iwanttocomment

I used to work with the dude in Michigan who started his own neighborhood fiber ISP. Good dude, super sharp, he had loads of experience in the ISP space. You don't do that kind of thing by getting consumer-priced fiber and then running it around the neighborhood, what he did was far more than that.

At the end of the day, you can't force someone to install consumer-priced fiber to your home. There's just no law requiring companies to provide you with fiber access.

Most streaming 4K is only 25mbps, FYI. Cox's lowest plan appears to be 100mbps downstream. Are you not getting even 25mbps from Cox?

I don't disagree with you, but the article shows the 4070 is still set at 12GB?

Shocking! It's not like there weren't 4070 Ti Super cards that had 16GB GDDR6x at 21Gbps with 8448 cuda cores. 28Gbps with 8960 cuda cores?! Unbelievable! Sounds... fine. Uh, let's see what the price is.

Indeed, 2022 started with unquestionably the most substantial spread of COVID throughout the pandemic, both in terms of wastewater levels and tracked cases. It is clear that early 2022 was a time of very substantial risk. Rates of COVID both in wastewater levels and reported infection rates were the highest of any time in the pandemic.

However, years later in late 2024, measured wastewater levels and serious illness risks appear statistically to be at their lowest of any point over the course of the COVID pandemic.

The linked article states that "we are in freefall" and contains a lot of florid language to imply that we are all at risk of serious disease. We are not. The rate of COVID-related illness is drastically and radically lower at this specific point in time than nearly any other since before the pandemic, and it's rational for people to react as such.

Personally, I'm boosted (so many times I've run out of space on my card), and I've got boxes of N95s, and in the event of any reportable uptick, I have no hesitation in going back to full protection. My loved ones feel the same way. But we are currently in no way at the same level of risk we were just a couple of years earlier.

We will all have to live with COVID in the same way we all live with the flu, pneumonia, cholera and any number of diseases. (The cholera pandemic is, according to the WHO, still ongoing!) We all risk illness and death every single day regardless of COVID; in the area I live, the risk of dying or experiencing serious injury in a car accident is currently greater than the risks of contracting COVID.

It doesn't help us in any way to continue to live in fear after the worst has passed. I don't disagree with a message to stay vigilant, but to say that the sky is falling when it is not is absurd.

It's almost 2025, can we have an article "How to Talk to Your Doomer Friends About Realistic Approaches to Modern Living Now That COVID Is Endemic”?

As ridiculous as this comment will sound, a million dollars for a 40 year old with a family is not a lot of money these days. "Oh hell yeah, I've got a million in fungible assets" honestly doesn't mean much when it comes to ensuring your future. Yeah, yeah, you could buy a Lambo in cash, and many of us here on HN could... and we don't. Do you have a pension? No? That money is there to help you in the future, not in the present.

1. Cash it in.

2. Pay the taxes.

3. Pay off any high interest rate debt, like credit cards or home equity loans.

4. Put money in a college fund for your child.

5. Move where you want, hopefully with a lower cost of living. Then, do what you want you like for money. Feel free to take breaks, but keep things moving. (Note: you do not have enough to properly retire in the US unless there's more in your investment funds that you're not telling us about.)

6. Put the rest in index funds, target funds, and other real estate investments.

7. Live quietly and calmly.

That is all.

Donating money has become incredibly painful. With the exception of extremely local independent charities, any amount less than a few hundred dollars will be quickly used up by mail campaigns, staff calls, endless harassment.

If there's a local cause, please, donate. If a friend experiences fire or medical issues, help them out. A local group helping people out or trying to run a local business in the face of adversity? Do it. But professional charities? I'm sorry to say that it's a waste.

Yes, yes, the EU cookie compliance law requires documenting and storing consent received from users.

And how do you do that, for any user not logged in? You understand how this works, right? THROUGH COOKIES. WHICH YOU HAVE TO NOTIFY THE VISITOR OF.

It's literally the dumbest law imaginable.

Noooo, they can't tell if I'm a new browser or not and they display these incessant, idiotic GDPR warnings because I don't have cookies enabled lol. How would they know whether or not they displayed the warning before without me having a cookie indicating whether or not they displayed the cookie warning?

Answer: they can't. The EU politicians did not think this through.

Like, just send everyone a postcard about cookies and be done with it. Literally this is the dumbest law ever. I love consumer protections, and yet this is the most idiotic thing we all have to deal with on a literal daily basis because nobody understands how cookies work, apparently.

They hope that I have cookies disabled by browsing incognito? Or they just want to subject me to nonsensical popups to be jerks? What? Huh?

Alas, as I am not in the EU, my cell phone is not covered by the regulations of the GDPR.

That being said, I do continually have to click through ridiculous GDPR cookie announcements, as I generally browse incognito, and thus am subject to cookie warnings on every web site every time. "Thanks, EU. Somehow, because I have cookies disabled, I get every cookie warning imaginable. Good job, idiots."

Never. Don't do it. If I abandon my cart, there is a genuine reason. If you really want to discuss it your founder or CEO can send what seems like a genuine and personal email. But don't send me a text message about it. Please. Don't. Ever.

