moshmosh

In certain crowds you could also get away with still water w/o ice, since it looks like a vodka-water, especially if you're a woman (tends to be a women's drink—not pushing that norm, just observing it).

In either the still-water or sparkling/soda-water case, just get it in a highball or Collins glass and you'll fit right in. The glass is what sells it. 99% chance you won't be the first one to make this request to a given bartender. Unless they're a jerk they won't charge you for soda water from the bar's tap, and a slice of lemon or lime.

You could also ask for a coke without ice served in whatever they serve jack & coke in (collins glass, lowball glass, old-fashioned glass, could be any of several). Even if someone hears you order any of these, unless they're socially clueless this will signal some things to them and they'll know you are pointedly Not Drinking, for whatever reason, and they won't bug you about it or offer you anything. This is assuming you're around people who care that others aren't drinking, to begin with (I'd still use the specific-glass trick just not to look out of place, regardless, personally).

I thought soda water (or sparkling mineral water) with lemon or lime was the official no-I'm-not-drinking-but-I-am-familiar-with-bars-and-don't-bug-me-about-it drink. Fake-sipping a beer would be bizarre.

I make 102g of alcohol about 1 bottle of 14% abv wine (so, strong-ish, but not exceptionally so) per week, or about 3 cans of 10% stout. Unless my math's wrong (1ml ~= 1g [not quite since it's not pure water, but close enough], 750ml * 0.14 = 105ml ~= 105g)

For those playing along at home, regulator "drinks" always seem to convert to 0.25-0.75 actual drinks a normal person might call "one drink". I'm not sure why they do that, unless it's to confuse people on purpose so they drink more.

Legitimately very interested to see a comparable study for cannabis, in adult users.

[EDIT] everything I could find with a quick search is about heavy, long-term use only, which evidently has little effect on white matter, and uneven effects on grey matter, increasing it in some areas and decreasing it in others. Nothing about long-term light use, occasional "binge" use, anything like that.

It's not as bad as it used to be. The "drawers full of devices", all terrible and broken in unique ways, gave me flashbacks to the Android 2.x days.

Yes, in fact the details vary some depending on which state you're in and how you're related to the deceased. In general, though, I'd treat unsolicited calls attempting to get you, personally, to pay for a dead relative's debts, as bullshit until you're 100% sure they're not. Most (all?) state governments have FAQs for this sort of thing online, and the federal government also offers guidance (all trivially Googleable).

I'd assume that, as long as they're careful about how they pressure you, it's not fraud if you decide to pay. AFAIK they're under no obligation to volunteer that you don't have to pay them anything, or to otherwise educate you about the fact that they're (in fact) just begging for money they're not owed, and hoping you'll give it to them. But if they ask you (the aggrieved, in the middle of hosting family and trying to plan a funeral and figuring out how to pay all the bills you actually do need to, as a result of all this) to accept this debt and you say you do, and then they help you work out a very convenient and gracious payment plan for this debt you unthinkingly accepted because you're not a damn lawyer and you're kinda stressed out and debt collectors are scary and now it's on auto-draft for the next 18 months, well, that's above-board.

I've known people who've been on the receiving end of those calls, so they definitely happen, and must be profitable, one way or another.

> Creditors can only go after the assets of the estate. One does not inherit debts.

They sometimes do go after the family, hoping to trick them into paying. I'm sure they get a lot of folks to pay, too.

I put quite a bit of effort into doing things "right" when I tried to board the cast-iron train. Pan was pre-seasoned, but I did one of those elaborate multi-step seasoning rituals online, using the expensive oil they recommended and everything, just in case. Horrible, smoke all over the house, smelled for a couple days. Everything sticks anyway, like I've never seen on any other kind of pan. Suitably-gentle cleaning (according to cast iron fans online) takes forever because there's so much crap on it after every use. Re-seasoned it again after a bit, thinking I'd screwed up. No improvement, everything sticks. My wife refuses to cook with it at all, and I'm pretty sure just seeing it in the drawer annoys her.

Oh, and if a tomato or anything else somewhat-acidic touches it then the entire dish will taste like blood. So that's fun.

