Seconding your thoughts on nonstick and cast iron. I haven’t used other kinds of pans, but I like cast iron enough that I’d consider having at least one of them to be essential.

Getting a good sear is pretty helpful towards avoiding something sticking.

In terms of who manufactures chips for RAM, Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron have a combined market share of 94%. I don’t know how big of a slice of the pie that Micron is, but it seems we’re down to two (and those two are also investing in AI — for as long as people are buying, anyway)

Ignorance isn’t bliss when you’re living in an objectively crazy world. At that point, you either internalise all the craziness and believe it’s in your head, or you look up and recognise that it’s the world that’s nuts. I’d prefer not to live in such a world, but given that I do, I might as well not be in denial about it.

Isn’t there only like, 2 other manufacturers of RAM?

I had a pretty miserable childhood, so I actually weirdly like being an adult. Don’t get me wrong, I’m frequently miserable now, and often drowning under chronic stress that my childhood self couldn’t have even conceived. At least I’m living a life that’s my own now though. It’s amazing what a bit of agency can do to help you cope.

And even though that stress is often borne of things beyond my control, as an adult, I have the opportunity to find other people who are suffering under the same or similar systemic oppressions as I am. Sometimes this can lead to being able to make some small, concrete changes with the system, but most of the time, it just makes me feel less alone. I was a very lonely child, and one of the things that allowed me to break out of that was the freedom of adulthood.

I peer pressure many of my friends into using adblockers and other tech stuff that gives them more agency.

Something that I’m especially chuffed with is that a I actually caused a friend to switch to open source software for scientific research. She’s doing a psychology PhD was getting frustrated with the online experiment setup on the no-code experiment builder she had been advised to use. The platform didn’t allow her to input the experiment parameters she needed and she was complaining to me, and so I had a gander at it, out of curiosity.

I expected there’d be some documentation showing how to use the experiment builder, but there was nothing I could find. Everywhere I looked, there were just more sales pitches. It seems that my friend was only using it because the university had a license for it.

I exclaimed that the lack of documentation and features was ridiculous, given that there’s almost certainly an open source equivalent that does more, is free, and almost certainly better documented. I said that flippantly, but then went and researched that. I showed her a few different options and she ended up going for one called PsychoPy.

As one might be able to gather from the name, that’s not a no-code experiment builder, but rather one that uses Python. However, for my friend, this was a feature, not a bug; although she didn’t already know Python, she was keen to learn — “what’s a PhD for if not to learn how to do actual science?”.

I found it quite affirming because I don’t know if she would have had this thought if not for me. I’m very much a jack of all trades, master of none, due to having many different interests and being spread relatively thin between them. I’m a better programmer than the majority of scientists in my field that I’ve known, but probably worse than most people who actually write code for their jobs. However, gaining expertise in the more computery (and in some cases, philosophical) side of science makes me feel like I’ve “diluted” my scientific expertise compared to my peers. It’s nice that this problem was one at the intersection of my knowledge areas.

Any noun’s a verb if you noun hard enough

When you’re a member of a marginalised group, it’s easy to just become dead to it, because it’s just part of your regular life. You can’t do anything about it, so it’s either die, or just get on with it as best you can. This is pragmatically necessary, but it’s easy to end up internalising a bunch of unhealthy stuff and begin feeling like the suffering you face is your fault. It’s a slow process, where you just sort of forget that you’re suffering an injustice, because it’s just normal.

My late best friend was like in the OP. He would often be shocked and outraged at some of the things I face as a disabled person, and it was always jarring in a way that reminded me of how bullshit it is that I have to face some stuff. He’d say things that would make me go “Yeah! That is fucked up”. Being angry at a thing doesn’t necessarily make things any better, nor does it make it easier to bear, but getting angry at myself (which inevitably happens if I slip into internalised ableism) definitely makes things harder.

Recognising my suffering as oppression is also a powerful step towards finding community and building solidarity, which is a useful step towards concrete political change

Sometimes. I tend to have quite hard lines about what feels like acceptable levels of cheating though.

