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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: April 25th, 2026

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  • Addicts often commit other crimes, but the addiction is a function of the exposure to (and therefore trafficking of by other people) addictive substances. Cops actually love to hassle addicts, so long as they’re homeless addicts. It hasn’t solved any problems. But tackling drug trafficking is scary and dangerous because it turns out drugs are profitable and traffickers have loads of money and power.





  • flow as in menstrual flow, the literal volume of blood and mucosal lining from the uterus during a woman’s period

    flow also as in lyrical flow, the use of rhythm and articulation in a rapper’s delivery

    bar as in a measure of time in music, typically a four beat bar

    spitting referring to the rapid and rhythmic delivery of words to a beat

    If your [lyrical] flow is so heavy, why aren’t you [rapping]?



  • Infrastructure is important, and walking back from these gigabit targets is awful. There is no replacement for fiber. We all deserve to have access to fast internet.

    But to yell at a cloud for a moment, if we’re being honest most people should not need gigabit. I know everyone is a gamer now, but let’s forget about bulk downloads. For normal browsing most people should not need much more than about 12mbps. 12 mbps is fast enough to have two 1080p h265 streams running concurrently. And yet, when you try to use the modern web at that speed, it’s a terrible experience because of all the adtech bullshit that gets crammed into every page. When I measured this Ars article it was 6.53MB. That is, to borrow a yardstick from a blogpost I reread recently, long enough to fit 3 or 4 of the great Russian epics inside. It is bigger than the shareware version of DOOM, big enough to fit the entire python standard package library documentation. For one article.

    Don’t let this cheapen the FCC being chickenshit and captured by specific perverse corporate interests, but publishers have sold us a bridge when it comes to the modern web. Web3 was supposed to fix all this with micropayments. I’d gladly pay whatever my paltry share of Ars’ CPM they expected to get out of my pageview, wouldn’t you? But cryptobros turned it into a get-rich-quick slopfest and then it died.

    edit: having meandered over to my computer because I just cannot sleep, I decided to measure the page as I access it, with ublock, noscript, and umatrix turned on. That article now weighs just over 724kB. Way better. Reader mode loses the images and gets the article down to 2.49kB. Meaning the actual content is roughly 0.04% of the delivered size of the original page. The stylesheet alone is many times the size of the content. I know I’m really indulging my old man energy but web pages do not need to be this large. I know cache exists, and that’s fine, but it’s still a bit ridiculous. Some people in this world do still use dialup and/or pay per MB. Your 6.5MB web page might cost somebody a nontrivial sum to read, relative to their means.

    The irony is not lost on me that my home instance itself is not the most lightweight web app. The page I am using to edit this comment is 1.9MB. With the cache active it’s <100kB transferred per page load but still, if I weren’t a hypocrite I’d probably switch to a Piefed instance.

    edit 2: added emphasis











  • You’re right that it would be ideal to simply wash the dishes before they accumulate, but I often find myself in situations where I don’t want to do dishes before and after I cook. Moving the tub takes 5 seconds, washing the accumulated dishes might take 5 minutes, and if all you wanna do is rinse some berries and make oatmeal before you run out the door taking 5 minutes to do dishes might not be on the table.

    Ultimately the dish tub and keeping the sink clear is a strategy I learned to avoid domestic blockers. Regardless of what everyone else in the house is doing, I need to be able to use the sink without doing a bunch of extraneous labor first. And getting mad at them for being lazy or messy or whatever might feel good but it doesn’t solve my problem. There are edge benefits like the fact that I never find accidental mold in my sink, which is nice from a hygiene perspective, but mostly it’s that I want to be able to use the damn sink when I want to use the damn sink.