I didn't consider the movie 'divisive' but I didn't care for it much. I can see the themes you're talking about in there. But it bothers me that you could cut the entire Finn/Rose story out and it wouldn't change the movie... and that's, what, 45 minutes of screen time? I was also annoyed with the Holdo/Poe conflict and that Holdo's whole plan was to turn the last ship around and ram the bad guys, but this had to be a secret for some reason. Why didn't they ram the bad guys with every single ship they abandoned, for example? Why did Holdo have to do it personally? Did they lack even rudimentary automation a long time ago? I dunno, I feel like the conflict they created was too senseless, too artificial, and the outcome unsatisfying. But absolutely none of my complaints are based upon 'wokeness' or 'overrepresentation' or whatever. I just thought it was kinda bad.

According to the NY Times, unvaccinated are developing COVID at 3x the rate as the vaccinated, and unvaccinated are dying of COVID at 6x the rate as the vaccinated. Daily deaths have been in the 400s since July. So, roughly 50 of the daily dead are vaccinated and 350 are not.

The evidence does not support your claim that the vaccines are useless.

the ISP helps subscribers pirate music by selling packages with higher Internet speeds

Nonsense. In 1997, my Internet speed was a fraction of what it is today, and I pirated tons of music thanks to Napster and friends. Today, with my faster Internet speed, I buy my music.

I hope the settlement was small. I can understand the ISP not wanting to go to court and leave it up to a jury, but this is absurd.

I did all of my work (including homework) for a master's degree in stats using LaTeX. Way easier than doing it on paper and having to go back and fix a mistake early on. Just saying, I don't think it's going away any time soon.

Before trying to teach "CS", whatever that entails in this proposal, I want to see schools teaching kids basic computer skills. As a college instructor, I need to have students do things like download a zip file, create a folder for a project, and then unzip the zip file into that folder. In recent years, I get blank stares when talking about creating a folder. Students are used to just saving a file and it automatically goes into "My Documents" and then they can search/browse for it later. But I'm teaching students how to work with datasets that may include dozens to hundreds of files, and if they can't keep them organized, they're doomed.

I don't see how you're going to teach "CS" when students are so weak on fundamentals.

needs to consult their friend group to decide where to eat [...] They're more or less stuck at 8 years old.

I'm not a tiktok user. I'm a gen x. I have consulted my friends group many times in my life about what restaurant is good. I don't see that doing the same thing via tiktok is a bad thing. It seems to me that your friends group is a lot more reliable source of information than likely-rigged anonymous online reviews.

I mean... I wouldn't take investment advice from Jimmy Fallon or Matt Damon commercials no matter what they were advertising. Obviously, whatever it is, they're getting paid to flog it. Add to that the fact they're flogging an investment product people have barely heard of and don't understand at all. Yeah, I feel a little bad for people who are losing their shirts with crypto and NFTs, but come on. You might as well watch Jim Cramer's clown show and take his "advice." As bad as it is, it's probably better than trading crypto.

Thanks for the lesson. I don't do a whole lot of front-end JS development, and when I do I usually favor a relatively lightweight framework. But most of what I do recently is science programming, data munging and analysis type tasks.

I honestly cannot tell whether all that stuff you typed is true things about Svelte, or just a magnificent stream of techno-bullshit.

I bought my most recent phone directly from the manufacturer, and it came without crapware. It's a Razr phone, which they don't make anymore, but I'm hoping there are still manufacturers out there that make phones that you can buy directly without junk apps. It seems like it's mostly the carriers that infect the phone with crap apps in order to subsidize the cost. I paid the same amount to the manufacturer that I would have paid to AT&T, but got a carrier-unlocked phone with no crapware. I didn't get a payment plan, but I didn't want one.

Yeah, I've never heard of the feature either, but my bank offers downloads of my account activity in CSV format. I rarely take advantage of it, but if I wanted to have that in my workflow, I would just download the .csv every month or whatever. This seems to be an issue with SaaS using novel APIs and formats... seems like the feature would be easily made seamless and universal if everyone just defaulted to using the existing standards.

I learned on BBC basic, then moved to QBasic.

I learned starting with a combination of BASICA, GW-BASIC, and, oddly, Lotus 1-2-3 (on a Tandy 1000-SX). I don't remember which was strictly first, but I do remember learning how to program macros in 1-2-3. As a kid, I gravitated more toward BASIC because I could make games there more readily than in 1-2-3. I used to transcribe games out of the back of magazines, which I credit for learning debugging better than most of my colleagues.

Anyway, just a reminiscence of Lotus 1-2-3, a program to which I owe at least some part of my early computer skills.

I am impressed by your commitment to this bit.

Wow, did a PhD pee in your breakfast cereal or something?

Seems to me it would be easy to make a stable stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. Just make this rule: for every $1 increment of currency minted, the company behind the coin puts $1 USD into an account. The public must be able to compare the account balance to the stablecoin supply. As long as there is always an extant dollar for every $1 of stablecoin, the value of the stablecoin should remain stable. Oh, also, a stablecoin holder must always be able to exchange coins for USD at a rate of 1:1.

Of course, this defeats the purpose, but it solves your gradient problem.