To use Terraria as an example, I remember going mad searching for a lava charm, and I ended up using a map viewer to check whether my world actually had one. It didn’t so I used a save editor to give me the charm. This part was a mistake, and felt like the kind of cheating that makes the game less fun in a slippery slope kind of way. I regretted what I did.

In future games, I would sometimes check to see if a Lava charm existed on my world if I had spent a while searching for it to no avail, and if there wasn’t one, I’d try going to a different world. If there was one in my world, I’d try to not pay attention to where in my world the chest(s) with the lava charm(s) were (and in some cases, I’d get a friend to confirm whether one existed on my world, so I wouldn’t even know the rough area where the chest was. Sometimes cheats can make the game more fun and engaging, if used wisely and in moderation.

I think a key distinction is that the religious rhetoric is often precisely that — rhetoric. Specifically, it’s rhetoric aimed at an international audience, because conflating Judaism with the Israeli state is essential to how Israel frames itself and its genocide. It allows them to denounce all criticism of zionism as antisemitism, even if those critiques are coming from Jewish antizionists. Meanwhile, Israel’s actions have been helping drive an increase in actual antisemitism, which is also useful for Israel, because it helps them to justify the existence of Israel as necessary for Jewish safety.

That might seem like splitting hairs, but it’s important if we want to understand what’s happening. Many of the most vehement pro-genocide voices in Israel are secular Jews, as is a decent proportion of Jews in Israel. Judaism is more than just a religion, but an ethnoreligious group, and that distinction is important because Israel cares more about the “ethno-” part of that than the religious part (because like I say, there are many people who identify as secular Jews).

It’s somewhat analogous to how Trump performs a particular kind of conservative Christian rhetoric that’s more about white nationalism than any Christian ideals. The religious component is important to acknowledge, because many prominent MAGAs aren’t doing it performatively in the way that Trump and some others do, but rather their Christian faith is tightly intertwined with their white nationalism. However, to see this purely as a religious issue would lose crucial nuance of the issue.

The Swiss literally collaborated with the literal Nazis.

Oftentimes, they are successful. There are certainly times when a wealthy person who tries this ends up failing in their attempt, but it doesn’t stand out much because there’s a certain level of rich-people-assholey that’s almost expected, where people will disapprove, but in an unsurprised way.

Streisand’s case was absurd to the highest degree, which was why it blew up. The photo wasn’t even of her house, but an aerial shot of the coast which also captured many other houses. Her house was just incidentally in the image, and even if you zoom in close enough to try see details of the house, the resolution is so low that I can’t fathom anyone genuinely believing it was an invasion of privacy.

What’s more, the purpose of the aerial photos was to document coastal erosion as research for policy making. Especially back in the early 2000s, I’d bet that the majority of photographers sued under invasion of privacy laws were paparazzi, and this is completely different circumstances. People found Streisand’s response offensive because she was obstructing a project that was for the public good. It’s likely that there were other people whose homes were included in photographs from this project who wouldn’t be keen on that prospect, but sucked it up because it’s not like they were actively trying to photograph people’s houses, and coastal erosion is a pretty big deal for people living on the coast.

Though I imagine most people would be unaware their homes were even captured. I remember that the photo in question had only been downloaded 6 times — two of those times were her attorneys.

Though actually I just learned that her beef was actually far more reasonable than I’d realised — unlike other homes that were labelled anonymously, with latitude and longitude coordinates, hers was labelled as belonging to her. Given the awfulness of paparazzi and stalkers, I actually think wanting her name off of it was reasonable. Since then, she’s made it clear that this was all she wanted, and one of the legal documents I just skimmed aligns with that. I can’t imagine why the photographer wouldn’t have just acquiesced to that request before it got all the way to court (by which point, he’d accrued $177k in legal fees). I wonder if perhaps the initial cease and desist sent to the photographer framed it more like a request to remove the photo entirely.

