I almost never nap. I stay tired for an hour or so after waking up, so if I sleep I need to account for the time I need to wake up afterwards, since I don’t really do anything useful in that time. Because of this, I only use naps when I really need to, and I try to sleep for at least 3-5 hours if I go to sleep at all.

I was thinking about this while I was composing my post. I was thinking that I could cite literally every word with a “wiktionary.org” link, but there’s probably a bootstrapping problem where if you don’t already understand a reasonable amount about “wiktionary.org”, you can’t make use of my citations. Also, if the reader normally uses the “dictionary.com” definitions of words, and a definition conflicts with the “wiktionary.org” usage, that could cause problems.

Some states have an official group of people who determine what the “correct” way to speak is. I know that France has or had something like that. That could be useful for legal proceedings so that people who use language inconsistently don’t stay free much more often than people who do.

I think that we just have to assume that everyone who’s not in prison has some way to communicate with the majority of the people they meet, regardless of whether there is a group of people making prescriptive statements about definitions and/or grammar. That means that dictionaries (and any other detailed documentation like citations) don’t need to be used for day-to-day communication.

Note that dictionaries and things like that will probably always be useful for “technical” interactions, like using a legal court, or making engineering plans, or directing time-sensitive operations (like how a pilot should know that someone saying “mayday mayday mayday” means that an emergency is being declared).

Things started earlier than that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Dnp7lOObjU&t=3119s&list=PLG1NADbefbENzGtVrh_bh-W6sfSWfopqS

So I’m English. I’m poor, rich, middle; who cares? It doesn’t matter. I get on a ship. I come to Virginia. If I’m free, they will deed me 40 acres of land (40 acres of land they don’t own). There’s a Native American family that owns it. I now have the deed to 40 acres of land that somebody else is using, that is farming. Because, right, we have this double think 1984 thing in our head: the Native Americans didn’t know how to farm, Europeans did; the pilgrims arrive, they don’t know how to farm, so Squanto finds them starving to death; he goes up to them he’s like “dude, what’s happening, why aren’t you growing food” and they’re like “we don’t know how” so Squanto shows them how to do Agriculture, and you may have been in a play about this, and he’s, like, planting fish in the ground to fix the nitrogen into the soil, and at the same time you hold these two contradictory beliefs: first that the Native Americans couldn’t Farm because they’re too dumb, and then second that the Native Americans taught the pilgrims how to farm, and it doesn’t occur to you that they can’t both be true! Anyway, turns out Squanto really did teach the dumb pilgrims how to farm because they were too stupid to grow their own food and were starving to death! So I walk out into Virginia; I got my blunderbuss. I’m walking out, and I see the family of Native Americans farming that land that’s mine, and I take a shot at them. They hear the bang, they run, they fight; doesn’t matter. The land will be mine; I will take it from them. There’s a crop already in the field, which is great cuz then come harvest time I’m already set, and then I just continue to farm the land. Is that amazing? All I need to do is get across the Atlantic; the rest is free (well, except for the ammo). In other words, at some level, the colonial settler project that the British unleash in what will become the United States of America was a wealth transfer scheme. There is no greater asset on the planet than real estate, right? Not Bitcoin, not stamps, not coins, not gold—it’s land! Land you can grow food, land you can build a house, land you can build a factory, land you can find gold, land you can find coal, you can find oil. Land, land, land, land! So to go from having none to suddenly having some with really nothing put into it other than you just happen to be English, and you had to commit a little act of violence, that’s a remarkable, like, leap! That’s a remarkable jump. But then, we added a layer to it. Tobacco is labor intensive. In other words, yeah, I can grow tobacco as a single person not farming, but I’m putting in a lot of hours. Now it turns out tobacco, at the time at least (I don’t know if it’s still true), the tobacco seed was worth more than its weight in gold, so this is going to make me a lot of money, but if I’m a single farmer out there doing this, it’s not really going to make me a lot of money fast. It’s better than growing yams, it’s better than growing wheat, it’s better than raising chickens for sure, but it’s hard. As soon as I have enough money, what I’ll do is I’ll put in for a mail-order bride; once she comes over, she becomes part of my labor team. Now I’m producing even more tobacco, and then she’ll incubate my next generation of labor; by the time it’s 8 or 10 years old, I’ll probably be able to get some work out of my children, and then once I have enough money, I’ll buy a mule or ox or a horse or something, and then once I have enough money, I’ll bring over an indentured servant, three, five year, seven-year contract. I have a conflict of interest with my indentured servant. In three, five, or seven years they’re going to get their freedom; I have to give them a gift as I let them go. They have every incentive not to work hard for the time they’re working for me, but I want to squeeze every ounce of labor out of them, so it’s kind of a violent event, and eventually they just start to run away (becomes a nuisance), but once we’ve developed the level of sophistication that we can support this, we start bringing over slaves (which is almost right away; it did not take long before we’re bringing over slaves).

