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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • Yeah, but honestly getting rid of coins is an admission that inflation is high relative to 40-50 years ago. When pretty much every government wants to keep that fact out of the public consciousness. Especially the current US government who wants to both claim we don’t have inflation at all, and are the ones getting rid of the penny.

    I’ve been saying we should drop the penny for almost 2 decades, but I still kind of look at getting rid of the penny as a sign of our current government’s abysmal handling of inflation.



  • Also, when donating to local food pantries, remember that donations of money go farther and feed more than donations of food. Food pantries have access to economies of scale and can buy food cheaper than an individual can. So you’ll increase your impact if you just donate your cash straight to the food pantry, rather than going to the grocery store to buy food to donate. In addition, the food pantry will be able to more accurately supply what people actually need and stock what they are short on, rather than you just guessing.


  • Started moving to Element/Matrix this weekend when I attended a protest and wanted to have some kind of communication, but also wanted to leave my primary phone at home. I was using a de-googled android fork and an e-sim, but being a data-only e-sim, I couldn’t use Signal due to the phone number requirement.

    Annoying to have try to get contacts to get another app, but at least it’s decentralized and comes with the option of being self-hosted once I’m ready to tackle that.



  • Mine aren’t quite that long, but are similar. And I’m a guy. I get really severe ingrown toenails if I keep mine trimmed too short, but don’t have any issues as long as I keep them grown out past the skin. Yes, they’re annoying, and took getting used to. I can still wear closed-toed shoes (occasionally I buy a size larger if the shape of the shoe feels tight on my nails). It all still beats the pain and occasional bloody socks from my nails cutting into my toes as they grow.





  • My personal scores have increased by about 100 points in the last 6 months (I started getting worried about interest rates getting even worse and consolidated my credit cards under a personal loan with a definite payoff date).

    At this point I really don’t care what my credit score is, but this feels like a bad time to have debt, and for once in my life I feel lucky that I’m able to be paying off debt faster than I can take on more - which really hasn’t been the case since I went to university in 2007 (and never finished for financial reasons).




  • I think the real reason they were hired was to give them something to do other than ask for the Epstein files all day on their podcasts. Kash Patel and Dan Bongino were both very outspoken about wanting the Epstein files released before they were given jobs leading the FBI. Honestly letting themselves show their incompetence to the world with this case may have been part of the plan all along. Make them look like the fools they are, and people will stop believing them when they inevitably decide they want to talk about Epstein again.




  • Most of us that are younger than the Boomers or maybe Gen X don’t want to count on Social Security because we’ve been hearing our whole lives that Social Security is on the chopping block because the government is in so much debt. And at this point we kinda just expect that ladder to be pulled up behind the Boomers before we get anything, because that’s already happened in so many other areas like home ownership.

    I also think people need to remember that Social Security is their own money that they paid in over their lives, and they are owed it back.

    And also that even though the US government has a large amount of debt, we’ve also spent the last 50 years giving tax cuts to the rich, we’d probably be just fine if we went back to a 90% marginal tax rate on the top earners like we had in the “good old days” of the 1950s.


  • Grew up in the great plains/midwest around the dairy industry. Had extended family who owned a smaller dairy farm. This all sounds pretty standard. Not saying it’s right, but none of it sounds new to me.

    I would imagine there were plenty of people who bought modern marketing that was designed to cruelty-wash the dairy industry. The reality is there’s no way to insert yourself between an udder and a calf without cruelty, and that’s the only way to get cow’s milk. Unless we can figure out how to get milk from lab-grown organs, which probably comes with it’s own ethical issues.




  • Oh I have read and heard about all those things, none of them (to my knowledge) are being done by OpenAI, xAI, Google, Anthropic, or any of the large companies fueling the current AI bubble, which is why I call it a bubble. The things you mentioned are where AI has potential, and I think that continuing to throw billions at marginally better LLMs and generative models at this point is hurting the real innovators. And sure, maybe some of those who are innovating end up getting bought by the larger companies, but that’s not as good for their start-ups or for humanity at large.