blep_

As someone in another often-politically-attacked group... yeah. It sucks when it's things that actually do affect you. Those are the times I'm glad I saved my mental energy so I can properly deal with it.

I'll admit to sometimes taking this too far and continuing to ignore things that I probably shouldn't. Eventually, someone mentions the actually important things to me, so I continue to get away with it.

Not that person, but I'm the same way.

You just... stop caring. The only two good reasons to pay attention to news are if it affects you in some way, or if you can do anything about it. The vast majority of news is in neither group.

That's the first pass. From there, you adjust your definition of "affects you". I'm in the US, for example, and our government does plenty of bad things I do not approve of. But most of them, even the ones that ostensibly should affect me, don't actually noticeably change anything in my life. After a while, it all blurs into "my team scored a point" or "the other team scored a point".

Is this privileged? Of course. But it's also a requirement for my mental health. Paying attention to it wouldn't even improve anything for the people who are suffering, so there's not even any sort of utilitarian tradeoff. It would just be making my life worse for no reason, so I don't.

I don't think it does. This isn't some big architectural thing where the choice actually has implications that reach beyond the function you're in. It's not even on the level of naming conventions, where you might have to go look elsewhere to see how something is named. If you can understand both of them, which you should be able to even as a junior (as you even imply yourself, by saying it doesn't matter which one you pick), you can read both of them just fine.

That doesn't really seem like the sort of thing that needs to be standardized at all, though. They're both valid, they're both readable to anyone competent, just do whatever feels right.

If you think those things are as immoral as what the NSA does (I don't), then yes, that seems like a conclusion you might reach.

But it doesn't actually matter: we're talking about "are there people who believe this and will that belief negatively affect me", not "should those people believe this".

I don't know. We would learn that some things are possible which we thought were impossible, which means physics took a wrong turn somewhere and we need to back up and keep looking. Even if it's not the secrets of hyper drive, that's probably going to lead to something interesting.

(or just give them the money you saved and let them decide how to allocate it)

Perhaps. I'm skeptical, but I have neither data nor anecdata to support that skepticism, so I won't actually dispute it.

But the problem there is still the manipulative and abusive behavior, not the polygamy. It's absurd to argue against healthy polygamous relationships just because there are unhealthy ones.

English has that too ("one should eat one's vegetables") but it has similar problems to "thou" in that nobody uses it in everyday speech.

There's also two users:

    Disallow: /account-login
    Disallow: /Explodingstuff/

The first for obvious reasons, the second probably because they've uploaded nothing of substance besides a copy of WannaCry.

Notably, there are ways to do so without being on the train, which probably increases the number of people willing to do it.

PVC fittings are weirdly expensive, considering how cheap the pipes themselves are.

"Tamper-resistant" usually just means "normal people won't have a screwdriver for it".

Yes, because there are often incentives for lower-class people to signal higher class. That doesn't mean it's not signaling.

It's signalling class, not respect. People can be assholes in any clothes. It's a tool for getting a certain type of person to respect you.

People tried that. Unfortunately, it was immediately doomed because it was a blockchain thing.

More seriously, this means you also have to accurately encode all the things the laws refer to, even when those things are vague judgement calls. It's easy to say "you can only have a noncompete agreement if it doesn't make it unreasonably difficult to find another job in the same industry", but hard to express "unreasonably difficult" or "same industry" with the kind of precision we expect from code. A sufficiently evil company would just pay a lawyer for a few days to find a loophole in whatever definitions you can think of.

There's a reason the primary use of this is cryptocurrency conversion - it's a lot easier to enumerate all the failure modes in "give me n of A and I will give you m of B".

I tried it earlier today, after seeing it mentioned in another thread. I gave it some queries where Google had recently frustrated me by returning nothing but affiliate marketing listicles.

It returned the same results, but with some of the listicles helpfully sorted into a "listicles" section. The rest of the results were also listicles.

It's entirely possible the content I'm looking for doesn't exist, drowned in a sea of SEO spam, but then I have little motivation to pay for a search engine to find it.

On that note, does anyone have a good site and/or strategy for "I would like to buy a [product] with [two features that are uncommonly found together]" searches? Those seem to be the hardest ones to get good results for, because of the number of "BEST [product] OF 2023" lists that aren't filtered to what I actually asked for.