This one is new to me! https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=imba

Oh my God, Becky. Look at her butt.

Sir Mix-A-Lot - Baby Got Back (Official Music Video)

https://faq.usps.com/s/article/How-is-Undeliverable-and-Misdelivered-Mail-Handled#report_return_misdelivered

This video suggests that the human population will stabilize at an appropriate level for a given environment, and that it can rebound quickly if that’s necessary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-oVwcDg5Uc

https://www.comicagile.net/comic/conways-law/

https://www.comicagile.net/?s=conway's+law&post_type=comic

I’m interested in whether this information was already taken into account when people were editing https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/ and https://www.privacyguides.org/en/mobile-browsers/

Ah, I didn’t realize that “Con” meant “conservative”! I thought “Con” meant “scam”.

How do you know this is a con?

It is surely good to occasionally test whether unforeseen events will cause disruption. Do you know how often such a test is performed?

For example, nuclear weapons systems are tested occasionally, and seeing a failure is probably important information.

Giving moderators practice with moderating will probably improve their performance when they are actually needed.

There are things that cannot be communicated by reading alone.

Zen is said to be based on a “special transmission outside scriptures”

I suspect that actually looking at someone (preferably while you’re together in the same room) lets you understand things better.

The balance of power shifted in February 2021 when New Ideas (Nuevas Ideas), the party Bukele had helped found in 2017, and allied members of GANA captured 56 seats in elections for the 84-seat legislature. That two-thirds majority meant that Bukele had the legislative support he needed to replace both the country’s attorney general and five of the Supreme Court’s justices. With some of the checks on his power minimized, Bukele began to take an increasingly authoritarian approach to addressing some of El Salvador’s pressing problems.

I suggest making some reforms to state institutions before someone else gains control of at least two thirds of the political power. Having support from two thirds of a legislative body is sufficient to completely rewrite a constitution in many cases, so the only question is whether a “supermajority” can reach some consensus.

I personally don’t have a lot of hope for peaceful reform, given what I see from https://ballotpedia.org/Results_for_ranked-choice_voting_(RCV)_and_electoral_system_ballot_measures,_2024

I suspect that, when certain election methods are used, it’s possible to make your preferred candidate lose if you express support for them:

instant-runoff voting is also sometimes vulnerable to a paradoxical strategy of ranking a candidate higher to make them lose, due to instant-runoff voting failing the monotonicity criterion.

I can imagine that someone’s best choice can be to entirely abstain from voting in some situations. I don’t think it’s ethical to force people to vote if doing so would harm them.

Making a law about an obligation to vote will probably make future electoral reform harder (since people will have to figure out / get confused about whether a change will make it more likely for them to land in court), and making it hard to change bad systems is surely a bad thing.

Incentivizing someone to show up and just cast a blank ballot could make it harder to detect fraud. For example, it might be convenient to dispose of ballots that someone intended to misuse by mixing them in with the legitimate ballots, and having more blank ballots that are actually legitimate would make it less clear whether something illegal has happened.

“Voting in all federal elections in Australia is a legal obligation for citizens aged 18 and over”, but there isn’t a very steep penalty for not doing so (and you might even get your name published in a newspaper, which some people might value for its own sake):

Failure to vote in the federal election initially results in a $20 fine as per section 245 of the Act, which can grow if left unpaid to a $220 fine and court fees.

