This is clickbait slop in my opinion. But, now that we are here.
I have found vinegar an excellent weed killing tool when someone put down weed barrier and rocks. You don’t care about the soil in that case.
Otherwise a torch works great if there is no plastic weed barrier to burn.
I am removing all of the weed barrier slowly on my property- it is snake oil no matter where it is used. Nature will slowly build soil on top of the barrier in a few years and it will slowly degrade from wear and heat. Max 3-5 years before it is just a big mess in the PNW.
The people who owned the house previous to us put plastic weed mat all over the place. Looked fine until it wasn't, and then it was a huge job to remove it. Still haven't got it all out 10 years on.
I'm not sure about their vinegar claim - I buy a horticultural vinegar and I haven't noticed any bad effects on the soil where I've used it. The main issue is just that you have to spray more often.
I’ve had the exact same experience with weed barrier - even the best and thickest. Weeds poke through or grow on top by the third year. In the midwest US.
The most interesting thing to me, personally, is the Glass Lewis ESG policy statement that defines what an independent board member is and then strives to have at least 2/3 of the Board meet that definition.
I think the statement from Bricks and Minifigs is quite incorrect based on the written letter demanding return of inventory and later evidence of buyer purchasing consigned property after demand letter was received: https://youtu.be/14ktgvoH4Mc?t=781
I recently learned of OrbStack and it feels like the only product that actually makes an effort to integrate VMs and Containers correctly and consistently into macOS.
Docker Desktop and Podman Desktop are both a treadmill made of Lego bricks.
Have you tried Apple's container CLI[0]? I'm still mostly using OrbStack, but container gives me some hope for the future that Apple cares about this experience.
The spreadsheet app looks like a really nice boiler plate. I was surprised to learn about this amazing library digging through the docs: https://github.com/handsontable/hyperformula
Yes, Hyperformula is amazing! it's actually the primary reason TinyCld is AGPL vs MIT, doing so was totally worth it in order to be compatible with it's GPL3 license.
HyperFormula was the key to unlocking the entire spreadsheet, the technical foundation of sparse rendering and multi-user interactions were easy enough with Yjs and and a few other libs, but I was completely stuck on how to support formulas beyond simple SUM and such until I found it.
My personal take is that the administration has had no problems taking over digital/physical infrastructure in undemocratic and authoritarian ways. And, the fact that this "design studio" is creating staging sites for some of the most sensitive government services like voter information and passports is ominous even when we don't know exactly what the contents are of their redesigns. If you take a straight reading of the executive order there are 1,000 other websites that they could start their work on that are far far worse to use than https://vote.gov and https://usa.gov/passport.
Fascinating to read about the laws created to prevent this. Laws that certainly didn't anticipate corralling tech in this way. You could probably assume ignorance of these laws was the root of the failure to comply, but then you would also have to assume Gebbia doesn't understand the tech. And, those two things, as the author of the article says, most certainly aren't both true at once.
I feel that "YouTube makes you an idiot" is a misdiagnosis. And one I hear frequently.
Books can make you an idiot too- I think of "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" or "Grit" or any number of pseudo-science best seller books. These books end up capturing the public imagination in big ways too- Grit caused some government policy in the US around when it was popular.
The difference, I suppose, is that YouTube works faster by having many different people presenting the same bad ideas that the algorithm has helped you to buy into.
On the other hand there are amazing and useful YouTube channels that I use all the time like Practical Engineering, Crafsman, Technology Connections, Park Tools, SciShow, Crash Course, and on and on.
>I feel that "YouTube makes you an idiot" is a misdiagnosis.
Signal/noise is much worse (arguably books are catching up thanks to LLMs)
People see emotional signals in youtube videos. They respond to vocal tone, facial expressions, these are known to circumvent critical thinking. Like if you examine crowds of science deniers the usual commonality is that they are having a parasocial relationship with a bunch of youtube creators who are nice to them and reinforce their beliefs. The actual content of the belief is irrelevant, if you are disagreeing with the belief, you are attacking their tribe. Not limited to science deniers either, you get this hacking of human tribal psychology even in stuff like people who watch computer game videos. They pick a few champions of their tribe and follow them without critical examination of the content. At least with a book, while this is still possible its much harder. Its also telling that a lot of cranks who published junk science have all migrated to youtube.
