I don't read or listen to narratives. I really don't listen to him much at all either, but it is hard to avoid. I quit watching/listening to mainstream news years ago, even before Obama came into office. Believe me, it is quite liberating, and while you may miss out on details of some news events, the amount of noise and BS you don't get it staggering. I am dead serious - I don't even watch the local news, unless I think it is something important - which 99% of it is not. I usually only check the BBC, and a few tech sites for news. (here, and Ars)

It is very hard to avoid Trump, and his outright lies. As you mentioned, in the SAME STATEMENTS he will tell a truth and a lie. He will say something, then come back later, sometimes MINUTES LATER and say he never said it. There have been books written about it already. Here's a wikipedia page on it. This isn't new for him. We know who he is from before he was President. He hasn't changed, and that is not a good thing.

I have never really liked any of our Presidents, but I can recognize when they do things right. Even GW Bush, who I think got a LOT of things wrong, handled the aftermath of 9/11 pretty well in my mind. Right up to the point where we decided to invade Iraq. But I can at least acknowledge and separate the good and the bad. That is so very very hard to do with Trump, because even though he might do some things right, he hasn't earned any trust. Even if we disagree with our President, deep down we should be able to trust them.

I don't understand half of what you are saying. Maybe because I didn't read the posts you seem to be referring to.
What I want to know is simple - why is he declaring a national emergency over a hoax? (HIS WORDS)

And why do his supporters tolerate his constant lies? There is some serious cognitive dissonance going on there.

I once had a team who was trying to create test data - a csv of 5 million rows to try to reproduce a client issue. They were using excel (because csv is excel, duh)!
It was spinning for 10 minutes just trying to open the file, then they were going to search and replace values for new data.

I used a shell script to generate 1000 rows of data, then I used cat and sed I manipulated it into a 1 MM row file with unique values. That was my template for creating their 5MM row file, and lots of other test data files. I could use vi to do a search/replace to quickly generate a new unique file. They thought I was a wizard! haha.

This was using MINGW64 because I was on windows. It worked pretty good. I found some things were a little slow on that setup, but I could copy the scripts to my home PC running linux. I could generate them, zip them, and ftp them back 10x faster than just running them on windows.

I guess over time the command line options have grown. Change is hard, and there are probably easier ways to do things. But my fingers just know "ls -lahtr" and "find . | grep -i this | grep -i that | grep -iv something "

I know from using imagemagick, there are LOTS of options, but I would generally only use "convert -geometry wwxhh $file.jpg $file_wwxhh.jpg". Sometimes it's the UI.. like using handbrake to figure out what options I wanted to use converting videos, then getting the generated command line and just putting it in a script. Plenty of other command line tools in the toolbox as well.

At work I wanted to parse out some info, and tried it in Notepad++ using search/replace. I was getting frustrated, and then remembered I had gitbash installed. Boom, got what I wanted right away using pipes with cat, sort, uniq, and sed.

Bottom line... command line for the win!

Seriously, I have wondered this for a while. Why post the paywalled link, then say "Warning, paywalled... alternate link). Just post the damn alternate link and then give the paywalled link like this "Here is the link to WSJ if you subscribe to them". But I am guessing you wouldn't need to even do that, because if someone subscribed to the WSJ, or other paywalled sites, they probably will see the article there anyway.

The people with those certifications will most certainly still put them on their resume.

It's quite a simple problem to solve. Musk will just have his team program it to NOT do what he wants it to do. e.g. "We don't want Teslas to crash into things." We see how well that has gone.

The Mind's I

Part IV explores its titular issue, "Mind as Program". What is the self: the mind, or the body? Can they be separated? Can the location of the consciousness be separate from one's physical location. In that case, where are you, really? Dennett's fantastical account of being separated from his brain and David Sanford's response tackle these issues. In this section the mind is considered as software: as patterns of thought and action, as separate from the physical body housing it as a piece of software is from the machine it runs on.

Great book, the one that introduced me to Douglas Hofstadter.

Fuck cancer. Sorry to hear about your wife. My wife taught at a gifted school in the Chicago area for a few years (middle school) and it was quite eye opening. Even among the gifted, there was a wide range of talents and IQs. Some were incredible muiscly, some at math, some at language, some at other things. She taught French, and one of her 5th graders translated a Star Wars novel into French as a project. One was programming perl, and this was around 2003 when things like that weren't as prevalent. I got to know a lot of the kids, and while they were gifted in many ways, they all still had challenges beyond just being a middle school kid.

I helped chaperone several field trips, one was a camping event in Wisconsin. My wife and another teacher took the class to Montreal. She said wrangling pre-teens going through an airport with passports and keeping track of all their various medications was something she would never want to do again. Not to mention that most of the families were fairly wealthy, some of them VERY, because it was a private school and wasn't cheap. So dealing with those particular parents was also something she didn't miss when she eventually left there.

To the point of this article - the Simpsons will always be relevant, whether spot-on or at least bringing up social topics. But what struck me was that I never thought about these gifted kids being ultra-successful. I think of them as being taken advantage of by those in power. My wife kind of keeps up with how some of her former students are doing. Some are successful, some are not. Being smart in something doesn't guarantee anyone success. I would be more interested in finding out - are they happy? That's the thing that seems to be more elusive than success these days.

I use custom colors that I prefer on my desktop (linux/XFCE w/redshift on) and I use Nova Launcher on my phone. The colors are generally white on dark colors, but I consider that custom and not dark mode.

Yes, it does say vice.com right next to the click-bait subject, but it's like putting a little sign in dog poop that says "don't step here". Just pick up the poop!
Vice is like TMZ and I feel dumber every time I accidentally click on one of their links.

I wonder if the day after the interview, and twice a week every week thereafter, they email candidates with "We see you're interested in cables and poles. Perhaps you would be interested in these deals..."

Don't people need better bookmark management?
It's why I don't like chrome, or the redesigned firefox. FF took out the ability to have notes on bookmarks. That is where I kept my password hint for the 100+ bookmarks that I have collected over the years for all the sites/accounts where I need them.

I tried a password manager once (keepass)... spent a day getting it all set up. The next day, all my passwords were gone. Removed it, back to the tried and true ways. I was a user of FF for a very long time, but when it started wigging out, taking up tons of memory, being sloooowwww... I switched to Chromium. But because of the password thing, that didn't last long. I tried a few others until I found Pale Moon and I've been using it ever since. Chrome keeps implementing things that the devs have to work around, but so far so good. I just hope I will always have an option besides chrome. And edge on linux? no thanks.

When you get down to the root of this story, it is the humans that are absurd.

I got my teenage daughter a Pixel3a for Xmas and she loved it! She has had a few decent Moto phones prior to that.
Hate to tell you... I got it off of CL lightly used for $150! It was some Apple guy who decided to try Android and didn't like it. So I am sure he thought I was a hobo for only paying $150 for a phone.

Hell, I have a Umidigi F1 Play, and it was only $200 new. The camera isn't stellar but works fine. (I put Camera MX on it, the stock was blew chunks). 64GB of storage, 6GB of RAM, and with a 5150 mAh battery I only have to charge it every 3-4 days, and it fully charges in 30 minutes or so.