It's alright for cooking steak (preheating for a few minutes on high is a must, though, it's gotta be terrifyingly hot or everything will stick, including steak), and if I drown things in scorching-hot oil or fat (say, from bacon) they they don't stick much, but that sure isn't healthy. The pan has zero inherent non-stickness, only what it acquires from whatever lake of oil I put in it.

If this happens to you:

1) The creditors are full of shit. Don't accept the estate, don't acknowledge that you owe any debt, and you don't owe them a damn thing. If no-one accepts it, they're simply screwed. They'll try to trick you into paying anyway, because they are, in fact, monsters, but they're full of shit.

2) Look up (online) the correct magic words to tell the creditors to go fuck themselves, or else face charges. They'll stop. On the off chance they don't, a call of complaint to your representative(s) or to the correct state agency will do the trick.

Flyover country checking in. Non- or semi-technical bigcos of the sort with big IT departments who take most of a week to get you your laptop when you start, are almost all Windows but may tolerate some macOS. Technical bigcos are mixed Win/macOS, with the business side preferring Windows and the tech people all on Macs. Smaller tech companies are all Mac, pretty much universally. Every now and then you get the one weirdo whose laptop can never connect to the projector and whose screen sharing always fucks up on calls or takes 5 minutes to get their bluetooth headset working, because they're on Linux (disclaimer: many years ago, I've been that weirdo). I've only seen one shop that was mostly Linux + Windows with little or no Mac presence, and they were in hardware (drivers or proprietary libs for embedded devices can be hard to come by Macs).

> If you gave europeans those 25% as an extra net pay, there would be a lot more new cars on the road, a bit more savings/investments, and a lot more problems when people get old. "Smart" people would save and invest, and have better "pensions" than they'd have in the current system, and "stupid" people would work until 85yo, and die of hunger.

Part of the problem with giving everyone more money and expecting them to invest it is that it frees up that money for competition for things like better schools (housing in better school districts, private school tuition). You can sacrifice your retirement to give your kids a serious advantage. Tons of people do this, in part because once some start doing it, everyone has to a little or their lives actually get worse than if the money were taken out for retirement before they ever saw it. Then there's the "keeping up with the Joneses" effect which is very hard to entirely resist when the spending-norms for your income-peers are set by people who aren't putting away enough for retirement.

Last time I was an Android user (and, for quite a while and for a couple different spans, an Android developer), that button was a ton of fun for when I wanted to see what random-ass crap the OS or application would decide to do when I pressed it. It was a "press only if you can't find something better to press" button given prime real-estate.

[EDIT] I think the fundamental problem with it is that, if an app screen deliberately presents a back button, there's nearly a 100% chance the current application will handle it in some way that makes sense for the current screen. With an always-on back button, the user has no way of knowing which of three handlers will receive it: 1) The OS, 2) The application, but not handling it in some way that makes sense for the current screen, or 3) The application, handling it sensibly for the current screen. You're rolling the dice.

I not-infrequently see Google UI on major consumer-facing products that would have gotten me (gently) slapped down by "third-tier" designers, product managers, and UX folks—hell, even some of my fellow developers—instantly if I'd presented them. People making 1/3 or less what Googlers make (yes, in the US). There's something organizationally wrong about Google, I think, that causes them to turn out products that are, in very visible ways, sub-par even for the kinds of small-fish places I've worked. I don't know what the cause is, but whatever it is isn't producing only minor or subtle errors.

Should be easy enough to look up what was happening that motivated those rules in the first place, for anyone who cares about them enough to consider removing them.

I tend to find "argument from reality" more compelling than arguments based on feeling, ideology, guesses about why people support a position, or reasoning from some moral axioms like one is completing mathematical proofs, personally. Possibly there were no major problems without those rules and it would be fine to remove them. Possibly a bunch of people were being significantly hurt with no recourse. Which was it?

> Google’s stuff isn’t bad, but it’s simply not exceptional.

Disagree. I've repeatedly had to help my older relatives out with awful UX failures on Gmail or basic apps (think: the phone app) on their Android phones. As recently as a couple weeks ago. Usually it takes me a while to figure out what's going on. They have no chance whatsoever. One thing they consistently seem to get wrong is having god-awful visual hierarchies for UI elements, and not labeling things. That on top of "flat design" tending to make it hard to tell what the hell anything means or is.