I dont think youtube makes you an idiot, so much as youtube content is designed to bypass your critical defenses and overwhelm you. It develops into a blind spot. People can be perfectly rational in most areas and then suddenly burp up some absolute nonsense they caught on youtube.
Oh and the best part, is when you point this out to someone they tend to go "Oh yeah that totally happens... except for my favourite youtube channel which does x and y and z and yes of course I buy all their products and donate to their charities"
The nice thing about books vs. YouTube is that it's much easier to critically interrogate books while you're reading them. That was the difference with my dad: he thought about what he read. He repeats what he listens to on YouTube.
I hate the proliferation of audiobooks too, by the way. It's the exact same problem.
To be fair, even reading 'good' books won't make you smart. I think the key is to be critical, which should be thought at a young age. Ikram Antaki dedicated most of her last years in teaching this in Mexico.
Anecdote: When I started studying economics I really agreed with a lot of what I read from economists like David Ricardo, Marx, Smith, etc. Then, I studied what other economist had to say and I could see how they disagreed with the former. This made me realize that I agreed with those people because their arguments 'made sense' to me, but that doesn't mean that what they said is completely true. This is something that has stayed with me, I always wonder how can something be wrong.
The Printing Press is good example, one of the first books was on "witch hunting", which panicked people, and lead to a lot of deaths. The first, 'conspiracy theory' to sweep over humans.
Humans are just highly susceptible to manipulation. YouTube is just taking it to next level. Like the difference in eating coca leaves, versus snorting coke.
There are a number of studies that show that Grit is either not a thing or there are better measures of success. It has been a long time since I have thought about it so I don't remember which papers in particular.
I think this is the same ethical questions of veganism and our use/abuse of biological systems. This is an excerpt from "The Pig that Wants to be Eaten" by Julian Baggini
> After forty years of vegetarianism, Max Berger was about to sit down to a feast of pork sausages, crispy bacon and pan-fried chicken breast. Max had always missed the taste of meat, but his principles were stronger than his culinary cravings. But now he was able to eat meat with a clear conscience.
> The sausages and bacon had come from a pig called Priscilla he had met the week before. The pig had been genetically engineered to be able to speak and, more importantly, to want to be eaten. Ending up on a human’s table was Priscilla’s lifetime ambition and she woke up on the day of her slaughter with a keen sense of anticipation. She had told all this to Max just before rushing off to the comfortable and humane slaughterhouse. Having heard her story, Max thought it would be disrespectful not to eat her.
> The chicken had come from a genetically modified bird which had been ‘decerebrated’. In other words, it lived the life of a vegetable, with no awareness of self, environment, pain or pleasure. Killing it was therefore no more barbarous than uprooting a carrot.
> Yet as the plate was placed before him, Max felt a twinge of nausea. Was this just a reflex reaction, caused by a lifetime of vegetarianism? Or was it the physical sign of a justifiable psychic distress? Collecting himself, he picked up his knife and fork . . .
> Source: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams (Pan Books, 1980)
What is the source line at the end representing there? I've read The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and while it definitely contains (and I see it as a major cultural anchor for) animals bred to desire being eaten and be able to say so, it doesn't contain that particular scene (at least in the version I read). Is that line Baggini noting that his scene was inspired by the Adams book?
This is the third time in the same week I observed an HHGG quote going whoosh in an age where reading books is long dead as the tech industry twitches to dying anytime soon from the moment Jeff sold godelescherbach online
Did Priscilla also want to be living in absolute misery every single day of her life? The way animals are treated while they are alive is my main objection to our farming practices and the reason why i don’t eat meat.
I believe you are missing the forest for the trees. It is bringing up the question of what defines self will. It is unrelated to veganism in all but text.
An easy example is dogs. We have bred dogs for centuries to love doing work for us. If they hated doing the work, it would be easy to call it cruel. If they loved it by nature, it would be easy to call it kind. But since we created them into a thing that loves the work we need them for, where do the ethics fall?
Should we prevent them from doing what brings them joy? Should we make use of this win-win situation? If it is the latter, we are quickly approaching the ability to morph every species into something that gets joy from doing our work.
Dogs we changed by accident. The next one will not be an accident. Is it still a beings free will if the game was rigged from the start?
This is why I also like cats. The only reason they don't eat me is that I am 10 times bigger than they are. Other than that, they still seem to be running Lion software on miniature hardware.
