Spyke

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She really was

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I somehow passed the 3rd grade eye exam, so I didn't get glasses until I was around 18. I distinctly remember being flabbergasted by the trees sprinkled around the parking lot. Also road signs!

atheism

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Threats and promises are your guiding principles?

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I don't believe that you are picking up what I'm putting down. Why shouldn't you die instead? Why do we consider it understandable to defend yourself to the death? Obviously it is because we value lives more than whatever the other person wants that drives them to attack someone, but there isn't a strict reason for that beyond social acceptance. We could just as easy decide, as a society, that those who can't defend themselves should be culled. Or that murder is so incomprehensible that there is no reason to consider it.

Murder and death are obviously extreme examples, but you work that idea forward to charity, politeness, and social contract to yield to a government authority.

atheism

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Threats and promises are your guiding principles?

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I agree with the first person about morality determining how to respond socially. For example, why is killing someone in self defense necessary? Why shouldn't you just run? Responding to violence with violence could be bad if someone else thinks that you weren't in enough legitimate danger. Similarly, is it ok to kill if you are protecting someone else? What if the person you were protecting did not feel that killing was necessary?

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Important Message

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The weird text the main bird is rattling off it something called "Assembly". Many programming languages don't really tell the computer what to do, they more or less outline the behavior they want, and then another program called a compiler turns that into 1s and 0s that a computer can actually understand. If you've ever heard of binary, that's what these 1s and 0s are. Assembly is one level of abstraction* above the 1s and 0s. It is a good way for humans to understand what a computer is actually doing without having to look at the original programming code, and without 1s and 0s. So the main bird represents a computer doing it's thing, running some program.

Then comes the crow with a "Hello It's me. The Keyboard! Someone pressed the letter e." The crow represents something called an interrupt, which is exactly what it sounds like. It interrupts the normal flow of a program to signal to a computer "Hey, you need to deal with this. Like, now."

The reason why he is a keyboard is because that is how old keyboards used to work. Before USB ruled the world, mice and keyboards used something called a PS2 port. If you ever saw an old mouse or keyboard with a green or purple plug on one end instead of a USB, then that's the old style we are talking about.

Modern USB keyboards are a little more polite and will wait in a line until the computer is ready to deal with whatever the human just typed, but old PS2 keyboards used interrupts to demand attention. This was really important for old slow computers that needed to respond to user input ASAP. Modern computers can handle that sort of thing a little bit better.

I think that is enough context to understand the meme.

*Not really: see ISA layer and micro-ops for more information

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Anon watches Gordon Ramsay

I prefer Gordon Ramsey's content outside of the US better because he is often less angry for angriness sake, and often because someone is doing something that will get someone sick or hurt. To me, that is what healthy anger looks like. An alert system that drives you to make changes and demand changes of others for the benefit and safety of everyone.

That probably isn't worded the best, and I am no philosopher or psychiatrist, but it is a worldview that has been healthy and helpful for me.

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Diesel-smelling

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Someone missed the episode(s?) where he raced the public transit system and lost. Or raced other drivers in noticeably slower cars in highly congested traffic and lost, or raced a bicycle and lost.

A semi-common through-line of the show was that cars are, and should be, for fun. (Full disclosure this was often pushed most heavily by James May, but I feel like Jeremy could have said no at any point.) They often lambasted average and everyday use cars.

I loved my old sports car! It was 2 seats and too much power! I had to get rid of it because it was unreliable and unsafe for traveling with my first kid. Neither would have been an issue with good public transit infrastructure in place.

Cars are not the problem, but car dependency absolutely is.

(I don't totally feel this way and do think cars a major contributing factor in some problems, like pollution of microplastic particulates from aggressive driving, but that isn't as quippy.)

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Biden administration sets 50 miles per gallon fuel economy standard for 2031

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As far as I am aware, current fuel economy standards are primarily determined by the size of the wheel base. Some years ago, the EPA went from a reasonably managed chart to a specific formula that gets a little extreme on the ends.

So you end up with craziness like a 95 ranger required to have 60mpg to meet the standard, and a 2024 f35 super mega ultra cab long bed to have like 3mpg to meet standards. (Numbers are made up, but that is the main idea as I understand it)