Spyke

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knowledge

Oddly when I ask people like this too many questions they find it difficult to explain their beliefs with any specificity. Questions like "what is energy," or "how exactly does the tetractys connect to quantum physics," or "how can we apply any of this knowledge in a falsifiable way?"

news

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Americans who say they drink alcohol remains at record low, survey finds

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I am in my mid thirties. Someday age will catch up to me on this front, but it doesn't seem to have noticed me yet. I can still out drink most 25 year olds (which does not make me cool). Some of us are just Built Different, and by that I mean that through a combination of genetics, tolerance, and being, ahem, "big boned," my body is fantastic at absorbing, buffering, and metabolizing ethanol. A blessing and a curse in equal parts. Other people will stop at two drinks because their body tells them to and they have the willpower to listen to that signal. My body never sends the signal. Unless I'm in a situation where I have to drive home, my internal "probably shouldn't do that" doesn't overcome the disinhibition. So on a Friday night at home with nothing to do I can easily knock back enough to still be drunk the next day and still not get hung over. Sounds awesome, except that the ability to process alcohol efficiently doesn't protect me from alcohol being a carcinogen or neurotoxic.

The simple antidote to all this, of course, is to not have the first drink. Which pains me, because alcohol rules.

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Trump wildly claims hospitals are performing ‘reverse surgery’ on trans patients ’at my order'

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I'm not holding my breath but I'm still hoping for a groundswell of electoral opposition that puts someone competent in power so he has to impotently watch P2025 crumble and get reversed. Also, y'know, a fair trial for his crimes and getting sued into oblivion by all the people he's stolen from. If he just has a massive stroke they'll keep him in power as long as he's technically alive. Its like 40k but way dumber

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I'll spelunk your 6 if you spelunk my 9

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I hope I never lose someone close to me in a way that gets memed on. John Edward Jones was a father expecting a second child, a brother, a husband, and a son. He was trapped in the cave a few days before Thanksgiving. I can only imagine how horrible it was for his family.

I'm not usually one to moralize or care about the tastefulness of comedy but the memes about nutty putty do not feel good to see

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Valid

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flow as in menstrual flow, the literal volume of blood and mucosal lining from the uterus during a woman's period

flow also as in lyrical flow, the use of rhythm and articulation in a rapper's delivery

bar as in a measure of time in music, typically a four beat bar

spitting referring to the rapid and rhythmic delivery of words to a beat

If your [lyrical] flow is so heavy, why aren't you [rapping]?

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The Vancouver Police

Addicts often commit other crimes, but the addiction is a function of the exposure to (and therefore trafficking of by other people) addictive substances. Cops actually love to hassle addicts, so long as they're homeless addicts. It hasn't solved any problems. But tackling drug trafficking is scary and dangerous because it turns out drugs are profitable and traffickers have loads of money and power.

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FCC abolishes gigabit speed goal, suggesting it is unfair to slower technologies

Infrastructure is important, and walking back from these gigabit targets is awful. There is no replacement for fiber. We all deserve to have access to fast internet.

But to yell at a cloud for a moment, if we're being honest most people should not need gigabit. I know everyone is a gamer now, but let's forget about bulk downloads. For normal browsing most people should not need much more than about 12mbps. 12 mbps is fast enough to have two 1080p h265 streams running concurrently. And yet, when you try to use the modern web at that speed, it's a terrible experience because of all the adtech bullshit that gets crammed into every page. When I measured this Ars article it was 6.53MB. That is, to borrow a yardstick from a blogpost I reread recently, long enough to fit 3 or 4 of the great Russian epics inside. It is bigger than the shareware version of DOOM, big enough to fit the entire python standard package library documentation. For one article.

Don't let this cheapen the FCC being chickenshit and captured by specific perverse corporate interests, but publishers have sold us a bridge when it comes to the modern web. Web3 was supposed to fix all this with micropayments. I'd gladly pay whatever my paltry share of Ars' CPM they expected to get out of my pageview, wouldn't you? But cryptobros turned it into a get-rich-quick slopfest and then it died.

edit: having meandered over to my computer because I just cannot sleep, I decided to measure the page as I access it, with ublock, noscript, and umatrix turned on. That article now weighs just over 724kB. Way better. Reader mode loses the images and gets the article down to 2.49kB. Meaning the actual content is roughly 0.04% of the delivered size of the original page. The stylesheet alone is many times the size of the content. I know I'm really indulging my old man energy but web pages do not need to be this large. I know cache exists, and that's fine, but it's still a bit ridiculous. Some people in this world do still use dialup and/or pay per MB. Your 6.5MB web page might cost somebody a nontrivial sum to read, relative to their means.

The irony is not lost on me that my home instance itself is not the most lightweight web app. The page I am using to edit this comment is 1.9MB. With the cache active it's <100kB transferred per page load but still, if I weren't a hypocrite I'd probably switch to a Piefed instance.

edit 2: added emphasis

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Flat earthers

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The moon is hollow, we know this because it rings like a bell when you hit it. There is no other possible explanation for this, certainly not one that's actually more interesting than my unfounded assertion about the moon being made by aliens or whatever