(I know your point wasn't about dogs either, it just reminded me of something).
I love Neil de Grasse Tyson's line in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey:
"This wolf has discovered what a branch of its ancestors figured out some 15.000 years ago... an excellent survival strategy: the domestication of humans."
There's also another animal/dog documentary that I've watched recently that puts a finer point on this realization. The secret to survival and evolution is cooperation. For instance, not all dogs evolved the same way in this documentary. Some were more nuturing, some were more problem solving. For the focus of the documentary the challenge was to match the dog with a human that had a need they could address.
I think somewhat egotistically humans underappreciate how we have also been goaded by our "pets" into our own evolutionary journey. Most of the subjects of that documentary would not be alive if it were not for those dogs.
It's much like how many plants have accidentally found that a great means of propagation is to produce a compound that is both a great chemical warfare agent against other plants and microbes and also tastes interesting to humans or makes them feel funny.
That just makes it even more interesting. Have we been selectively modified to think dogs are cute? If I showed a toy poodle to a caveman, would he also want to put it in a little bag with only its head poking out?
Two things. He's obviously an expert in astrophysics but his explanations are condescending and "well actually", like he is trying to convince you how smart he is. That's given him a reputation as a blowhard online.
One of his tweets that HN will love: "Obama authorized North Korea sanctions over cyber hacking. Solution there, it seems to me, is to create unhackable systems."
> "genius in one thing believes he's a genius in everything"
No disagreement here, and sadly I think this is an unfortunate part of human nature.
Other than that, I'd say the person who wrote that list has a beef with Tyson, there's a mix between honest mistakes and debatable things, a lot of nitpicking (with a dose of cherry-picking), and ultimately this doesn't prove that "most of [Tyson's] takes" are mistaken. I agree that some things he says are dumb (like the cybersecurity tweet you mentioned) but I wouldn't dwell too much on them. "Cosmos", in all of its incarnations, is amazing. Of course, I'm not arguing the script is his, but his delivery and screen presence are solid.
I see Tyson commented on that blog, and some of what he says makes sense (e.g. picking on his colloquial use of "exponential" seems a bit mean spirited, though he could have been more precise; some people misunderstand the spirit of his comments on scifi movies; etc). In general, his replies in that blog to what at some points amounted to personal attacks left me the impression that Tyson knows how to gracefully and politely handle flamebait.
I did not notice he commented on the blog so thanks for pointing it out.
His response was impressive I agree, he has matured. You can see that from his initial response to the Bush quote (claiming his memory is infallible, and then condescendingly talking about "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" when the burden of proof is on HIM) vs. his comment where he said he'd made "inexcusable errors"
Full disclosure I'm not American so my main exposure to this guy is his tweets and occasional Reddit threads about how much they hate him.
I'm also not American (well, I am South American), and I wouldn't count Reddit threats about how much people hate someone else as evidence of anything (other than Reddit being Reddit) :)
Some of the comments in that blog, pushing back against the blog post, say more or less what I think about this.
> my main exposure to this guy is his tweets
In that case, I wholeheartedly recommend the sequels to Sagan's "Cosmos", "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" and "Cosmos: Possible Worlds". I think they have the potential to make you like Tyson!
Depends on the dog tbh. Keshonds are bred to yell at anyone getting on your barge. A lot of humans would probably like that job if it paid enough. Just chilling out and yelling at anyone you dont recognise.
We can easily blast pure pleasure every second of every day of her life with direct brain stimulation. She would be so deliriously happy our lives will be inhumane by comparison.
Just thing about, whats better, being treated the way some of the animals treated or being locked up in a server room all your life, seeing only doom dungeons and run to not get killed ingame? I would be happy to be the animal when I need to choose between Priscilla and the brain tissue in a biological computer.
Organic farming, at least over here, has also wellbeing criteria besides just controlling the food. For example a lot more space per animal, ability to go out and so on. Organic meat is a bit more expensive, but not hugely. So it shows it can be done.
At the end of the day vegans play the same game as meat eaters where some line is drawn. For meat eaters it is with livestock meats and for pescatarians that is no go, but fish are alright. And for vegans that is all off limits. Except of course the life we deem base enough to not care it is being eaten alive. Slaughter all the lettuce you want. There are no lettuce advocates.
