The majority of comedy works because there is truth in it. Sure, Idiocracy is prophetic, or we wouldn’t be discussing it today. Nobody discusses South Park’s “Bigger Longer Uncut” like Idiocracy because it doesn’t really engage this kind of truth.

What I cannot tell is if people have always been this moronic and we’re only more aware of it because of ubiquitous cell phone camera technology and the Internet’s capability to rapidly distribute awareness of dumbness that would have otherwise stayed regionally isolated.

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”—George Carlin

It’s more “tragedy of the commons” eugenics than “evil corporate-governmental-white supremacy” eugenics.

I thought the movie was more nuanced than that—the “smart parents” of Idiocracy did not have smart children—they had zero children. The smart couple in fact were the ones doing “self-eugenics” to their own detriment.

Eugenics or not, evolution favors the population that produces the fittest offspring for the environment–not the smartest.

I know people who actively fight me on ISO 8601. They don’t like the way it sorts their files/folders, reliant on whatever behavior the operating system does. Whenever data recovery happens or their files are moved, all the change times are blown out the window and the sorting they expect is blown away.

I’m not yet using a 24-hour clock. But it has me thinking. That’s not such a bad transition for 24-hour local time into UTC. Or just using both. At some point the inconvenience of the local will become vestigial and UTC is what remains.

What if the only enabling factor to getting to Kardashev Type I is adoption of UTC for everything?

Yep, we’re doomed by the Great Filter.

I keep the keys in the hand that closes the door they lock. No keys, no close.

How about two batteries that can be ejected and swapped without powering off the device? We don’t need to wait for super-capacitors today.

iPhones… someday. :)

OpenBao https://openbao.org/

(making a note for myself.)

The pandemic whipsawed its de-facto function the other direction: before the pandemic, public education grew to become more of a form of subsidized childcare with added politics of mandatory curricula and mandatory testing. During the pandemic, the system forced already strained parents previously reliant on subsidized childcare to become teachers and were required to be on-camera attendants for their children to complete timed assessments to “prove there was learning and not cheating”, which was even more problematic when you had more than one child-- because then you had to teach and assess N-child-different things during the day where previously each child was cohorted in grades with N-concurrent teachers.

The current system treats everyone like children because it never had the plot for effective education, “compulsory education” was for the poor and it was oriented to inculcating values for adherents of religion, loyal subjects of monarchy, soldiers for state, and drones for industry. If your family had money, your education was not from the compulsory design.

Oh that’s awesome. The drop-down arrow “disapeared” with my mental blinders-- I was thinking it was only a toggle for PDFs.

This is a useful take: I too will use LLMs for search-- but not for search for journal articles with data and evidence. LLMs too easily confabulate these.

LLM-as-search is fantastic when you want a no-bullshit statistical result for what you’re looking for when you’re wanting an overview or interactive tutorial.

I have the big SearXNG portal bookmarked ( https://searx.space/ ) but I don’t find that I ever reach for it that often. Not being able to cull lower quality sites is just a little bit of extra toil I’m happy to pay to go away.

Ok, you piqued me: Got a link to a guide on using Kagi for the fediverse?

One of my best monthly expenses. I also appreciate being able to block low-quality domains from my search results.

StackOverflow initially had an interesting idea of putting metrics on things, and unfortunately humanity’s penchant for “what gets measured is gamed” was amplified and devolved into a hive of HOA Karens looking for infractions of the rules.

I’ll bet that if you “relaunched” a SO-like system and removed all human-visible “points” or “scores” you could achieve a less toxic environment. The only “ranking” is implicit based on your topical subscriptions.

Then again, you could “relaunch” the “relaunch” and “AlphaGo-ify” a bunch of AI agents to compose the dialogs and threads without any human interaction at all. I guess we’re on our way already to building Culture minds.

Absolutely doable.

I’ve switched to paid search with Kagi. Best standard feature is I can tell Kagi to block w3schools, mediumDOTcom and stackoverflow from my search results.

I don’t expect that from a month-old USB drive however. A month old USB drive that write-locks itself is a lemon.

SanDisk sells very pretty expensive plastic bricks that excel at disappointment and confusion (like when a USB flash drive decides to become permanently read-only).