Links 08/03/2024: Rant About Shoes, Right to be Forgotten, and Fedi Groups vs Tags
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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A Short Rant About Shoes
Today, I will complain. I live in a fairly big city. That being the case it seems reasonable to me to expect lots of options for getting basic things, like, say, shoes. A big city ought to be able to support at least a couple of shoe stores, right? Even in the age of Amazon, it's common to need to try shoes on to see if they will fit—a feature of brick and mortar stores that ecommerce can't replace. And yet, and yet... There are no shoe stores in a shockingly large radius. There's just big box stores with a few cheap shoes none of which are in your size.
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I just want you to tell me everything's going to be okay, Part I: Thinly-veiled nihilism
You're a university student. You and your peers are represented by an organization--let's call them the Student Union. The Student Union is, among other things, meant to advocate for the student body and provide certain services. They are a "union," in a sense, though if we're being honest they do a lot more providing certain services than they do advocacy (you, being the nerd you are, looked into their audit from last year and found a single line titled "Advocacy," for which they apparently spent under 1000$)
The Student Union is run by students, as the name implies, who are elected to one-year terms.
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🔤SpellBinding: EYNOSTK Wordo: SHARE
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🔤SpellBinding: AFTLNRG Wordo: CHILL
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Science
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Premature consistency
From time to time, including a couple of times today, I’ve found myself using “consistent” thinking as a bad thing and “inconsistent” as a good thing, and I like to paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson’s li’l “hobgoblin of consistency” snowclone.
Really, the problem isn’t consistency, it’s premature consistency. Thinking our mental model is complete before it is, so we fool ourselves to come up with cockamamie explanations for things that don’t fit in, or block it out it entirely.
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One “left”, one “right”—brain edition
Yeah, yeah, I’ve read that brains aren’t literally organized the way people thought for a while:
That the left side has all the nerd stuff: Dewey decimal system, numbers, letters, putting words for things, putting things in order, symbolic language, Lisp, discrete math.
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Technology and Free Software
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The Right to be Forgotten
I sent a complaint today to a consumer protection agency for an incident that took place a couple of years ago. A couple of days ago, I decided to change my name to an anonymous name and remove my profile picture because I don't see any reason why comments that make me look pathetic should appear in public. Today I realized that that the replies I had received are by no means based on reading comprehension. For example, I had written about getting long strings to my feature phone, with whice I cannot browse the web, and two people replied that I can create my account without giving them my phone number. Of course, you don't call them assholes on an internet forums.
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Internet/Gemini
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Pennywhether's Place [Ed: Now turning 3]
Hello! This is my Gemini capsule thingie. Probably just going to write about what I'm interested in, so mostly books, video games, probably some anime. Nothing too out of the ordinary. Not sure how often stuff will go up, so bookmark this place if it somehow tickles your fancy.
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Starlink update
Multiplayer gaming is less reliable than it seemed at the beginning with Starlink. Warframe is frequently dropping members from my party and Shroud of the Avatar is showing party members to be lagging.
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Groups vs Tags
I’ve talked before about how hashtags don’t work on Fedi and we should be using groups instead because of technical reasons:
Hashtags don’t work well on Fedi
But socially, they’re not the same thing.
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ceske noviny vol3
To the czech visitors of this place, or those who can read czech, the popular 'news' section has received a rework.[1]
Most notably, individual files are now in utf-8, and there is a lot more of them at the moment.
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.