All this to say the moral arguments are sort of silly and illogical. Unfortunately for us all, we exist where we do in the food chain, having to consume life to live, unable to secure our resources from the sun and inorganic resources which would be more morally righteous by all measures. Things could be better but they also could be worse. At least much of our prey receives veterinary care and is killed via airgun vs having to rough it and be eaten alive.
Vegans base their line on a very easily defensible ability on behalf of the victim - sentience.
If there’s no sentience, there’s nobody within to experience the pain and fear, and there is no victim.
That said, even if you granted that every blade of grass and kernel of corn was fully as sentient as a human being, that would only strengthen the argument for veganism many times over as animals act as inefficient intermediaries for those plant calories, burning most of them and leaving only a small fraction in their meat. You’d kill far fewer plants by eating the plants directly.
Finally, to your other point, many humans die horrible deaths - whether in global poverty, war or of various types of disease, cancer and dementia in the wealthier countries. That of course does not justify serial killer cannibals who put a bullet in the back of their victims’ heads on the basis that they’re giving them a “humane” end and likely saving them a large amount of future suffering.
> That said, even if you granted that every blade of grass and kernel of corn was fully as sentient as a human being, that would only strengthen the argument for veganism many times over as animals act as inefficient intermediaries for those plant calories, burning most of them and leaving only a small fraction in their meat. You’d kill far fewer plants by eating the plants directly.
An insensate plant is morally equivalent to a rock. Neither is conscious, neither has anybody home.
It’s not a value judgement, it’s establishing the basis for what constitutes an “other”.
There is no “other” within unconscious entities.
Regardless, once again, even if you felt the grass was objectively as conscious or “valuable” (what does value even mean in this context?) as much as your children or your dog (and of course you don't, if we’re being honest, this entire line of reasoning is not in good faith) - then again:
> That said, even if you granted that every blade of grass and kernel of corn was fully as sentient as a human being, that would only strengthen the argument for veganism many times over as animals act as inefficient intermediaries for those plant calories, burning most of them and leaving only a small fraction in their meat. You’d kill far fewer plants by eating the plants directly.
It is a value judgement. It is life. It is not a rock. It merely lacks sentience, as far as we are aware at least. May I ask what you think of a human in a coma? Are they also no different than a rock to you?
Is observing that a certain car lacks wheels a value judgement?
Something being alive has no more to do with it being sentient than it does with it having the capacity of sight.
You need an organism to actually develop all the components necessary to capture the photons, turn them into a signal, and transmit that signal to something like a brain that can process that into a vision. All living things, single celled organisms, do not just have the capacity of sight granted by virtue of being living.
Even in humans, which have all that machinery for sight, a slight disruption (trauma to the eye, retinal detachment, genetic disorders) can completely eliminate their ability to see.
It's the same for any number of capabilities, including consciousness. We know humans have the capacity for consciousness, and yet extremely subtle disruptions (a tiny amount of propofol, trauma to the brain, sleep itself) is enough to turn off consciousness, despite all that machinery still being in place and it being quite difficult from the outside to see anything awry.
That said, again and again, even if you want to pretend that every blade of grass, every life form down to the single celled, (and even every rock!) is as sentient as a human being, you will kill fewer plants, fewer microbial beings, clear less land (destroying fewer rocks, displacing and killing fewer people, animals, microbes etc.) by eating as low on the food chain as is feasible, and eliminating the inefficiencies of jumping up the trophic levels, which requires greater and greater inputs and destruction all the way up the chain to produce a given number of calories at the top.
A human is capable of sentience, a plant is not, nor is a rock. There's a plethora of evidence of humans coming out of comas and regaining sentience, and even of them dreaming/maintaining bits of awareness while from the outside appearing to be in a coma.
That said, there are also cases of clear brain death, in which case the human themselves is no longer capable of sentience, and so then their family unplugging them is not guilty of murder.
I value my own life (defined fundamentally by my ability to experience said life) and there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that the majority of other sentient beings do as well, humans (in temporary comas or not) and animals included, which is why I do not try to justify them being mass murdered for my personal hedonistic pleasure and try to work backwards from that end desire to find a way to justify the unjustifiable.
A value judgement would be saying that some sentient beings are more valuable than others. A statement of fact is that these living beings are capable of sentience, sight, hearing, flight, sexual reproduction, asexual reproduction, growing fur, breathing water, etc etc. and these other ones are not.