I'm serious, do not give. Not to the right, not to the left. Don't.

Never give less than a hundred bucks to anyone unless it's someone you personally know. Sure, if you know someone who has recently encountered a serious illness, a fire, or the loss of their job for reasons outside of their control, absolutely, help them out. Otherwise - do not. Don't give.

Any small donation to any political party will be used to try to get you to donate more money. You are not helping the cause. You are paying for someone to pester you to donate more money. Really. Unless you have serious cash, 100% of your donation will eventually be used up by staff calling, texting or emailing to get you to donate more. Just move on. You literally cannot help.

While I don't disagree with anything written in the article, I was honestly hoping for a soap recommendation? Wanna get out of this soap rut.

"Quantel Paintbox" is generally regarded as the most beautiful phrase in the English language, having taken the reins from "Cellar Door".

For some reason, this mention of Starship's "We Built This City" led me down a hole of Internet research on my own personal Mandala Effect rabbit hole. I remembered as a kid, the Residents - who I only knew at the time as a bunch of guys wearing eyeballs as their heads - being part of the video for "We Built This City". I later became a fan of the Residents, who hadn't mentioned this at all. No evidence of them appearing with Starship, including the video for "We Built this City". But I hadn't been able to shake this vision for decades. Did I imagine it?

Tonight, digging deeper, I found it! I found the source. In 1984, just a year before "We Built this City", Jefferson Starship (the progenitor of Starship, we won't mention the Airplane here) released a video for their ostensible hit single "Layin' it on the Line".

There they were! The Residents! In a terrible, terrible Jefferson Starship video! Sung by Grace Slick and, uh, that dude from Starship!

Strangely, I'll be able to sleep deeply tonight knowing that this mystery that was knawing at my soul for so many years has finally been solved.

While I personally am not a harbinger of failure, here with my Macbook and my boring Toyota and various LG appliances, I always have enjoyed going to Grocery Outlet to sample various after-the-fact product failures available at low, low prices. It's fun to spend a dollar or two on "what were they thinking?" foodstuffs. My personal favorite has always been the Lance Armstrong performance-enhanced Stroopwafel, always befuddling. Breakfast cereals with excessive chocolate. Stale candies. Wines with weird labels. Just magic.

The truly bizarre and insane prices for having food delivered has killed the ghost kitchen concept. Why on earth would I spend fancy restaurant prices to have mediocre or worse food delivered lukewarm from far away? I'd genuinely rather eat $2 of canned soup and crackers than the $30-60 meal most ghost kitchen delivery services can provide. It costs only a few dollars to fry up a fresh burger on my stove, and it takes far less time than waiting for takeaway. Post-COVID, people have wised up to the pricing and quality gap.

Motel of the Mysteries, David Macauley's satire of then-modern America intertwixed with a satire of archaeology and historical and academic understanding, masquerading as a picture book. A remarkable work I still think about today.

https://www.vox.com/22753080/motel-mysteries-book-david-maca...

This article had me going a different direction. What is up with the 60 year olds in Norway? Not snark, the spike there seems way more radical than any of the purported divides between benefits towards younger people in 2012 vs 2023 in any country. Do you just get a pension at 60 in Norway?

Caught Megalopolis. I'm confident it's intentional, it's clearly the film Francis Ford Coppola wanted to make. If at 85 I can spend 100M of my own money on such a wild, ambitious, optimistic, critical, often camp but often very human film, I will have lived my best life.

Coppola's going out with something big and weird. My respects.

But will you be getting your 4 free at-home Covid-19 tests?

This is a strangely important article, as this is literally the dumbest feature ever devised and it's shocking and bizarre that we're all sort of annoyed by how terrible it is on devices we've paid so much money for.

I was in a rideshare with my wife as we were headed back home from a concert last week. We had spent literally hours within a couple of feet with each other. We were literally leaning on each other, exhausted from the show, heading to the same place. Siri popped up to recommend she check in to let me - the person literally next to her - know when she'd be home. Good job, Apple.

I regularly get notifications when I'm out and about to check in to share the time it will take for me to get to my home with my elderly mother, who I have a good relationship with but who literally lives across the country, and who I have not lived in the same house with since 1990.

This is an extraordinarily badly designed feature, and it's truly bizarre that it made it into production in this state. If we're all paying nearly $1k for a phone, it shouldn't be nagging us with literally bizarre suggestions all the time.

Like with the absurd lack of iPad-like flipkeys or GBoard-like punctuation shortcuts on the iOS keyboard, things like this really make me wonder if Tim Cook actually uses his own iPhone or if he just has an assistant to manage his affairs. If I were a CEO of one of the world's most powerful companies and had issues like these with my own product, I would be like... this is going to change in the next point release.

The flip side of this is the requirement, within a monoculture, that you need to do something in a certain way because that is the way that it is done, even when there are other valid options, different techniques and preparations, different tastes and preferences. Many have been stifled by "cultural norms" when they were doing no harm but simply following a different path than their elders. The ability to browse the knowledge of the world and explore the many different ways we cook, speak and live is in no way a bad thing for humanity.

