It's not sweetness you're missing.

It's sourness. Those tomatoes have PLENTY of sweetness, plenty of sugars. They lack the sourness/acidity that would allow you to notice the sweetness.

As an experiment - take some of your bland tomatoes, and add a bit (like a teaspoon) of vinegar or lemon juice to them. Let it gel a bit, wipe them off, and they'll taste sweeter. Cook it into them, and it'll taste super-sweet. Salts can also help, but acid I find is the biggest missing element.

Same thing with bland strawberries, or those horrible red delicious apples. Add a bit of acid/sour to them, get it really into them, and boom - you taste all those sugars.

It's why salad dressing is often acid+fats - the combination comes out sweet on the sugars on the veggies.

It's also why factory farming practices selecting for yield end up with horrible fruit over decades - all that energy goes into producing more sugars for larger fruit, picked earlier. But it's so sweet, it tastes like nothing. Fresh mandarins are getting much worse now for that.

Ryan Fenton

So which is it, .5, .75, or 1 point?

The article also doesn't state what the range started at... the reporting there in general seems like a mess.

Since this is more a general tech nerd site, rather than a industry financial financing nerd site... might want to explain those terms and ranges for folks not focused on needing to borrow at large business levels.

Thanks!

Ryan Fenton

Because of the way cause and effect work - we could BE that universe, and wouldn't be able to tell.

See - our memories would still be formed at some point, and would have to have been formed, in order to lead back to the past - and in having those memories, we'd still be living the same life as if time were running the other way.

Our lives would be the same.

Reminds me a lot of debates on philosophical zombies. Time being an illusion is a bit like souls being real or not - it's all context that might or might not matter, but doesn't have to be in order to have the world present as we observe it.

Ryan Fenton

Lots of programming tutorials use it as a puzzle game to teach basic programming.

Just don't use the name Wordle (except as prior use, which there is some), and you should be fine.

Unless NYT wants to claim ownership over the very idea - in which case, they've got a LONG haul ahead of them.

Ryan Fenton

The concept is that the world is NOT against the Russian people. They are against their current undemocratic overlords.

The Internet is used for bad uses - but on the people vs. overlords scale, it's still largely balanced towards the people in this scenario. Plenty of weight on the other side, mind you - but also a lot of people able to get around limitations and see a wider world.

And a people cut off from the wider world is a lot less capable of creating change over time.

Part of the problem is that in adapting to a LONG history of despotic regimes is that the people have developed a 'wisdom' of never improving things, and seeing any improvement towards anything they would prefer itself as a curse.

But each new generation does bring its own hope of having a better vision for a future that can be improved - and the internet as imperfect as it is, is part of that process that most modern nations had to go through to get to what we count as 'normal' today.

Ryan Fenton

The entire game of almost every sector - of what has emerged as the 'crypto segment' of the market and discussion spaces - is the 'greater fool' approach to interaction.

Most commonly seen in multi-level marketing and pump-and-dump practices, it's the act of creating a community based on hype and encouraging theory-crafting on when best to get in, and when best to get out of speculation arcs.

Note that this process is inherently self-selecting for a certain kind of 'wisdom' - that is, folks who think they are 'clever' or 'lucky enough to win in high-risk scenarios, with more than a dash of desperation involved in most of the people playing.

That desperation is what makes the high-energy/enthusiasm aspect of these communities self-reinforcing, and very punishing of skepticism and many kinds of consideration, usually with special labels for that kind of talk.

Exactly that selection bias means that members of these communities tend to have a very limited kind of technical acumen. Basically a small pool of shared scripts, a few gurus with specialized knowledge, and a lot of people shopping around for cheap services to scale up those scripts.

The folks with more aptitude have usually found better ways to make more consistent money and never get involved, or the less ethical ones with more skill tend to create automated ways of playing that crowd for access to resources.

So... it's a bit like how a lot of managers end up falling for email scams, after managing technical people and getting overconfident in how 'easy' tech stuff seems.

Spend all your time searching for the greater fool tends to end up with you playing that role.

It's also the core of how most major market crashes play out.

Ryan Fenton

I got you a macaroni art thing.

Ha! You think it's worthless?

That's because you aren't marketing it - it'll be worth something if you can SELL the idea of it - which is now your job.

Which I'm not paying you for.

Well, not any more than a crappy, er, REVOLUTIONARY macaroni art.

Except in the case of the story, you're not even getting a macaroni art piece, you're getting a receipt for one.

And anyone can copy the actual macaroni art.

But that receipt, that receipt is sure unique. As unique as picking a star in the sky and saying 'that's mine'. Meaninglessly and unverifiably unique, on a collection no one will likely ever care about, which no one else is required to coordinate with or respect.

Ryan Fenton

It doens't matter how 'efficient' hardware is made to ease cryptomining. The value of the currency itself is currently linked to the designed increasing difficulty in finding the magic numbers for that algorithm.

The less resources required, the more that will be mined, and then you're back where you started. Burning resources at the same rate, just with more tokens at play for the same money.

