Hard disagree on this: "We use clever is to mean brilliant, sharp, and insightful in a way that others might miss. A 'clever' solution is not just effective but demonstrates imagination and a kind of a command of the situation." Tell that to software dev.
hedgehogreview.com/issues/hope-it… I had a "decleverizing" pass in my work's to-do list because I frequently wrote code that was all of those things... and couldn't be maintained by anyone else. If there was a flaw in my logic, even I couldn't fix it; I would rip it out and start over.

Krugman's point that "the point of a public blockchain is to eliminate the need for trust." Trust in whom? Trust in a central authority to administer financial accounts. But in the real world, someone has to do or provide something to someone else. ...

https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1598666464629760000

So even if the finances are trustworthy (either earned the human way, or enforced by inhuman algorithms), the provider still has to prove trustworthy in the quality and accuracy of what they provide. ...

This is silly. "Digital ledger representations of traditional assets such as cash, bonds and equities could be an important progression, as the original computer ledgers and real-time payments were from paper before them. That's not needs regulating! ft.com/content/5568bd… Public blockchains with their proof-of-* algorithms are environmental nightmares sucking up electricity to maintain intergrity, and they're not even stable, as network disruptions can split a blockchain, requiring everyone to manually abandon one side of the split.

It's been week since I last meditated, and I pulled up my @ChooseMuse app today for the first time since surgery. I am utterly livid. The app now pushes micropurchases and I cannot find the "just f****** meditate for 20 minutes" control anymore. They've literally removed the "meditate in silence" feature. The only way to simulate it is to download one of their "soundscapes" and slam all the volume sliders to zero. The lead in and lead out voices have been eliminated, and the end of session marker is much more confusing.

"While the stoic individual may feel less pain, that is because they have become dulled to, and accept, the injustices of the world." psyche.co/ideas/dont-be-…

This sentence reads like a creationist trying to explain evolution. It's inaccuracy is mind-boggling. First, Stoics do not "feel less pain." Stoics feel as much pain as anyone else; we are after all ordinarily human. What Stoics do is meditate and plan on how to react to pain. We meditate on crises, plan for them, so that when a crisis hits we can be men and women of action.

Tucker Carlson's newest 'special,' "The End of Men," claims there is "a collapse of testosterone among American men."

1) Does he propose to find the environmental causes? No, of course not. What then? Injections for every man?

2) There's not a single black man in the trailer.

https://twitter.com/NikkiMcR/status/1515130557675581442

This video is the return of the Leisure Panic. In the 1890s a cultural meme was that the new managerial class, which was entirely white, was growing weak in their comfortable offices and comfortable chairs, unready to fight should the swarthy masses rise up.

I'm at Norwescon, an SF writers' con, so of course it's code hacking time. I re-organized by XRandR/XCB/C++ project and documented the heck out it, every step of the way, to show the stats for screen, video cards, and monitors. git.elfsternberg.com/elf/xcb-studies And then... In a complete fit of madness, and in less than an hour, I ported the whole thing to Rust! The XCB 1.0.1-beta branch is amazing and coherent and friendly. It reminds me a lot of KDE's libkscreen and the structural macros they use to manage XRandR.

There is a lot to be said for this. There's also a lot to be said that sometimes the "luck" comes from having parents and a society that want you to succeed, because you're rich, or you're white, or you're male, or both. But luck... (HT: @delong)
chadorzel.substack.com/p/you-need-to-… Five times now in a career entering its 29th year, I have had luck be an incredibly important factor in getting work; five times when something completely off-the-wall I had been studying just weeks prior to the job search paid off in unexpected ways.

"Cryptocurrency is everywhere except the cash register." washingtonpost.com/business/2022/… "Few people are using it for its intended purpose: to pay for things." That's because it's not a currency! It's not a valid exchange system, and no state guarantees its value. You know where else you don't see cryptocurrencies? Porn. Porn jumps on absolutely every technology that helps it "get around" the limitations of payment processors and censors. Porn pushes technology forward.

Someone asked me how "He Man" is responsible for the Internet being such a terrible place. Let me explain. In 1981, HE-MAN and the Masters of the Universe toys hit the shelves. Six years later, this happened: npr.org/sections/money… Those two events are related. In 1981, He-Man sucked all the money out of families' Christmas budgets. Apple and Atari and Commodore and so forth saw their "A machine that's programmable and fun!" message fall dead.

It's impossible to parody this. It's impossible to overstate just how insane this document is. The 2020 Texas GOP Platform:
drive.google.com/file/d/1HFTbz1… Let's start with their first principle: "We believe in the laws of nature and nature's God." But when science points out there's no such thing as a gender binary, they stick their fingers in their ears.

As a writer, let me explain why comedians can't make much fun of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC). It has to do with the nature of comedy itself, and what comedy tries to do. The trope people most right-wingers are grasping for is "Hubris," one of the most common in storytelling.

https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/status/1088553249903443968

Hubris appears in lots of comedies, but Sienfeld WAS a hubris plot. Every episode, a character tried to improve their lot only to be slapped back to the status quo, and always due to their own obvious failings. It's the "obvious" part that makes it comic.