sylver_dragon

One idea to always go back to is:

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

• Carl Sagan

This can be tough to evaluate sometimes, but it’s a good general idea.

Does the claim sit outside the natural world as currently understood by scientific theory?
If yes, then there’s going to need to be a lot of evidence. If not, the level of evidence is lower.

Does the claim involve a low probability event?
If yes, then more evidence is needed of that event.

Does the claimant have a stake in the claim?
For example, does the person get money, fame or other stuff by getting people to believe the claim? If so, more evidence should be required.

What type of evidence would you expect to see, if the claim were correct?
When things exist, they tend to leave evidence of their existence. Bones, ruins, written records, etc. If someone says something exists, or used to exist, but they should have archeological/anthropological evidence to back it up.

Sure, it’s always going to be a bit subjective as to what requires proof. And for a lot of low stakes things, there’s no point in going after it. If someone claims to be from Pitcairn, then what’s the point of questioning it? Just say, “huh, cool” and move on. If someone is trying to convince you that an historical figure existed, and that should effect how you see the world, maybe ask for as bit more evidence.

I was always terrible with knots growing up. My father spent far too much time trying to teach me a basic trucker’s hitch and sadly never got to see me really “get it”. Then, when my own son was in Cub Scouts and supposed to learn some basic knots, something just clicked in my mind and I took an interest. The bowline was the gateway knot for me and learning that led me to finally apply myself to the trucker’s hitch. Just such a useful pair for tying up a load. I can understand why my father really wanted me to learn it.

Now, I keep a length of paracord on my desk and will fiddle with it, practicing knots whenever I’m doing something that leaves my hands free. And ya, having a basic set of knots down is just damned handy.

NextCloud running in docker on my server. I can then sync folders from both my desktop and phone.

I took up indoor rock climbing a couple years ago, partly because I have a similarly sedentary job and hate most forms of exercise. I can certainly understand the draw. I go 2-3 times a week and have stuck with it for so long because it forces me to get out of my head, but also doesn’t require dealing with strangers as much. It’s just a clam, focused activity which also happens to work my body.

Unfortunately, as a hobby, rock climbing is going to work your hands and arms. I would say that, as I have gotten better, I do a better job of using body position to prevent having to hang by my hands. But, just the other day, my foot slipped and I was hanging on by my fingertips for a couple seconds. And harder climbs may require you to engage your hands more. Though again, body position and technique counts for a lot.

Best advice I can give is: talk to your doctor. They will know more about how your condition will be affected by climbing and what your options are. Certainly more than random idiots on the other side of the internet.

Game: Quest for Glory I: So you want to be a Hero
Book: Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett
TV Show: Babylon 5
Movie: Spaceballs

All fairly old, but still some of all time favorites.

But, the coupon says, “half off”!

But they pinky promised that only the “good guys” would use the “front doors”. /s

I’ll add Kingdom Come: Deliverance to the list. Great story, fun (if challenging to learn) gameplay and really amazing environments.

What do you do to feel like you’re part of everyone else and in a way cope with some of the pressures of life around you?

I stopped giving a fuck about everyone else. I do what makes me, my wife or my kids happy. The rest of the world can go stuff a sock in it. Sure, I like to keep up on news and politics and will go read related sites when I have time and energy. I also listen to several podcasts and follow several Youtube channels. But, those are all things I do because I want to do them. If I’m not feeling like doing one of those things, I don’t. I also work and so have to keep up on the aspects of life related to that; but, I don’t pretend to be interested in things just to make coworkers happy. I am employed to do a job, they are employed to do a job. Sometimes we do a job together and I focus on the work at hand. And yes, I do socialize a bit with my coworkers as we have some shared hobbies and interests. But, if they start going off about basketball, I let them say their peace and then move on. It’s not my cup of tea and I feel no need to engage with it.

One of the most important secrets to life is learning to set boundaries. Don’t let other peoples’ wants become your needs. Be who you are because it’s who you want to be. If other people can’t deal with that, then they can go put their problems somewhere uncomfortable for them.