At the bottom of the stack, the answer is probably either "it fit perfectly in an 88x31 space between some other things on the first page it was used on" or "I drew a rectangle that looked right and didn't bother rounding the numbers".

I remember, many years ago, using an alarm clock on my phone that used questions like that.

It was a clever solution to the problem I was having at the time, which was that I kept oversleeping because I got really good at shutting off the alarm before waking up enough to remember what alarm clocks were for.

PTAs are primarily/only a thing in grade school.

Why can't you just resize the window to a width that is comfortable for you?

A lot of the friction here is that the WMF (nonprofit who gets donations and runs servers) and the Wikipedia community (the unpaid people who write the content and run the project[0]) are separate entities. Many people in the community feel that the WMF is misleading donors into thinking the donations are for the latter.

[0] Including administrators. It's customary to say "btw I have never been paid to edit", completely unprompted, when accepting a nomination for adminship.

I actually do agree with you on this one. This wasn't intended as an individualist libertarian take (most of those people would call me a communist, though I don't call myself one), so much as an anti-preferential-treatment-for-family take.

> However, if it wasn't them, I'd be helping someone else in a similar position.

Exactly. I just skip to this part. Ignoring any sort of judgement of their actions, there are many people who need help far more than my parents do, and I'd sooner give money to them.

If my parents legitimately were the most in-need people I could find, I'd have some mental gymnastics to do to justify this, but that is not the case.

... no? I legitimately, honestly, cannot comprehend why you would think that.

Had I not been born, I wouldn't know the difference, because I wouldn't exist. That I do exist now is irrelevant, because we're talking about a hypothetical universe where that's not the case. Not being born is a fundamentally different sort of thing than being alive and then dying. (If it wasn't, everyone who can physically have a child and isn't doing so right now would be committing murder.)

Everyone involved would've been objectively better off had I not been born. Both of my parents would have been happier. Everyone around them who had to deal with the fallout would be happier.

To be absolutely clear, this is not an expression of any sort of guilt on my part - I had no input into this terrible decision, and I take no responsibility for it. But any observer would have called it an obviously bad idea, if they didn't have to dance around the psychological and social implications of saying that within earshot of the child. One of the benefits of being an adult with a fully formed brain is that I can now look at such hypotheticals objectively, without conflating them with my own self-worth.

So my past, as terrible as it was, is a sunk cost. If I spontaneously died right now, it wouldn't undo any of that, nor make me or anyone else happier. The best I can do with the situation I am currently in is to keep living, and try not to repeat the mistakes of others.

I have a partner like that, and this is a thing we discussed very early and very much agree on. Neither of us would enjoy it, and both of us would be terrible parents, because it is very possible to severely screw something up without it being malicious. It would be bad for everyone involved.

I wish society didn't seem to be so quick to assume everyone would be happier with children. Some people legitimately are, but it is not a guarantee.

Parameterized queries do that just as well.

> It’s not about pay back; it’s about helping those in need that once helped you.

That... is paying them back, though?

> It also sets a great example for your kids to consider if the day comes when you are old and in need.

That would be the selfish reasons I mentioned. I consider it unethical to expect this of one's children.

I'm going to answer anyway because I can read subtext and don't like people making such assumptions about me: one of them went to jail after putting me in the hospital. The other was an extreme helicopter parent with no concept of their own identity outside of being my parent.

I do not have children of my own, and don't plan to. I think you have the causation backwards, though: this is an effect of my unusual views on families and parenting, not a cause.

(Invariably, around this point, someone snarkily tells me it's a good thing I don't have kids. I unironically agree. Most people shouldn't, and I am very much in that group.)

> Most parents sacrificed some of their future to have children

That's a choice they made, though (and usually for selfish reasons). It's like giving someone a gift and then getting upset when they don't pay you back for it.

You don't know other people's life situations, even if you know their financial situations. My family consists entirely of terrible people who don't deserve my help. Any success I have is despite them, not because of them.

But even for people for whom that's not the case, you do not get to impose your morals on them. The idea of owing your parents anything more than you owe the rest of society is a nonsensical social construct that is thankfully dying out.