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zeekaran

119 karma · joined May 31, 2023

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zeekaran··on Laptops with Stickers
The team who handles hardware generally loves seeing the stickers people put on them.
zeekaran··on Laptops with Stickers
I used to have Pokemon stickers on my laptop.

I still do, but I used to, too.

zeekaran··on Laptops with Stickers
Wait until you hear about intentional scarification
zeekaran··on Laptops with Stickers
Often the laptop is replaced before the feelings change. Each laptop lid becomes a time machine showing who you were at the time.
zeekaran··on Laptops with Stickers
I work at a large (>50k employees) company that is in every way the opposite of a start-up. Plenty of people cover their work laptops in stickers. The hardware group that handles replacing old machines has a wall of fame for all the lids with cool stickers.
zeekaran··on I tasted Honda’s spicy rodent-repelling tape and I will do it again (2021)
Prop 65 is frequently joked about but at the time it was a resounding success. The drawback is that any item being sold in California that doesn't pay for the extensive testing (to confirm it doesn't contain any of the thousand chemicals on the list from 1985), ends up carrying the label that the item might cause cancer. If Wikipedia is too dry for you, there's a podcast that explains the history and facts well https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/warning-this-podcast-...
zeekaran··on I tasted Honda’s spicy rodent-repelling tape and I will do it again (2021)
Cold take. This is quality writing. I learned about something and was thoroughly amused the entire time.
zeekaran··on I tasted Honda’s spicy rodent-repelling tape and I will do it again (2021)
Unnecessarily verbose? So you hate reading, I guess.
zeekaran··on A Real Life Off-by-One Error
Took me a bit to realize the last photo has it correctly, and to stop trying to find the discrepancy there. Looking at only the first image it pops out to me because the wrong one is floating closer to my eyes than the rest.
zeekaran··on A road safety plan that will lead to cars communicating with each other
> (or vise versa)

Is it really though? Is it?

zeekaran··on There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018)
Best I know of is /r/rational which focuses on rationalist writing, like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Worm, Ra (also by qntm), and a million other things.

As for meatspace, if you have a local LessWrong / rationalist adjacent meetup, those are usually full of people who read stuff like this.

zeekaran··on There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018)
I prefer the original ending, but I don't think it'll change your feelings.
zeekaran··on There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018)
Worm is absolutely not aimed at teens, and it's not milked. If anything I think it could have been longer.

It does absolutely ruin the believability of any other superhero world. Invincible, for example, is ruined for me. That's how good Worm is. It just takes a loooong time to get there fully.

zeekaran··on There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018)
Mother of Learning is practically D&D porn. Also I love the magic system. If we ever get deep dive VR games, I want to be in the MoL world.
zeekaran··on There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018)
It's mainly just an early story thing. They eventually become too busy to have high school drama. Except sometimes they still have to go back to high school, though the stakes are so different and raised it's not really high school drama anymore.

I do agree there is far too much of that in the first arcs, but I think it goes away once Coil is introduced.

There is extremely little romance if you counted the pages compared to the length of the whole thing. It's 1.69M words.

zeekaran··on US Government wants to make it easier for you to click the 'unsubscribe' button
> I won't do business with companies that spam me.

I just wouldn't be able to do business.

zeekaran··on Can kids master the video games their parents loved?
I had a similar thing happen with Link's Awakening, but I had the DX version for the GBC and I was probably 8-10 when I got it. I explored every nook and cranny of that game, but was stuck in the seventh dungeon because the only way to progress was to find a hidden, bombable section of wall. As far as I know there is no hint that it's there. I had already gone through the whole dungeon poking every square inch of wall with my sword listening for the hollow plink, but I missed this section.

I only got back to it on the multi-state drive at the end of summer to my second year of college, when I borrowed my parent's Blackberry to look up the answer on gamefaqs. Then I breezed through the eighth dungeon and beat the game after a decade of not playing it at all.

zeekaran··on It's Time for Americans to Get over It and Embrace the Bidet (2015)
What? No. Other way around. Blast the ass, TP as a cleanliness check and for drying.
zeekaran··on It's Time for Americans to Get over It and Embrace the Bidet (2015)
Visiting Japan left me feeling spoiled. Every single place we went had a bidet. Every restaurant, bar, teahouse, mall, and the places we stayed overnight. The expensive restaurants had bidets that auto opened and auto flushed.

I have a bidet on all three toilets in my home, so it feels crappy (ha) to poop at a public restroom. It's just so unclean.

zeekaran··on It's Time for Americans to Get over It and Embrace the Bidet (2015)
Sure but they pale in comparison to ones that have heated water. The shock of cold water on the tush is worse than a cold shower.
zeekaran··on The case against morning yoga, daily routines, and endless meetings
> The reward for me is so significant that getting myself running requires 0 mental effort or preparation.

Is there a drug I can take to achieve this? This sounds like a superpower to me. I've tried to start running so many times.

zeekaran··on Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI
Most useless ever? You've used a Windows OS, right?
zeekaran··on Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta
I assumed vertical farming was exciting for space reasons, and maybe very little else other than someone wanting (for whatever reason) to grow things in the middle of a dense urban center.
zeekaran··on Are animals conscious? New research
Cats do the same thing if you take them outside on a leash. My cat is dumb enough to get tangled, but smart enough to know that I will guide her in reverse every time.
zeekaran··on Are animals conscious? New research
Any time we move a piece of furniture, especially cat furniture that has been ignored for months, it becomes a new fascinating object.

Most non-feral cats don't just go around pissing on everything.

zeekaran··on The Moral Economy of the Shire
How does any of GRRM's ASOIAF make realistic sense then?
zeekaran··on What UI density means and how to design for it
I appreciate when video games do this, especially when the text is comical and fake.

For example:

> Reticulating splines

> Generating witty dialogue

> Swapping time and space

https://gist.github.com/meain/6440b706a97d2dd71574769517e7ed...

zeekaran··on What UI density means and how to design for it
Even brand new restaurants do this, and it's maddening. I also go straight to Google Maps for the menu. The best restaurant websites have the straight PDF of their menu, and automatically visible from the landing page of the site. Don't make me interact with a burger menu and then several clicks later finally get the menu, grr.
zeekaran··on One dead as London-Singapore flight hit by turbulence
So I should start panicking when I see them back out and strap in?

Because that's what happened on my last flight. I didn't panic, I just felt sick.

zeekaran··on Music vs. Lyrics
I'm similar but also I treat languages I can't understand or movie samples as non-lyric.
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