worth a trip to the library or a few dollars for a used copy, for something you'll spend hours with.

Flash is to web dev as Excel is to desktop applications: it "sucks" but is also arguably the single best tool the entire field has produced. The technologies that might replace Flash are "better" but also so much worse that they aren't even close to actually replacing it, years on—and, yeah, that's mostly about the authoring tools, which were not just excellent, but also de facto free for hobbyists (thanks, piracy) when Flash was in its prime.

It's more like a math major speculating on some possible route to a proof of a hard problem without having dug specifically into the literature on that problem in particular, such that there's a good chance they're barking up a proven-unproductive tree or ineptly re-discovering something well-known to those who have so-studied.

Vonnegut wasn't "a nihilist" (not... many people are, really? Approximately zero? Not in some all-encompassing sense, anyway—"I'm a nihilist" usually means subscribing to some philosophy that features nihilistic elements in some parts of it, or to having accepted, specifically, existential nihilism as a ground truth for one's further exploration of philosophy) but definitely expresses elements of existential nihilism in his writing, which is what people usually mean when they say stuff like "I'm a nihilist" or "so-and-so is a nihilist": rejection of (the possibility of) objective meaning or purpose.

Nihilism's a feature of positions/schools more than some philosophical school of its own, and that feature's strongly present in much of Vonnegut's work. Existential nihilism is a key element of absurdism (which you mention)—in a philosophical sense, and in the places where that intersects with literature, not necessarily in the colloquial senses of the word.

In some areas, sure, Vonnegut's not particularly nihilistic. I don't think it'd make any sense to associate him with moral nihilism, for instance.

Watts, IDK, he's on my to-read list but it's a looooong list.

"Being" a nihilist is kind of a weird idea anyway. It's more a feature of (parts of) various other world-views or approaches to certain aspects of philosophy, than, like, some thing all its own.

Pessimists, broadly, are closer to a real definable "school" to which one might credibly assign hypocrisy at failing to follow through and off oneself (though there are various valid reasons that may still not really be fair). A famous example of this kind of philosophy in pop culture is Rusty in True Detective, who explicitly labels himself a pessimist, and who carries on not because he believes there's a reason to that he could defend philosophically, but because he "lacks the constitution for suicide", as he puts it himself. Though, again, even the pessimist school comes up with justifications for going on living (they just tend to lean more romantic, than couched in reason).

TL;DR I think you're wrestling a ghost with this true- or not-true nihilist deal. I think the colloquial use of the term admits cases and views less-strict or precise/complete than you're insisting on, usually being a shorthand for some limited and specific case of nihilism (e.g. existential nihilist) that doesn't necessarily mean what you're expecting nihilism to mean, while some more-formal-and-strict version that exists as an all-encompassing School of Nihilism isn't really a thing to begin with.

There exist multiple good, free encyclopedias of philosophy online:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life-meaning/#Nihi

https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/nihilism/v-1

https://iep.utm.edu/nihilism/

Stanford's is probably the best-regarded of the bunch—you'll struggle to find a better brief introduction to most topics, than it provides, especially for $0. Skipping e.g. Wikipedia and going straight to the SEP, for philosophical topics, is usually a good call.