I’d rather spend N minutes reading a list of book recommendations than 5*N minutes watching a video. Presumably the target audience for books is literate.

I’m tired of video.

On the one hand, this might help fence sitters that are like “there’s no content there”.

On the other, I just don’t personally care for a stream of random images like Instagram et al do.

There’s something off about a video about books.

My parents are difficult. Not the worst people and not monsters, but at many times unpleasant.

Plus it was a house in the suburbs. Not ideal for socializing or culture.

And lastly, living with parents in the suburbs would be huge negatives for dating.

“Top-down mandates to use large language models are crazy,” one employee told Wired. “If the tool were good, we’d all just use it.”

Yep.

Management is often out of touch and full of shit

I don’t like to think of people as immutably good or bad, but I get what you meant.

There’s a bunch of factors.

• are they honest?
• are they kind?
• do they care about things other than themselves?
• do they try to make the world better?

So, someone who lies, is cruel, doesn’t care about anyone else, and leaves the world a mess is being a pretty bad person.

Someone who just keeps their head down, goes to work, and is polite to people they meet is kind of middling.

Why aren’t the pro-brexit people being shamed? Stripped of their wealth and made to spend the rest of their miserable lives doing community service?

It’s always been pretty bad for large chunks of the population. This seems like a low point, but there have been many lows in living memory. Civil rights movement in the 60s. Vietnam war. War on drugs. Countless cruelties done to non-whites and queer folks.

Even the idealized stuff of “buy a house on one income” was more for white people than anything else. Redlining, mortgage discrimination, “and then the white people burned down our house” were all realities.

This country has always been deeply racist. The wealthy ownership class has largely been soulless ghouls. Maybe they build libraries and museums for a while, but they still oversaw tremendous suffering and poverty.

This was a favorite for a long time, by the high water marks: https://thehighwatermarks.bandcamp.com/track/suicide

It feels like suicide or something worse

I’ve got this curse on me

It seems I only dream about the things

that shouldn’t come to be

always I try to find a way it feels

it seems to real to me

I just can’t let it go

I’ll let you know

Just what it means to me

As days go past and it all moves too fast

And I won’t think about it

And when I do it all comes back to you

And I don’t want to change that

Markdown fornatting is really tedious to do on the phone so I’m not going to fix that more.

But the song sounds upbeat, but it’s lyrics are a sad loop they want to break and also don’t want to.

Mergers and acquisitions should not be allowed so often.

There was discussion about what the NYC subway announcements should say instead of “ladies and gentlemen”.

My vote was “listen up you little shits, [this train is going express until canal Street or whatever]”

I think they went with “everyone”, however.

Depends on the app. Some let you see all versions, I think.

Editing is a power not all people should be trusted with.

You all know at least one person (or are the person) who would text a yes/no like “Did you see Dave today?” and then when you write “yeah” edit their message to “Can I borrow your car?” or something you wouldn’t have said yes to.

I don’t know if it’s favorite of all time but I thought of this one now:

haha and then what ;) by jawbreaker reunion. Probably gave some software nerds a headache trying to incorporate the semicolon and parenthesis. Points for a confusing band name, too.

https://jawbreakerreunion.bandcamp.com/album/haha-and-then-what

“Patches” might be my favorite track on it.

It’s really hard to get people to suffer mild inconvenience when they don’t emotionally connect with the benefits.

Most of facebook’s evils are remote and impersonal. Seeing your cousin’s baby photos is real and at hand.

Sometimes I still see job postings that are like “MUST KNOW OBJECT ORIENTED PROGRAMMING” and I’m wondering who in 2026 isn’t at least passably familiar with it.

But then again I also see job posts that are like “must know Java or JavaScript”

I’m just going to move on

That’s my point. They’re doing a self-sabotage. Some of them will then complain that they’re not getting good matches and messages, but a big factor is they’re not giving potential good matches anything to work with.

So many people see the prompt “what I’m looking for” and write “my keys”.

A. That’s not a terribly funny joke. It’s fine, but not great.

B. It’s not original.

C. You are wasting valuable space. Now the other person has a little less information to make a good opening message. Do you really want that many people messaging you about your keys? Really? Why are you setting yourself up for unhappy outcomes?

Most people don’t think very hard about this, and hope it’ll just work out.

Meetup.com ? They’re still around.

One problem is users are selfish idiots. They won’t go somewhere that doesn’t already have a lot of users. They don’t care that going there now moves it closer to having a lot of users, so in a few months it’ll be good and vibrant. Most people can’t even think an hour ahead.

Another problem is that there are many scammers and bad actors. You need to deal with them, and convince your real users that the scammers are dealt with.

Lastly, in this capitalist hellscape everything is expensive. How are you going to run a big service that’s got low latency and high quality?