(Apple, for their part, is getting increasingly bad on this front and have been since iOS 7, but mostly that's about discoverability for moderately-advanced functionality, not [except rarely] extremely basic UX fails that even this non-UX-expert developer recognizes as terrible)

[EDIT] it doesn't help that every time they upgrade, it seems like everything's totally different and layouts & UI paradigms have been redesigned from the ground up. This despite my steering them to fairly basic, vanilla-Android phones.

There's a trend of "new, revolutionary Internet protocols" having reference (and, chronically, sole actually-useful, but with other ones always at various uselessly-incomplete stages of development so they can point to those and say "see, we're catching on!") implementations in languages that integrate like shit, crippling their adoption, rather than writing, say, a C library. IPFS is another one (and I like Go).

Similar story. A couple years ago I tried to set up Synapse. I've set up and administered IRC before. I've twice gone from nothing to having an XMPP server (different daemon each time) working and hooked into web services and custom auth serving production traffic. And that's just the chat-related work I've done. I kind of know what I'm doing, at least.

After a couple hours I gave up on Synapse, having accomplished nothing and only being more confused than when I started out, as far as any path to a deployed config I'd be comfortable with. That they sell hosting, and it was such an incredible pain in the ass to run sanely on one's own, sets off some alarm bells.

More generally, I've noticed being reluctant to ask others to do things for me even when it's their job is an attitude I have that's hard to shake, and is probably a result of my low-ish social class upbringing. It feels rude or imposing. This extends to hiring people to clean or work on home improvement projects for me—it's hard not to want to help out when someone else is doing stuff for me, even if I'm paying them. I feel bad if I pay someone to mow my lawn. I very much doubt folks who grew up with lots of "help" around feel that way. I expect it'd be damn hard for me to run a business with employees, for similar reasons, at least until I got over the initial discomfort—it makes me feel really bad to pay someone to do something I could do myself, not just because I'm parting with money, but because it makes me feel like a lazy, rude asshole.

You don't have to get too far off the beaten path to hit material that's only even mentioned in books, and you'd never even know exists if you only used the Web. The Web is pretty damn shallow for, especially, history and social science, in my experience. It's great if you want to look up math stuff, I guess.

For social science it seems fastest way to get into a topic is just use the Web to find one decent, recent book on the topic, get it, then write down all the books & sources that book name-drops in its introduction as important or notable, and go get them. College course syllabi can also be useful if you're really starting from scratch (especially for finding that first book). If you try to stick with the Web you'll just spin your wheels.

I mean this question sincerely, am not trying to troll or provoke anyone, and engage only with the greatest hesitance:

Can someone please explain to me what things like the Jones & Okun list of "white supremacy characteristics" on page 5 have to do with (to quote the text) "white supremacy culture"? I was involved with leftist movements quite a bit in college and these just read like typical leftist complaints about capitalism, plus a touch of the anti-"affluenza"/consumerism movement, plus some generic things that most people probably agree are bad (when, implicitly, taken to an extreme). I don't see the connection to white supremacy, but I assume there is one and am curious what I'm missing. I started reading the text but am having trouble following it—I think they're assuming background that I don't have.

Reads more like SlateStarCodex's Moloch than anything to do with thinking one race is superior to another, really. What am I missing?

[EDIT] I've just looked around for the original Jones and Okun paper and all I can find are excerpts expanding on the list, nothing connecting it to the attitude that other races are inferior to whites. I'm having trouble finding the original on LibGen, too.

Real estate's different, obviously, especially in this market. It's not the same when time actually is a factor.

Salespeople pull this crap with all kinds of things that don't really have any actual time-pressure on them, though. Home remodeling, various services, unremarkable (that is: not unique or highly in-demand) cars. In fact, "we're running a special that'll get you 10% off if you sign today" is usually a strong indicator that I can ask for 15-20% off tomorrow and get it. If that kind of salesperson offers you a "deal" unprompted, then that "deal" is actually their price for suckers. I hate that kind of thing, don't like being manipulated, and don't like it when scummy salespeople win. So I'll either look somewhere else or take that newfound knowledge and ask for something better than the "special", on my own timeline, not the salesperson's.

