isaaclyman

Expensive for a toy, but dirt cheap for a car, as I always say.

(Assuming, of course, that you live in an area where you can replace car trips with bike trips)

There’s a handful of us that do 50 for FOSS: https://50forfoss.org/

tl;dr: on the first Friday of the month we each pick a FOSS (free/open-source) project and give the maintainer $50.

Thanks and encouragement is great too. As a small-time open source maintainer, it seems awareness has been spreading over the last few years and people are going out of their way to be kind and respectful when they raise issues; it really makes a difference. But financial sustainability and community ownership are separate and arguably more essential issues if we want FOSS to survive over the long term.

I did have one maintainer turn down the $50 and ask me to donate it to UNICEF. It’s all the same to me as long as it makes the work more sustainable for them.

“If we run terabytes of text through a statistical model, then spend millions of man-hours labeling outputs, we can approximate the way humans respond to a prompt.” –OpenAI, more or less

Wow, what a surprise. I'll do you one better: if you take me to a river, I can tell you where the water is going to go next! Maybe we can get some VC money by promising to deliver clean water to every business in the world without all the expense of pipelines and plumbers? I mean, just look at all this water. It may not go where you want right now, but let us dump sewage in it for a couple years and who knows what it’ll do.

This is why email never caught on. Who wants to choose between Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Proton, and Comcast? A successful email service would be one where you can only communicate with users of the same email service. /s

As this thread demonstrates, there are plenty of ways to say “I’m doing terrible, actually” without breaking the social contract. If I’m having an awful day, my go-to is “hangin’ in there, how are you?”

The last part is important. Some people don’t want to talk about how you’re doing (maybe they don’t have the emotional bandwidth at the moment, maybe they’re in a hurry, maybe they just don’t care) so give them an out, a clear signal of something else they can discuss without seeming rude. The easiest way is to return the question, but you can also just jump into the imminent topic of conversation, like:

“How are you?”

“Keeping on keeping on. Hey, just wanted to reach out about that thing on page 4, do you have a minute?”

Or if they started the conversation and you don’t know what it’s about, there’s always “Takin’ it one day at a time, eh? What can I do for you?”

The biggest “risk” of this approach is that someone may offer sympathy or ask you what happened, which is a whole new set of protocols. But for me it’s worth it to not have to lie.

Vis à vis Archimedes’ Principle, does that imply that leprechauns have a higher average body density than human beings? I’m also relatively hard to drown, despite not having any cereal-powered buoyancy. (At least, no more than the average cereal eater.)

General Mills needs to clarify the exchange rate between Red Balloons and Rainbows. The people demand it

Kavita for my ebook collection—mostly tabletop RPGs, but some comics and sci fi as well.

I don’t actually use the web interface that often. I add books to my Kavita library, then scan the OPDS feed into my scratch-my-own-itch mobile app, Bookoscope, and download whatever I want to read onto my tablet from there.

Side note, PDFs are the absolute worst. Even reading them on a full-sized tablet is incredibly annoying. Anybody have any tips/tricks/apps for that?

The Far Side would be proud

Mosquito baiting

Ugh, I don’t know about you but the amount of work I put into being a “good exmormon” and not playing into all the stereotypes and stories they tell about us, if only for the sake of proving them wrong, is ridiculous.

I left Mormonism in 2020. Took me a while to fully extricate myself, but coffee was right at the top of my to-do list. My whole life I’ve slowed down while passing the coffee aisle so I can take a whiff.

I think my first drink was a latte from a local chain, no sugar. There wasn’t any “acquired taste” period, I dug it from the first sip. And that was that.

I don’t like any sweetness in my coffee at all. When I make it at home I take it black. I drink decaf, usually, because caffeine is a troublesome molecule for me. There’s a shop not far from here that makes an incredible cup of decaf—smooth, mild, neither sour nor bitter.

Thanks for the tip about decaf beans being mechanically different from regular beans. For some reason, after years of watching James Hoffmann videos, that never occurred to me. I’ve been gradually dialing in my brewing process and taking that into account might be the next step.