On the NES, I always enjoyed Base Wars. It was baseball, except not boring. Instead of a player being “out” when you got the ball to the base ahead of him, you fought for the base.

Soon to be “air delivered” by Israel to civilians in Gaza.

There may also be a (very weak) reason around bounds checking and avoiding buffer overflows. By rejecting anything longer that 20 characters, the developer can be sure that there will be nothing longer sent to the back end code. While they should still be doing bounds checking in the rest of the code, if the team making the UI is not the same as the team making the back end code, the UI team may see it as a reasonable restriction to prevent a screw up, further down the stack, from being exploited. Again, it’s a very weak argument, but I can see such an argument being made in a large organization with lots of teams who don’t talk to each other. Or worse yet, different contractors standing up the front end and back end.

I don’t know how anyone makes it without a password manager at this point.

Password reuse. Password reuse everywhere.

Perhaps a bit on the campy side, the opening theme song of the original Highlander was always one of my favorites:
Princes of the Universe by Queen.

Also not mentioned in the article at all: the polling error.
While a 4% shift could be significant, I’d also bet that the error bars of the two polls overlap.

A few from my list:

• Darknet Diaries - Interviews with interesting people around hacking and cybersecurity. This includes a lot of the actual criminals themselves and you get to hear their motivations and how they did what they did. Really neat for understanding the minds of folks who do bad things.
• FiveThirtyEight Politics - This one is good for staying abreast of US politics, polling. While the political bias of the hosts is pretty obvious, this is less punditry and more about the numbers.
• Risky Business with Nate Silver Maria Konnikova - A neat podcast covering risk, poker and politics. Just a good listen for thinking about risk and probabilities in life.
• The Lawfare Podcast - Lawyers talking about the law, and how it shapes and is shaped by whats in the news. Great for getting a legalistic view of the world.

Sears Super Pong

Honor is a social construct which is used to promote “pro-social” behavior. It can be useful in the absence of or in concert with other systems of social control (e.g. laws, religion). Of course, “pro-social” is very much a construct of what the creating society considers to be positive. This can include acting in ways which we, in our current social constructs, would consider “anti-social”. Honor ends up getting idolized in media because it often includes an element of self-discipline and self-sacrifice and is usually associated with warrior cultures. Though, it also tends to be conservative and resist changing as social mores change. This has led to some famous consequences as honor based systems tried to cling to social constructs which were no longer tenable. For example, the Satsuma Rebellion saw the existing feudal class seek to maintain it’s grip on power in then face of a changing society.

Ultimately, any system of honor would need to be taught to new adherents. It’s no different from a religion or legal system in that regard. No one comes out of the womb fully indoctrinated to a system of honor. So no, it isn’t really self-explanatory. Like any social construct, you would need to define the system and how it interacts with the society in which is was created. Otherwise, it’s just naming a system for social control and hoping no one notices that it’s a hollow shell.

The Holocaust was unique in the industrialization of genocide. The Nazi party organized the state around the process, using industrial technology to track, move and kill millions of people in an efficient manner. It was also very well documented and was publicized in a way, which made people really aware of what was occurring. As horrible as genocide is, at any scale, most are fairly limited in geography and organization. The Nazis showed us just how bad things can be, if we bend the resources of a modern, industrial state, to those ends. So, I’d tend to disagree with Walz’s thesis that the Holocaust wasn’t unique. Though, I would still agree that it should be taught in context with other genocides which have happened and which are happening today. It can become an example of just how bad a genocide can become. But, the goal should be to teach students about the causes, and processes of genocides. So that, we hopefully will try to stop them from occurring.

That said, that the modern Israeli State uses the horrible things, which happened to Jews in the early 20th century, to justify doing similarly horrible things to Palestinians today, is downright atrocious. It cheapens the horrors faced by Jews at the hands of the Nazis.

You can’t convince me printer software/drivers/firmware doesn’t have an agenda.

Yes well, but they are coded by pure evil incarnate. Otherwise known as HP.