The worst is when you can smell people walking past you when you’re outside… before they pass you.

This is why I like taste tests.

They routinely prove that even experts can’t distinguish between $20 wine and $200 wine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice-supportive_bias ?

I think I’ve had it happen once over something like a decade of using them. From what I remember it was because I was running something in the terminal that ignored the signals it was sent, so the laptop didn’t properly go to sleep. Of course, the program ended up failing because a lot of the things it depended on did suspend themselves and that caused major breakage.

Luckily I noticed a whining sound (fans at maximum speed) from my backpack before anything too bad happened.

Yeah, I mean, that’s the only part of farming that actually seems interesting to me. It’s not that it makes me want to do it, but I’m curious about tractors using GPS to sow seeds then plow a field. But, John Deere tractors seem even more enshittified than most tech right now.

But, that also emphasizes your other point. To make farming less labour intensive and require less expertise, you can now buy really expensive farming equipment with the latest tech that makes certain aspects of farming easier. But, that equipment is extremely expensive.

Farm work used to be done by slaves. In the US, once slaves were freed, many continued to be farmers because that’s all they knew how to do, and it wasn’t a job that anybody else wanted to do. Now farming has diverged in 2 directions, on one end there’s the (white) farm owner, or upper tier farm worker who owns million-dollar pieces of equipment with all kinds of modern tech. On the other end there are farm workers, who are often illegal immigrants, or at least immigrants on very restricted visas who work the toughest jobs for almost no money. And, both jobs suck.

The suck of the farm worker’s job is obvious. Back breaking labour in terrible weather for almost no pay. It’s a job that nobody with any options would choose to do.

The farm owner’s job sucks too. You’re at the mercy of the weather, and that weather is only getting more unpredictable as the climate changes. You have to invest in extremely expensive equipment just to have a chance, so you might have millions of dollars in assets (harvesters, livestock, land) but your average cashflow is only in the low 6 figures, and in bad years it can be negative. You don’t own your own seeds, you “own” your tractor, but need John Deere’s approval for your own repairs, and you’re kind-of tied to the land.

Not in the slightest.

But, where I used to super interested in cutting-edge tech stuff, I’m now extremely jaded. I used to actively seek out news on new tech companies / projects because it genuinely felt like there were a lot of problems out there to be solved, and tech was solving those problems. These days it seems like tech often is the problem, and it’s never going to be solved because they have the DMCA, Section 230, trillions of dollars, and the entire apparatus of the state ensuring that their shitty tech keeps getting in your way.

The thing is, I still like tech. I can’t imagine living in a world without it. Whenever I see these memes about people wanting to become farmers it amazes me, because farming sucks. I don’t like the great outdoors, the indoors is far greater. I can appreciate non-digital tech. An internal combustion engine is a really cool gadget, for example. And, I’m happy to do my own bike maintenance. But, real world things are greasy, loud, and inelegant. It amazes me when people claim to like record players instead of good quality digital media. It’s amazing how record players work, but they’re still terrible, outdated things that objectively produce a less accurate sound than a good digital file. I still prefer technology, preferably digital technology. I just don’t like the stuff that makes up 95% of the Internet these days.

It sounds like you really feel the same way, because:

get a dumb phone

That’s tech.

a CD player

Also tech.

check out books, movies, music, and games

I’m pretty sure any movies and music you check out from the library in 2025 will be digital, that’s tech.

Have you found ways to reconnect with technology?

If you don’t like it, don’t reconnect. Become a farmer or a fisherman or whatever makes you happy. But, I’m not going to join you. I may be veering a lot more towards DIY tech, and offline things than I used to. But, to get me to abandon technology you’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Reddit existed long before Digg died, and was so much better before the Digg refugees streamed in.

Apple laptops are typically extremely good when it comes to sleep and suspend.

A major advantage of having a very small range of hardware you have to support is that it’s pretty easy to test all possible combinations and make sure they work well together. As far as I’m concerned, Apple has been, and probably always will be the undisputed champion of doing this right.

I’ll say what I just said on a similar thread: if the internet goes down tomorrow, mesh will mean very little compared to ham radio.

For what purpose? Hanging out with friends? Watching porn? Getting vital information around?