So true. I remember how big a bummer Android keynotes were when I did lots of mobile dev. "Oh, cool, that'll be fun to use... in three or four years".

We definitely have more of everything data-related and have a much better idea of all the stuff we can buy. I'm skeptical how far that's actually moved the happiness and life-satisfaction needles, in general.

[EDIT] specifically, I think some of our "satisfaction" from this sort of consumption is itch-scratching generated by the possibility of doing it, in the same way that pre-Internet one rarely felt bothered by not knowing some piece of trivia, if no-one around happened to know either. Now it itches until someone looks it up, because you know you can find out quickly. Now if I'm not watching the best possible thing, for example, it itches, but I don't think it would have before. I think to some extent the level of choice available, aside from famously causing analysis-paralysis ("browsing Netflix" is famously an activity all its own, that may or may not end up in ever actually watching anything) also generates the very desire that it's satiating. I'm not sure I was actually less happy watching the best thing I could find at the video store, versus the best thing I can find on streaming services.

These get an instant "no" from me. I don't care how good the offer is. If you try to keep me from thinking about my options, I'm not inclined to do business with you. Salespeople take me from "maybe today" to "absolutely not today" with this tactic, though I must be in the minority, since they keep doing it.

Plus if I reflect and later decide I do want what you're offering, then I know your "full" price is bullshit and your "special" rate probably is too, so I'll come in negotiating hard, both because I've learned something about your prices and because now I kinda don't like you.

IME the answer to "how did they make [hard to scale thing] easily scalable?" is usually that they introduce limitations in how you can use [hard to scale thing] so you can't use it in ways that are hard to scale, then automate scaling it in well-known ways for use cases that are so-limited. Vitesse's site mentions that it relies on horizontal sharding, so right off the bat, my guess is that you can't use it in ways that are sharding-unfriendly, or if you can then you'll be met with restrictions on much of the "magic" of it if you do.

Rarely is it the case that someone's actually discovered e.g. novel math or something to make the hard part easier. Better tools (to do well-understood things more easily for this use case) and restrictions (so you don't use it in ways the tools can't handle) are the usual way.

It's a hosted DB, and as far as I can tell the Killer Feature is that it makes schema updates less painful. How it does that without significant performance trade-offs or caps is unclear to me.

[EDIT] on reading further in their docs, my suspicion is that their "branching" concept is a hell of a lot more limited than I believed at first. I initially took it to mean you could have multiple active schemas working on your data at once—instead, I think it's more like exporting just the schema of your DB and importing it to a fresh DB, which is nothing new and doesn't run into all kinds of operational and security issues the other workflow would. I'm fairly sure all the actual magic is in the schema diffing, and the docs make me think even that isn't as fully-magical as one might hope.

USB-C would have been a great replacement... for DisplayPort/Thunderbolt ports.

It's finally, years later, getting merely not infuriating to be stuck with only USB-C ports.

Single port for display + charging is very nice, when it works.

That iPhones and most iPads still don't use it is annoying. Having two kinds of charging cable around, years after Apple went all-in on USB-C for laptops, sucks.

[EDIT] two kinds of charging cable and still needing to buy & carry two kinds of adapters/dongles for everything. Ugh.

I maintain that most of what we get from the Web and computers, as individuals, is barely better than what we had before, and not enough so to justify its costs. Shopping very much included.

For some context, I grew up very much "OMG wire my brain in, let's get this future shit going!" Years of watching that future develop, and some reflection, have almost entirely reversed that sentiment, for me.

For example: are streaming services convenient? Yeah, of course. Am I actually happier with them than I was with the library, rentals, and the occasional purchased movie? Marginally, if at all. (but I have Internet service for the handful of things it actually is highly beneficial for, so, may as well use streaming, too)

Is shopping online convenient? Yes. Am I happier than when I just had way less idea what was available to buy, and there was more friction to indulging every little purchase-whim? I really wonder. This one may not just be marginally better, but net-harmful.