The nature of the currency is to burn the environmentally available resources to grow tokens for trade.

To paraphrase Monty Python: 'Tis a silly system.

We've had sillier, but this ain't the answer.

Ryan Fenton

If there were some form of UBI, where loss of work didn't mean a lack of retirement, insurance, ability to feed loved ones, and harming the ability to find more work - then these actions could just be seen as a neutral aspect of free ownership.

As it is, it's more symbolic about how little agency most people have in the system they allow to function - which is increasingly managed by the market itself, and decreasingly democratic in any sense of the term.

The power of automation can offer freedoms we haven't been able to realistically consider previously - including a lot of our more libertarian ideals, as long as we plan enough to make sure no one can starve or be similarly left destitute in any emergency.

Until then, allowing cruelty as policy at increasing rates is going to catch up and destroy most of the stability and benefits society used to enjoy. It's not like we haven't seen that process play out thousands of times into recorded history.

Ryan Fenton

There's half the nation under this continuing impression that it's on its last legs and going to be gone any second now.

Exactly the same sentiment held in 2020.

I say you can't stop active prevention efforts until there's been ZERO new cases in the nation for at least two weeks.

I think we've learned by now that it's not that hard to wear a mask indoors. It doesn't hurt your breathing, you can communicate just fine with clear intention and effort - and it's a worthwhile priority.

We've had many pandemics in history - it's worth working together to get past them. Unfortunately, we've had a political streak working especially hard this time to fight any effort against the pandemic - usually those influences fade a bit more when we reach this point in a pandemic.

If you're desperate for the pandemic times to end - there's a way to end it. By not taking steps that tend to spread it. Refusing prevention steps is how it gets the virus population to mutate and start the pandemic over again.

Preventing more variants is also the best way to maximize the economy, by the way.

Ryan Fenton

Would it be more hypocritical, or appropriate for them to add the other's product as a malware product for exactly this?

I can see the defenders already "Oh, it's a MINIMAL performance impact - don't be such a worry-wart. They deserve to make money for their services.." (on your electric bill dime)

The block-chain keeps giving and giving, doesn't it?

Ryan Fenton

This name change approach is probably the wrong way to address the situation. Triggers the Streisand effect in more folks than anything.

I'm completely OK with GMO. Virtually every thing we grow has had an absurd degree of change by genetic selection over centuries.

The practices we use for genetic modification are far more selective and tested than anything we've done in history. They're not only safe by any standards I can think of, but one of the most tested in all of history if you consider how many feed animals have been having GMOs for decades.

It's just new, and like tomatoes were considered poison for decades, it's going to take some time before that doesn't feel icky to some people.

Not too long from now, basically everything is going to be GMO. It's just not practical for it not to be - the benefits in immunity and lack of need for pesticides are just too great at scale.

The real benefits will come when we start getting over this semi-generational 'icky' feeling about it - when we can start doing some relatively simple edits to start making more varieties that can be easily grown at home, without careful grafting that so much agriculture needs now to be productive.

There's a lot of absurd stuff about agriculture in general - GMO is one of the least issues of concern - and one of the best ways to making things really sustainable over the long run.

If you're disgusted by how folks treat nuclear energy - GMOs are basically the same issue. A powerful tool, that yes, needs consideration, but is basically the best way to get us to a future where we don't need to do constant damage on the regular to keep things going.

Ryan Fenton

What if you were making a game, and wanted user-generated content?

Like, thumbnails for save files, exportable character images, etc.

Making games faster to load/save would DEFINITELY be a benefit - and not just on handheld consoles.

More bandwidth means more ability to have more ways of using such features, like making new features using dynamically changing textures and being able to save the most recent state with the game load, instead of resetting it each time.

Each little bit of improved bandwidth has a way of allowing new features or quality of life.

Ryan Fenton

Treaties are good. Good intentions.

Nothing wrong with that.

But we've got a LOT of bad intentions built into the beating heart of our institutions, and I don't know how much sway these treaties have over the courts and legislature as we've been shaping things recently.

Still - good on them for at least setting a better starting tone.

But most of the real job is going to be for upcoming generations to start actually start taking power to change in the functional running of things.

And we've got a LOT of people very angry still about allowing anything like that to happen. This won't be forever - but it certainly weighs on the expectations of the current moment.

Ryan Fenton

The measurement method (from the article) is the time between first email accessed and last, using Mircosoft Teams.

That means it's exclusively ignoring:

Travel Time.

Time spent in the middle of the day outside paid work tasks.

Anyone not using Microsoft Teams.

Or any of a large number of context issues like someone called at 9pm to look at a notification about server capacity or something, and sent an email to the team to let them know it was a false alarm after a 1 minute remote check ... then this logic would say they worked a 14 hour day.

I'd categorize this data as one of an ENORMOUS number of similar ones set up to categorize remote work as a nebulous bad thing, using selective data, and ignoring who knows what other data to produce the desired illusion.

Ryan Fenton