AFAIK, ham is really mostly geared towards synchronous voice communication, whereas most of the Internet is asynchronous communication in a variety of forms: text, voice, video, etc. In an emergency, synchronous voice is pretty important. But, for day-to-day life, asynchronous dominates most people’s usage of things.

So, if the Internet goes down tomorrow and you need to know why, what happened, etc. your best bet is probably not ham radio but normal TV and radio broadcasts, not rumours being spread by other random people using ham radio. If you live in a country where a complete overnight shut down of the internet, and complete stopping of all news broadcasts is possible, then ham might be useful for the first few days / hours to figure out what’s going on. But, in the longer term, ham isn’t really a replacement for the Internet. For that you’d want asynchronous sharing of various kinds of data, which is more a mesh network, not ham radio.

Yeah, good description. Fighting Entropy is really the trick that makes ONI great. I just love how at the beginning heat isn’t even on your radar as something to worry about. You might not even know that the heat overlay exists. But, by the mid-game if you don’t start handling heat suddenly everything starts breaking.

Also, the size is another big difference. Factorio has that endless map where you just keep expanding your conveyor belts. The further out you go, the more you have to worry about aliens, but after a while that isn’t much of an issue. Meanwhile in ONI as you start making bigger and bigger colonies, it starts to feel cramped.

k

Yeah, a minor deviation from a working contraption can mean it fails completely. They’re often really unforgiving. But, they’re so satisfying when they work.

Wait, so someone is criticizing Factorio because someone who worked on Factorio linked to an article written by someone who has, at some point in the past, made awful statements?

Man, that’s some bullshit.

ONI has amazing “process engineering” where you take some substance, use a machine to transform it into another, feed it into a third, etc.

But, what’s extra great about it is that it also includes a pretty basic, but still fully functional simulation of chemistry and physics. So, you can feed oil to the oil refinery to get petroleum, but it’s only 50% efficient. If you want a more efficient process you can boil the petroleum instead by dropping oil onto something hot. But doing that generates petroleum that’s at hundreds of degrees so you need to cool it down. So, instead of just doing that, you can pre-heat the oil coming into the boiler using the petroleum that the boiler produces, creating a counter-flow heat exchanger that cools the petroleum while pre-heating the oil.

My mom has clothes made for her too, often made in Eastern Europe. It’s not exactly cheap, but neither were the off the shelf things she would otherwise be buying.

Yeah, I really don’t get the sizing thing. I’ve heard it’s because if the manufacturer makes a bigger size but labels it a smaller size, some women will enthusiastically buy it because they’re happy to be wearing a smaller (labelled) size. But, that sounds like BS to me.

I think maybe a difference is that men tend to rarely wear tight clothing, so even if the arms are a bit too long, or the chest is a bit too tight a medium still works. But, for women, because it’s designed to have a body-hugging style, if it’s too tight anywhere it’s too small. Like, I can’t imagine any men’s shirt that would result in a muffin top. For a guy, that might mean you’re off by two sizes, not just one.

Government officials are really scared of changing the status quo. They’re really afraid that if they get rid of anti-circumvention laws, that they’ll become a pariah state. In the past that probably would have been true. The US would have thrown its weight around, and Europe would have fallen in line and boycotted whoever it was. Many countries also have a lot of Hollywood productions made there. The major Hollywood studios care about anti-circumvention because they think it guarantees their profits. So, if these countries scaled back anti-circumvention, Hollywood would probably throw a fit and cut them off too. Even if the economic impact of getting rid of anti-circumvention were a huge positive, Hollywood has a big cultural impact worldwide.

I’d like to see it happen, but I think the most likely scenario is that a country that already doesn’t fully respect US copyright laws, like Switzerland or Singapore, might take an additional step and stop respecting anti-circumvention.

Was “Motherfucker” the world you forgot? If so, where does it go in that post?

These days, can you find them online? I can imagine that a local mall might not have much selection, but the Internets are huge.

It’s not that they won’t buy them, it’s just that there’s typically a list of priorities including fashion, availability, price, durability, etc., and pockets is low on that list of concerns. If something is cheap, durable, looks good, can be bought easily nearby or online, and has pockets, it’s going to sell well. The problem is that most designers seem to feel that pockets ruin fashion, so you rarely get things that are both fashionable and have useful pockets. Even when there are knock-offs of clothes where fashion isn’t the main point, they tend to keep small / no pockets just because whatever they’re copying had small / no pockets.