She writes and talks about Trump because she feels that the insight that she has on the fucked up dynamic of the Trump family is useful in understanding the mindset of one of the most powerful men in the world. People care about what she says, and thus give her a platform, because they agree that her analysis is useful and interesting.

In terms of her agenda, if I were her, saddled with the curse of that name and the toxic family that comes with it, I would feel it my duty to do everything I could to criticise Trump, especially given that her name means that her words would carry weight even if her perspective wasn’t especially interesting (I do find her work interesting — she doesn’t just coast off of the name, but also draws on her experience as someone with a PhD in psychology). Hell, even outside of that hypothetical, I already do consider it my duty to oppose Trump however I can; it’s just that that amounts to very little given that I’m a Brit with no political power). Trump is such a repugnant human that surely we don’t need to grasp for some nefarious underlying agenda to explain why she’d criticise him.

“But I really try not to go shitty to other people because for the most part, they’re not the cause of my shittiness”

If more people had this attitude, we’d have a world where people would have more space to address the other kinds of “being shitty” that you describe (and potentially prevent ourselves from developing bad habits that lead to cycles of shittiness).

I’m sorry that we live in a world that makes it really hard to not be shitty, but I’m glad that you try to avoid being shitty to other people. That’s infinitely more important than the other kinds of shittiness, in my view.

Ooh, I like this

Edit: I think part of why I like it is that it’s evocative of both “construction” and “destruction”, and civil engineering necessarily involves aspects of both. Like, even when there isn’t existing infrastructure to demolish, there’ll still be tasks such as digging into the ground to anchor support structures, which I could consider to be a kind of destruction

I’m glad that you have a spouse who makes you feel seen, and gives you the compassion you deserve.

The bucket is clearly still functional enough to be used, otherwise the other bucket would be difficult to carry due to lack of a counterweight. Of course the metaphor doesn’t work when you distort it as you have — the flowers clearly are meant to represent something unexpected and positive that arises from a minor fault in an item. If the person in the comic had a wife who was allergic to flowers, then the minor flaw would be recontextualised as a major flaw, and in that scenario, it would be the silly person at fault for continuing to use a functionally dangerous tool.

I’ve got two words that I’ve coined that I use to describe this stuff.

“Para-productive” tasks are like what you describe. Usually procrastination related, but in a useful way. Examples might include tidying up my desk rather than starting the essay I need to do. For me, that kind of thing helps me to gear up towards the proper task. Random reading of fun stuff also helps me to focus better when I get onto the task. I find that I work best when I do a sort of task “circuit training”, where I have an array of tasks that I cycle between — and some of these tasks need to be fun for it to work.

“Psuedo-productive” is similar, except bad vibes. It is often associated with unhealthy avoidance towards tasks that I’m dreading, or an excessive level of procrastination. This word is mostly just to distinguish between the good and bad kinds of procrastination.

“My point is that it’s not that there is no reason to not put a network connection on a fridge. It’s that capitalists can’t be trusted not to enshittify whatever useful smart feature they implement.”

This is eloquently phrased, and I will probably borrow it when arguing with people in the future

A form of wage theft that’s common in the US (and elsewhere) is that workers are expected to still do work when they have already clocked out (such as closing up the shop).

I have a Japanese friend who told me that it’s not uncommon that if your work colleagues are going to the bar after work, you are expected to go along. If you don’t, it shows a lack of commitment to your job. As it’s not a formal requirement, of course you don’t get paid for this, despite it being functionally mandatory. What’s worse is that you can’t just stick around for one drink and then head home — you are expected to stick around at least as long as your boss, even if he (let’s face it, the boss is probably male) is still drinking long into the night. I consider this to be an especially egregious form of the wage theft I described above.

It sounds so exhausting that I would likely be unable to do anything besides pretend to work, and even that would lead to inevitable burn out. I had heard that the work culture in Japan was bad, but I had no idea how bad until my friend shared some first hand experiences with me.