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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • Unfortunately, most bioplastics are more like 300 years, which yes, is significantly better than 300 thousand years, and with industrial compost heaters you can push those 300 years down. But I’ve also had to come to terms that my failed 3D prints will likely outlive me (although I do collect the waste to hopefully recycle someday). I don’t print that much compared to most in the hobby, but it is something I consider before I print things.

    That said, I’m not going to let perfect be the enemy of good, and the biodegradability of bioplastics is still exponentially better than petroleum plastic.





  • I was absolutely on a version of the alt-right pipeline a decade ago. I was raised by far-right, Mike Johnson-style “Christians,” so I was already pretty far down that path before I was drawn into any pipeline.

    Luckily, I ended up on a weird libertarian branch of the pipeline (LearnLiberty rather than Prager U), and somehow the YouTube algorithm steered me into Veritasium’s content on climate change, and clips from Adam Ruins Everything. It sounds a bit crazy, but those things started opening my eyes and expanding my worldview. Probably didn’t hurt that my favorite TV show at the time was Leverage, which had plenty of its own anti-corporate-grifting themes.

    Eventually, I realized that the Libertarian utopia doesn’t work because greed is an unlimited resource, and that makes regulation important.

    Of course, there were other things that helped me escape my upbringing and the alt-right pipeline during gamergate (I wasn’t into gaming at the time, so that probably helped), but looking back and seeing how easily I could have ended up being a January 6 insurrectionist. I’m so thankful for all the little things that nudged me out of that worldview, and helped me see reality.

    I wish there was an easy way to show young guys that the people they are listening to are liars and grifters who are manipulating young men into believing that their real pain is somehow the fault of women. But if I look at my own journey, it was a thousand little nudges. I didn’t change overnight, but there was a day during the 2016 election cycle that I remember realizing that even though I had spent almost 8 years despising Obama, that he had been an alright president - especially compared to the Republican nominee, Trump.




  • But what qualifies as social media? We can all probably agree that Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, etc. count, but what about say Discord or WhatsApp? How about browsing older forums (like open ones where you don’t need an account to read them)? What about news articles or blogs with a comment section? Is a wiki social media? Depending on how you define it, the majority of the internet could be considered social media.

    Plus there are plenty of sites that just won’t ever bother to try to comply. For example, I live in one of the more stupid states in the US that has required age verification for porn sites, PornHub has complied by just blocking their site in the state with a notice that they won’t implement a system like that for privacy reasons. But they and their sister sites are the only ones I’ve seen that have bothered to make any changes. The same will inevitably happen with social media. You’re just going to push kids to shadier corners of the internet that don’t care about laws, and they’re gonna end up radicalized by nazis, or taken advantage of in worse ways.

    The whole problem is parents who don’t want to be parents and tell their kids they can’t have a smartphone. And I get that the dumbphone market is kinda limited, and that some parents just don’t care what their kids are exposed to. But trying to fix this problem by changing the internet is never going to work. The only way to fix the problem is to have a spine and make appropriate changes IRL - like banning smartphones for underaged kids in school, or show your full distopian side and prosecute parents who let their kids use social media.


  • Yeah, check lists in Notes could really use some improvement for sure. Honestly, just now looking through the Github for the Android Nextcloud Notes app it looks like there’s a good deal of technical debt that has been stacking up over time from trying to bring more modern features to what started as a minimal text-only notes app.

    There is a way to enable “grid view” in the app settings for the more post-it view that shows the first part of the contents, but doesn’t seem to show on notes with markdown formatting, so anything with a list doesn’t show a preview.








  • Relatively few musicians are counting dollar bills. Publishers are, Spotify and the tech-bros who have inserted themselves between musicians and their fans are. But the musicians writing protest music are busking on TikTok in the evenings after working day jobs to afford rent. I hate to recommend a sinking ship, but unironically, if you are looking for music about the current moment, it’s on TikTok. Some of it makes it’s way to other platforms, but the average person won’t find it because music discovery on the mainstream music platforms is curated by corporations who are out to make money for the big record labels.


  • Couldn’t find the exact one I ordered a few months ago, but this type of pressure sensor aliexpress link is apparently a common bed occupancy sensor type used when building medical beds for hospitals and care homes so staff can be alerted when a patient gets out of bed. I’m not sure the specific model I linked is quite right specs-wise, but the idea is that it goes on a slat or other surface between the matress and the frame that doesn’t necessarily get the full weight of the occupant, but still gets enough to measure on the sensor.