Let me know when they make the shift from “wanting themselves not to be feeling the pain” to “wanting different policies that protect everyone,” I guess.

Same. Uggh. It was a bit like a fever, but so much worse. I was absolutely freezing and couldn’t stop shaking and sweating, but I also couldn’t really manage to distract myself with anything because my brain didn’t work, so I just had to lay there and wait. There was also this overwhelming, crushing ringing sound and a feeling like old analog TV static, along with a splitting headache. Thankfully my family were around, of whom I was dimly aware, so I could tell that time was probably passing, and I could kind of gauge that I probably wasn’t getting worse, or they’d take me to a hospital or something. That’s about the limit of what I was aware of, though. It just felt like it went on a really long time. I suspect in reality it didn’t last more than a few hours. I should ask; I’m sure one of them has a clearer memory of that aspect than I do.

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I ran into this just yesterday. My dad’s Windows 10 computer was reporting our printer as offline, even though it wasn’t; it would queue print jobs, but never actually send them. It did this even though it had been printing normally less than half an hour beforehand. It’s connected over Wi-Fi.

And I remembered having solved this problem once before, ages ago (I think like twelve years ago?), by digging through the old Microsoft forums and Google search results, and I had a dim recollection of what sort of thing the solution had been, but not the details. So I figured that, most likely, the fix had gotten undone, probably when I switched him to IoT LTSC edition so he could keep getting security updates. (Both my parents were basically unwilling to switch to 11.)

But when I pulled up search on a browser to see if I could reconstruct the solution I’d found all those years ago, instead I got all this SEO and AI slop. Page after page that claimed to have relevant information, and didn’t. After about fifteen minutes I decided I was better off trying to dig through the settings myself and see if I could reconstruct it from my own memory, kind of like driving through an old neighborhood and seeing if I recognize any landmarks.

I did manage to fix it that way. There’s some kind of dumb aspect to the way Windows gauges whether a printer is online that doesn’t work if it’s connected over wifi. The workaround is to go into the properties for the printer, tell it to change the settings (which brings up a very similar-looking but not actually the same panel), go to the “ports” tab, scroll down to the TCP/IP port with the address of the printer, choose “configure port” which brings up yet another dialog, and at the bottom of that check the box marked “SNMP enabled.” SNMP is “Simple Network Management Protocol,” and lets Windows check the status of the printer in a more sane manner. After doing this the printer reports itself as online and prints normally.

But yeah, I had to rely on my rotting meat storage because our global worldwide network of supercomputers now only serves up blather designed to look like it might hold solutions but not actually contain any of them, because it’s more profitable to delude you into reading endless ad-filled pages of slop than to solve your problem and let you leave.

And then there’s the federal minimum wage for tipped workers, which is a paltry $2.13/hr. If the tips don’t bring that up to at least match the normal minimum (the $7.25/hr figure) then employers are supposed to pay them more to make up the difference, but they basically never do. Tip theft is also super common, including with some of the online ordering apps.

Honestly the idea that parasites all share a single, simple method of reproduction is the silliest thing in this comic. There’s a cordyceps fungus that not only has a stage in an ant, it then swells and reddens the abdomen of the ant, takes over the behavior of the ant and forces it to climb to the top of a stalk of grass, and has it wave in the air until a bird mistakes it for a berry and swoops down and eats it. At this point it has a whole other phase of its life cycle inside the bird until it finally releases its spores in the bird’s droppings.

(I probably have a few of the details here not quite right, as it’s not my field of expertise, but it’s along these lines, including the behavior modification and the two separate host species.)

There are so many kinds of parasites, and they do so many crazy things.

I’m a little thrown by “20% efficient” when paired with “allows 94% of solar energy to pass through.” Are they saying it captures 20% of 6%, i.e., 1.2% of the incident solar energy? Or are they saying 20% is captured and 94% passes through for a total energy recovery of 114%? (This latter is not physically possible, but that doesn’t mean it’s not what they’re saying.)

Basically I would rather they listed the power output of the solar system in Watts.

I dunno. I agree with this to some extent for sure–I don’t print a lot of the meme models that are everywhere on 3d printing forums. But there are toys that would not exist without 3d printing that I think are pretty great.

I designed a kaleidoscope that reflects things not to tile a plane, but instead to tile the surface of a disdyakis triacontahedron: https://imgur.com/gallery/i-made-kaleidoscope-P4atHey I had to cut the mirrors from acrylic by hand, but the templates for them and the shell that holds them in place are all 3d printed. And that thing is a pretty great toy.

This thing: https://imgur.com/gallery/make-of-cyclidial-iris-by-vergo-henry-segerman-XHN4MC0

is a math sculpture that I didn’t design, just printed, but it’s completely beautiful, and it’s had real staying power as both a toy and a decoration. It sits out on our coffee table all the time, but my niece plays with it every time she’s over here.

And this puzzle box I designed: https://imgur.com/gallery/i-made-puzzle-box-nieces-birthday-U1q408R

was a big hit with her too. I’m not sure if she’ll continue to play with it long-term, but based on my own tendencies as a kid, I think she might end up investigating the mechanisms involved for some time to come.

