For anyone on the “invest in the complete opposite of whatever Don Jr. is doing” plan, there are lots of good ESG’s you can put your money in. Firms like Calvert are gonna perform slightly worse than VTSAX, but it’s typically not more than “slightly,” and at least your money isn’t funding oil cartels, Meta, Amazon et al.
The Microsoft store app that nobody uses? Oh god, anything but that
It’s all hallucinations. It’s just that some of them happen to be right
Or!—hear me out—one woman whose 8 co-gestators were just laid off by someone who doesn’t understand what their job was
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
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?
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.
Is Unreal worse than Unity? I’ve only ever heard people complain about the latter
+1 for biking. I track my bike rides with Apple Health and it’s pretty solid, I don’t know if it would be hard to make those importable to the game.
“If you knew what it was, you’d be using it already.”
This is a great concept. I hope it catches on.
I participate in a pledge called #50forFOSS. On the first Friday of every month, I choose an open source project and give the maintainer $50, no strings attached. It lets me target small projects that may not have a lot of users, but are valuable to me, as well as bigger ones with more expenses. My mindset these days is that I need to insist on paying for the software I use, because if I don’t, someone else will (i.e. advertisers and venture capitalists, which is bad) or no one else will (i.e. abandonware, which is worse).
Disclaimer: I started #50forFOSS and there’s a very small group of us who are doing it.
Only for the floors that are labeled correctly, though.
Tap-to-pay on credit card chips, too.
Please don’t make me work hard for my memes
True as that may be, I know how to add subtitles to a GIF from YouTube in 10 minutes or less. I don’t know how to do that to a video.
As a professional dev (okay, okay, forgot where I was, aren’t we all) I approve of this reasoning