There are LED bars for mounting in your rear windows to display text to those behind you

Gay.

It’s the Gay Intersex Marxist Program. Obviously.

This is an outrage!

Coq was such an excellent name. Short, memorable, unique, related to its origins and logo, as well as funny.

Aluminium smelting is so energy intensive that Iceland, a country with a population of less than 400 000, is the world’s 12th largest producer of it, even though the raw materials aren’t mined there. Iceland just has cheap geothermal and hydroelectric power.

You cannot say no to legitimate interest. That’s a valid legal basis for processing the data that you only need to be informed about. Some times it appears like they are asking for your consent (which is a different legal basis for processing data) for legitimate interest, but that’s likely just a poorly designed interface.

Economists refuse to accept that their subject is really just sociology. They like to imagine it being like physics, where study of reality leads to underlying mathematical truths to extrapolate from. Not a big messy subject where you can’t be certain of anything.

What makes it even more freaky is that many of the subjects being studied know they are playing a game. So in many ways economy is more like the evolving metagame of competitive sports, where hardcore nerds constantly try to game the system and outplay each other, and what was a solid strategy last month doesn’t work anymore, even if the rules are the same.

Here’s a trick that works for me (who mainly have trouble getting started with things).

Decide that you only need to do the thing for 10 minutes. Set a timer for 10 minutes and get started. Then when the timer rings you’ve gotten going and will likely want to continue (forever).

It’s mind boggling how different the modern concept of work is from how it was for 99.9% of human existence.

I’m sure the hyper-optimization, hyper-specialization, the alienation, and the constant flux of modern work contributes greatly to the problems we are experiencing.

Even when there was no “adventurous alternative”, work was a lot more grounded in society and had a lot more downtime at pretty much any point in history.

Why does the lock, faucet and shades run on batteries to begin with? They aren’t portable devices, just spend a few minutes running a damn cable and you never have to care about power ever again.

The coolest thing about this IR laser is the very cyberpunk things a hacker might do with it.

Any url that ends in .io is pronounced as if it was Italian.

I recently played Curse of Strahd and that dude had food that had been sitting out since before he was a vampire and entire rooms full of cobwebs.

One common misconception about meditation is that meditation is and end goal, not a practice. That to meditate is to sit down and have your brain be quiet, and if you can’t do that, your session was a failure.

But that’s like saying weight lifting is about deadlifting your body weight, and any session you don’t manage do that was a failure. That is something you might be able to do after years of training. But you start with the smaller weights, learning form and technique, setting reasonable goals, and find a practice that you can make a habit out of. Because a five minute walk every day beats a day at the gym/retreat once a year.

You are stuck with yourself for the rest of your life. So just like when you have a coworker or classmate that you don’t like but must work with, you just have to get a working relationship going where you can get stuff done and not fight.

Try to not get annoyed at yourself, reward good behavior, be kind even when you don’t deserve it, be the bigger person etc.

More generally, feelings do not care about facts. We must accept how we feel, even if those feelings don’t “make sense”. Trying to reason with feelings is a fools errand.

That doesn’t mean we can’t change how we feel. It just doesn’t happen by denying reality.

Or it measured how rare it was for them to get candy. The most interesting thing about the experiment is honestly the many ways in which it was flawed.

Then change the keyboard shortcuts of your terminal so that it does that. If you can’t, then switch to a terminal that lets you change the keyboard shortcuts.

A neat thing is that a lot of command line programs use readline. So learning and configuring it will also be useful in for example the Python REPL and calc.

Here are some neat configuration options you can put in ~/.inputrc

set completion-ignore-case on
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
set completion-prefix-display-length 9
set blink-matching-paren on
set mark-symlinked-directories on

And if you are a sensible person who is used to vim

set editing-mode vi
set show-mode-in-prompt on