Having early voting and making the “main” voting day be a holiday for a large number of people seems like a good idea, since that makes voting easier for people who want to vote. Hounding people who don’t want to vote (regardless of their reasoning) seems like a worse idea.

If a non-personal email — such as an American citizen contact — was provided by the alien, notices may have been sent to unintended recipients, It does make me concerned there’re a lot more people out there like me who probably also thought this was spam, who probably didn’t realize, ‘I have a problem,’

Having a mistake in this situation makes it less clear whether other messages are legitimate or not, so we might see more cases like those described around https://www.yahoo.com/news/black-people-receiving-racist-text-012451742.html

There has been some confusion about this question: https://www.thewisedrive.com/turn-signals-in-dedicated-turn-lanes/ https://www.thewisedrive.com/yes-you-have-to-use-your-turn-signal/ https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2023/12/26/watch-live-trooper-steve-explains-whether-you-need-to-use-turn-signals-in-turn-only-lanes/

I think the idea of a “direct course” is useful:

No person shall turn a vehicle at an intersection unless the vehicle is in proper position upon the roadway as required in RSA 265:42, or turn a vehicle to enter a private road or driveway, or otherwise turn a vehicle from a direct course or move right or left upon a roadway unless and until such movement can be made with reasonable safety. No person shall so turn any vehicle without giving an appropriate signal in the manner hereinafter provided.

I do pay extra attention to giving a signal when I intend to make a U-turn rather than a typical left turn.

I use openSUSE because I want to see the license used with a package before installing it, and I can do that by using YaST. Also, it seems that version numbers are used consistently which enables elegant downgrading (I found that the pacman system is probably capable of supporting this too, but the operating system(s) that use it don’t seem to use version numbers consistently and I’ve had a bad experience with downgrading in the past). I reviewed packaging systems other than rpm but it seemed that rpm while used with openSUSE was the most robust.

I also like having a bootable image with a streamlined installation process that is clearly supported by the operating system maintainers: I was tired of worrying about whether I set up LUKS correctly while setting up Arch Linux, and just having a checkbox for “encrypt the disk” makes me a lot calmer. Knowing that I can use a guided process if I want to reinstall the operating system also gives me some peace of mind.

It’s also nice to get practice with an operating system that is more similar to “enterprise” Linux distributions: it’s probably useful to get practice managing my personal computer(s) and at the same time get knowledge that is probably re-usable while interacting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise itself. However, this was not a primary consideration for choosing an operating system for myself.

Luckily, my choice can currently also get some support from https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop/

I also like NixOS, but it doesn’t seem to use secure boot by default, and I’d prefer to have that handled without needing input from me, so I only use it when that feature isn’t available at all.

Are you saying that some functionality is not federated but some functionality is?

I suppose my main problem is lack of meaningful decentralization. I prefer to use networks that allow me to contact people using a local public Wi-Fi service or someone’s home internet connection, and I believe it would be expensive or impossible to do that using ATProto without depending on infrastructure maintained by Bluesky.

The only program I wanted to use but haven’t managed to access using the openSUSE package management system is one that’s unlikely to be available using Fedora’s either.

When there is a package provided by the original creator of a program, it’s less likely that openSUSE compatibility will be tested, and it’s probably more likely that compatibility will not be tested as rigorously. In my experience, a package intended for use with Fedora will be useful to use with openSUSE without needing to modify it most of the time (the names of basic dependencies/capabilities are probably the same for both operating systems in many cases). I think coverage is expanding over time, since the examples I thought only explicitly supported Fedora currently do support OpenSUSE too: https://brave.com/linux/ https://vscodium.com/#install-on-fedora-rhel-centos-rockylinux-opensuse-rpm-package

I don’t like the idea of using Flathub, but most programs that aren’t accessible while only using YaST are available using GNOME Software, and it might be true that the exact same set of programs is accessible using that method while using either Fedora or openSUSE.