Things that you could buy at the store you’re generally better off buying at the store. But there are things it’s not economical to mass produce, and it never used to be possible to design and make your own toys. Both ideosyncratic toys and bespoke toys are pretty great uses of 3d printing in my opinion.

“If only I’d programmed the robot to be more careful what I wished for. Robot, experience this tragic irony for me!”

Really! I find that fascinating.

When I try to think of a tune (often because I haven’t recalled the lyrics yet and am still trying to identify the song), I am just listening to the song in my head, trying to think of the notes and instrumentation of the next bit. I hear it, like a recording.

When I try to throw something–I said basketball because I figured it would be more relatable, but the sport I actually played was Ultimate (Frisbee, but that’s a trademark, so the sport is just Ultimate)–I’m picturing the path of the disc, how it will arc on the wind, the precise angle, how to roll it off my fingers, how long it will be in the air and how far to lead the runner. It’s a struggle to even come up with words for it now. It all feels visceral, the same as thinking how to reach my hand out to touch a glass on a table.

It’s hard for me to imagine using words for those kinds of things because words are so vague and general. Words deal with categories we impose on the world, rather than the world as it is. Like, I learned to juggle as a teenager; I could never do that if I had to use words to think about every way to maneuver my arms and how the balls would land and so forth. I just have to reach where the ball is going to be, and throw where my hand is going to be. When I first learned Mills’ Mess, I got it mixed up a bit (because I was learning from a VHS tape), and I had an extra throw in there. It took me quite a while to figure out how I mixed it up, and how to do it without that extra throw. But it was a spatial puzzle. I wouldn’t even know how to convey the issue in detail without just doing it.

I dunno. I shouldn’t be surprised that people’s inner lives are very different, but this particular point confounds me a bit.

When you’re thinking about how to throw a basketball to get it through a hoop, do you use words for that?

When you are thinking of the tune to a particular song, is that in words?

I think a lot of people overestimate the role of words in thinking. There’s a lot of non-verbal thought.

I dunno. I think a lot of regular people felt really strongly that it was critical that the Republicans not gain control of everything in this last election, and given how things are going at the moment, it’s really hard to argue that was wrong. Which is not to say that the folks criticizing the Democrats were wrong either! The Democrats’ feckless centrism and undermining of leftist candidates has been galling for years. The difficult truth is that the system has been so broken that really good people following genuine motivations were arguing on both sides of the leftist/Democrat divide. I was trying to cling to the hope that if we jollied the current system along, we could get reforms like ranked choice voting and the national vote interstate compact in place that would help shift the underlying incentives in the system away from the two-party system, but it’s probably really been irreparable for years now.

Of course bullying people was never going to be an effective tactic, and I never endorsed that. But that’s just regular tribalism and anger at the nonconformist. That’s just regular dumb human stuff.

I mostly agree with this–I commented not long ago in another thread that the political situation in the US has convinced me not to seek any diagnosis right now. But I would say that there can be reasons that aren’t specific to medication in particular that you might want a diagnosis. Sometimes there are non-medication accommodations that you can get (e.g. at work) with a diagnosis that they might not be open to giving you without one. Sometimes this can be huge! I’ve had times where I was in two different different locations in the same office at different times, and in one, half my field of view was taken up by a throughway where people walked across the office, and in the other my view was against a wall and behind a little corner of wall, and I got so much more work done in the second spot. It was just tremendously less overstimulating. So the prospect of being able to get that kind of issue taken seriously is part of what tempted me about seeking diagnosis.

I think this might be more what they’re looking for.

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/random_number.png

GNU Terry Pratchett

Yes, to an extent they do different things, but that’s not what the person you were replying to was talking about. For several years there was this idea that “left-handed people are right-brain dominant, and right-handed people are left-brain dominant.” And along with that went this whole astrology-tinged thing about the right brain being the creative half and the left brain being the analytic half and whatnot. It’s pretty much nonsense.

It’s not just Fox News. Bezo’s Washington Post ran an editorial, written by “the editorial board,” about how Mamdani would be “bad for New York and bad for the Democratic Party,” claiming he would destroy public transit, reduce the number of grocery stores, drive away big businesses, depress low-skill employment, etc., etc., etc. Oh, and of course that this would discredit all the other young candidates across the country. The WaPo’s threat earlier this year to make their editorial page aggressively pro-capitalist and anti-public-good was apparently very much in earnest.

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Precisely that. https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/16/politics/dhs-vetting-immigrant-reality-tv-show

I tried this with my Switch, but it turns out the switch version of moonlight is super janky. It can’t wake the computer, and the controls don’t seem to map right by default, which basically means I have to remap controls every time I start a game (since I go back and forth between the PC and the handheld, and I need to switch them back when I’m at the PC). Plus it sometimes just stops accepting input for a while and makes me run down to the computer. It just has a lot more friction than I thought it would.

I’m doing all that because there’s this part of my brain that is convinced that I should get a Deck, even though my problem isn’t actually that I don’t have a handheld, it’s that I can’t motivate myself to play the games I already have. So, not actually gonna get a Deck unless the prices come down a lot. The used prices are mostly still over $300, though.