> Things could be better but they also could be worse
> the moral arguments are sort of silly and illogical
You can use these to justify literally anything
> Slaughter all the lettuce you want
Yeah because we don't have compelling evidence that lettuce experiences anything comparable to conscious suffering, and the only alternative to not eating plants is dying
Yet, we don’t, is the key qualifier. The idea that babies feel pain is only somewhat recently accepted for example. What happens in a future if we determine plants also have pain signals? Would you feel some way, or would you chew that lettuce with the indifference a carnivore has towards its prey?
> The idea that babies feel pain is only somewhat recently accepted
This is crazy to me, but I still believe it's very unlikely plants experience conscious suffering
> Would you feel some way, or [...] chew [...] with the indifference
I'd probably be upset, accept that I needed to eat plants or starve, try to minimize the pain I did cause, and then grow numb to the knowledge over time because I couldn't practically do anything about it
I think you can pose many hypothetical scenarios where I'd be unsure what to do or do the selfish thing, but to me the important thing is that the world we do exist in has lots of "bang for your buck" choices like: trading getting to taste meat for animals not having to go through factory farms
It wouldn't continue in any real form. Maybe cholesterol conscious and devout buddhists will still try to adhere, but beyond that I don't see what the point would be.
It would be like how Ozempic lead to a mysterious quieting of Body Positivity/Health at Every Size advocates. They were a vocal minority, there was much "debate" and cri de couer from many sides and now its all evaporated without a farewell or explicit winding down.
There is already massive industry lobbying against lab grown meat, resulting in bans in states like Florida[0] accompanied with propaganda about "processed" vs "natural" food.
Were lab grown meat to be available today at a cost lower than regular meat, it is apparent that there would still be huge amounts of animal ag dollars spent on lobbying against and demonizing these things, and millions of people who would fall for the propaganda.
You can compare this to renewables now, even though they may be far cheaper per kwH, and the Trump admin's push to halt all renewable projects and do everything they can to prop up the viability of fossil fuels.
This means the vegan movement would need to continue to exist as does the environmental movement.
Your mental hoops being on full display doesn't make them true. Nothing new or profound in these arguments and analogies, and stating them with this pretend wise tone just sounds childish.
To your last point, I still think slaughtering with a <sharp> knife is more humane. You slit the animals throat, it's traumatizing, it's painful, but you've started the "bleed-out timer." The bodily processes know that's NOT GOOD, and plan accordingly. If it's anything like humans, perhaps the animal's body will dump large amounts of feel good chemicals near the end.
Juxtapose that against the airgun, a sudden impulse to the central processing unit of the animal. Chemicals and neuron activity get disrupted immediately, the animal may be comatose but not necessarily dead for some amount of time as the signal processing is just obliterated. Chaotic disruption of the system seems more unpleasant/inhumane than the more outwardly barbaric but ostensibly better slicing of the throat.
I was almost too sure I had never heard of Julian Baggini and I almost celebrated the first in history when neither the Onion nor the Simpsons nor Idiocracy predicted the future by assumed funniness of assumed impossibility of unfathomable human stupidity AND that it still was kinda funny instead of depressing discovery of frontier Authentic Idiocy (TM) I believe this is one of many scenes in HHGG where I super shy in public tried to suppress convolutions of my soul and contortions of face and bone only to fail audibly and visibly
as an unintentional and perhaps unethical vegetarian of many years who hasn't read this book: eating dead things gives me the creeps because it makes me consider my own death and consumption which is unappetizing
As a fellow ‘unethical’ vegetarian, eating dead animals just seems yucky. I imagine it’s a similar feeling to what most non-vegetarians feel when contemplating eating dog or cat meat.
Give it time, I find the initial “ew you made me think a thought I don’t like” downvotes tend to be counteracted by the long tail of “huh actually that makes sense” upvotes. :)
I have found vinegar an excellent weed killing tool when someone put down weed barrier and rocks. You don’t care about the soil in that case.
Otherwise a torch works great if there is no plastic weed barrier to burn.
I am removing all of the weed barrier slowly on my property- it is snake oil no matter where it is used. Nature will slowly build soil on top of the barrier in a few years and it will slowly degrade from wear and heat. Max 3-5 years before it is just a big mess in the PNW.
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