As someone who has spent the last 50 years encountering the song "Yummy Yummy, Yummy (I've Got Love in My Tummy)", which charted at #4 in the US in 1968 and has regrettably never really gone away, I'm hard-pressed to think of literally any song I've heard that's worse.

No, I haven't convinced you? 1969 #1 hit "Sugar, Sugar" by the Archies.

1969. The Beatles. The Stones. Jimi. Aretha. Otis. Leonard Cohen. The Kinks.

No. Turn on the radio. Yummy, Yummy Yummy I've Got Love in My Tummy. When you get to my age, and you hear that damned song for the thousandth time, you just want to give up. No amount of Katy Perry or Justin Bieber or whoever is going to be worse. Ever.

You're correct that Crystalens had indeed been approved by the FDA, but has not been widely used because of issues with the IOL explanting. While there are resources on the web related to it, I'm not sure any surgeon is currently implanting it. My apologies if that's not accurate, but I wouldn't get a Crystalens today.

https://www.healio.com/news/ophthalmology/20230818/blog-thre...

All current IOLs are non-accommodating: the multifocal IOLs work by having multiple rings beam two or three different focal lengths into your retina simultaneously.

The way a natural accommodating lens works is that your optical musculature physically flexes the lens to focus on the point you're looking at. The current non-accommodating multifocal lenses are stiff and fixed; the implantee handles the transition between focal points entirely in the mind's eye. While accommodating IOLs are being developed, they are currently not on the commercial market.

I have a multifocal IOL that I honestly love, and has allowed me to abandon wearing any glasses; I have crisp and natural vision except in certain edge-cases. Other people, however, never adapt, or dislike the artifacts of the multifocal rings (mostly halos around bright lights such as headlights).

If the list contains preparations like ice cream and fruit-sweetened yogurt that have been made for centuries in non-industrial kitchens, perhaps the list is not only non-exhaustive, but it's also just not a very good list? Perhaps it should actually quantify the industrial ingredients or preparations that are problematic and evidence of the "ultra" in ultra-processed, rather than just wave its hands towards extracts or derived ingredients and include foods that are easily made at home (albeit in a time-consuming way)?

The only ingredients in Ben & Jerry's vanilla ice cream that aren't in Haagen Dazs are guar gum (which is a ground bean, and natural enough to be sold in a bag for your kitchen by Bob's Red Mill) and carageenan, which sure, can be considered a derived ingredient but is ultimately derived from seaweed and is almost certainly not the cause of any health issues. Those thickeners are a far cry from industrial concoctions like hydrogenated oils.

I mean, canned soups are on the list an ultra-processed food. Oh no!! I assure you we're not suffering a health crisis due to canned soups in the generic. It's all nonsense.

I really hate the notion of "ultra-processed" foods. The NOVA food classification system[1], which established the term, is loose and unscientific about what "ultra-processing" means, and different articles use the term interchangeably with different types of foods, many of which could barely be considered to be processed beyond what a home cook might do.

For example, pictures of potato chips or bacon are often pictured and vilified as ultra-processed foods. The NOVA system describes these as "processed" (but not "ultra-processed") foods, and that's almost certainly the case. A home cook can make bacon by curing pork belly in salt and natural spices and then cooking it in a conventional fashion, or frying potato slices in oil and then salting them. Many bacons and potato chips list few ingredients beyond pork or potatoes, salt, and in the case of chips, oil. These can hardly be considered "ultra-processed", even if the American diet of cured and smoked meats may not be optimal for cardiovascular health. These are things people were eating for centuries, long before modern grocery stores and preparations.

But even then, the NOVA system is obtuse. Ice cream is listed as an ultra-processed food, even as you can pick up Haagen Dazs vanilla at Walgreens with only "cream, milk, eggs, sugar and vanilla." You can certainly make a simulacrum of it of similar quality at home using the same ingredients and an ice cream maker. Is it "healthy"? Almost certainly no! Is it ultra-processed? Also, almost certainly no!

Other "ultra-processed" foods according to NOVA are "sweetened and flavored yogurts including fruit yogurts" which again can be made at home using no artificial ingredients with... sugar and fruit, hardly ultra-processing. Chocolate milk is an ultra-processed food according to NOVA, consisting of... milk, cocoa and sugar, which again, you can certainly make at home and is not some sort of industrial concoction.

We are all well aware of the issues with excessive sugar and salt in the diet, and this was established long before any of us were born.

Everything you read about "ultra-processed foods" is junk science. There may well be certain preservatives or preparations that aren't good for us, but the classifications in place are total garbage, and don't point us to any actual risks beyond the natural ingredients we have all known to be problematic from time immemorial.

[1] The NOVA classifications: https://ecuphysicians.ecu.edu/wp-content/pv-uploads/sites/78...

You are still their parent, but a 19 year old is no longer a child.

Allow the adult you raised to live their own life. This is not a life-threatening condition.