Also, courts have repeatedly ruled that a punishment has to be both cruel and unusual to be unconstitutional. Which means that if the government just treats everyone like trash, it’s cruel but not unusual. Because the government is what decides what is unusual simply by adjusting how often it is used. If something is unusual and they want to change that, they just do it more so it’s considered usual.

It’s the same strategy used by Hitler and the nazis to seize control of Germany. They initially only got control of some of the smaller, “less important” government departments. And then they just started drastically expanding the reach of existing departments, declaring themselves to be in charge of other departments, consolidating loyalists, etc…

The idea is that by the time opponents have time to push back, you have already seized control and are already ousting them. Court battles take months or years, but the takeover was done in a few days.

It’s a directory. When you create a new note, it creates a new file inside of that directory. My point was simply that you can always just browse the directory and read the plaintext file for whichever note you want. Obsidian simply adds things like text formatting and automatic links to other notes.

Yeah, I tired Audiobookshelf and gave up after fighting with it for a day or two. It refused to read or write any data on my NAS, so it couldn’t actually save/load any audiobook files.

It stores your data in plaintext, and simply uses the program to parse special formatting characters. There are no attempts at obfuscation or encryption, and it doesn’t lock you into a walled garden that refuses to play nice with other programs. The program itself is closed-source, but anyone could write an open source version to parse the same info… There just hasn’t been a good reason to do so. Even if Obsidian as a company and program ceases to exist overnight, your data is still safe on your machine and can be read by anyone who cares enough to dig into the file. Hell, you can even open it as the plaintext file and dig through it manually.

This is the third time today that I have seen a reference to the sword of Damocles. Almost as if the entire fucking world feels like it’s only a thread away from destruction…

Honestly, my initial guess was that the department used a fake name to refer to the officer. Because it’s giving big “the hardest part of making a new character is thinking of a name” vibes.

I had an idea for a community along the lines of /LeastSupremeWhites which was the same basic premise. Based on an old comment I saw a while ago, which was along the lines of “why are white supremacists always the least supreme whites?”

They also fired the workers who handled most FOIA requests, so there is nobody to fulfill them anyways.

And here’s a reminder that if you run a Plex server, there’s an app called Prologue which turns it into a fully fledged audiobook server.

Plex doesn’t natively support things like audiobook bookmarks in m4b files, and tries to just play them straight through like a gigantic 4 hour long music track. But Prologue does support bookmark data. Prologue simply uses Plex’s service to access the files, (because admittedly, Plex is good for letting newbies remotely access their content) and then it ignores Plex’s built-in “lol just play it like music” instructions, and actually parses the files for bookmark data.

As someone who couldn’t get Audiobookshelf to work properly, (something about not being able to access network drives via Docker), Prologue has saved my audiobook library by allowing me to just host it via Plex instead.

I’ll admit that Douglas Adams hit the nail on the head in regards to AI. In the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, AI exists but everyone hates dealing with it because it’s so damned annoying. They avoid it whenever possible, and only interact when forced to do so via things like smart devices that use AI for basic tasks.

For instance, doors are programmed with AI and emphatically love opening and closing for people. In fact, they love their job as a door so much that they have a tendency to loudly and repeatedly thank people for using them, to the point of annoyance.

And then there are things like poor sleep hygiene when very young can trigger a correlates with the development of ADHD later on.

FTFY. Correlation≠Causation, especially in cases like you mentioned. It’s a chicken and egg scenario.

Are kids getting ADHD because they didn’t sleep well? Or is poor sleep hygiene an early indicator of ADHD? Lots of people with ADHD have poor sleep hygiene, even as adults. Many will struggle with things like Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, because they get their biggest bursts of focus late at night when everyone else is asleep, the brain is releasing dopamine to keep them awake, and distractions are limited. Every single adult with ADHD has stories about getting focused on a project right before bedtime, then suddenly realizing the birds are chirping outside their window and the sun is rising.

It was an impressively fast decline too.

So fast that many people think they never actually intended to have it survive. They simply didn’t want to compete in the future, so they bought it before it was too big to compete with. But they had to reframe the massive purchase to shareholders as a potential profit-making venture, so they publicly stated that they were doing it to move into merch sales. And then they just nosedived it as soon as the purchase was complete, so they could shrug their shoulders and go “oops, well we tried!”

GameStop likely could have pivoted into something akin to the Steam storefront, or fully jumped into merch/apparel sales and become something like BoxLunch for licensed video game stuff. But instead, they clung to physical games for far too long, while only dipping their toes into merch sales. And now it’s likely too late for them to fully shift into merch sales, because competitors have already had a full decade to establish themselves.

I’ve seen people saying “oh the AfD only has like 20% support” like the US didn’t vote Trump into power with only 25% of the population. Also, 20% of a population supporting literal nazis is something to be concerned about.

Honestly, I don’t think that the current administration’s tactics would work without social media. Social media allows people to feel the outrage and feel like they’re making an impact, all without doing a damned thing to actually stop the current admin. Social media allows you to post online and feel satisfied with the engagement it got, because “maybe someone else will step up because of my post.” But it doesn’t actually spur any action on the poster’s part.

I’d argue that posting about it is the best case scenario for fascism, because as long as people are allowed to post they won’t be motivated to actually start fires.

Until I learned the whole story about Musk’s takeover of Tesla, I had no idea how bad and overconfident he was at engineering and business, but once I learned that, a lot of things started to make a lot more sense.

Yeah, my cousin used to work at SpaceX, and it’s sort of an open secret that they need to actively keep Elon away from the engineers. They have entire teams of people dedicated to shoving menial decisions and distractions in front of him, so he doesn’t have time to wander over to the engineers. Like as soon as he steps out of his office door, there are multiple people whose sole job is dedicated to subtlety redirecting him off to other non-critical wings of the building to keep him distracted. Because if he ever talks to the rocket engineers, he’ll try to one-up them by dropping some asinine “we’re going to do it this dumb way instead” decree that requires them to scrap their entire current project and start over from scratch (for the third time this week.)