I think it’s not humiliating, but if you know someone, you should have some idea what they like/their interests are. Getting a small gift that fits them shows that you spent at least a small amount of time and thoughtfulness picking out or making the gift. If you don’t know the person, sure, cash/gift card.

Although I think it’s becoming less common to have the space or ‘the time’ (but we could prob all spend 30 mins less each day doing nothing on our phones) so giving physical actual gifts are becoming less common, and also due to the economy the idea of ‘mandatory days of gift giving’ is a bit off-putting. People love getting personalized gifts from people who create things, but far less people today ‘have time’ to learn a hobby where they create things in physical space.

Less “Fuck you here is $10” and more “Here is $10 as agreed upon by the social contract unwritten by the masses who came before us, I didn’t have any clue what you might like or want and didn’t think to ask.”

Some people gladly prefer cash/card. I am one of those people. We will make that known well ahead of time.

2008

Time is a flat circle.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Every wild dog will chase and eat prey and their own poop, and attack any dog that challenges them or their pack.

Every wild cat will chase and catch their prey, and then play with it while keeping it alive for a while until it ultimately dies.

Humans are basically dogs or cats that have 1000’s of societal incentives not to chase and play with prey, drilled into most of us from the beginning, but everyone still has that innate ability that will come out under the right circumstances. If civilization ended today, who you think you are, and what you think you are not capable of today, ends today.

Opiates. Often and overly.

DO NOT MISS A DOSE!

you never had any dark thoughts? Never did anything bad?

Yes, you might not be doing this particular bad thing.

You: Yeah sure, but I never did this particular bad thing.

Welcome to the species, bud. We’re all a little mad here.

New features get released into the developer preview. It’s basically beta test windows. It’s what the tech sites watch to see what new features/etc have been added/removed/changed. Usually they end up making it into the release builds, but sometimes they end up not doing it, or the change doesn’t apply to certain regions.

He’s not being cloak and dagger. He’s an old guy (double spacer spotted) who works in the military or private sector under NDA and can’t talk about it.

Or he’s LARPing. But the double spaces make me believe him.

There are many theories

They’re saying don’t read the manual that tells you how things work, just copypasta sudo command lists from some random blog like a normal person.

I manage a large network and ads are blocked at the edge of the network.

You must MITM all traffic and do some magic with stripping/injecting JavaScript then? Because every time I’ve tried with pihole, its just threads and threads of people saying its not possible with DNS blocking because the ads are served from the video servers.

All the halogen/fluorescent/etc bulbs before LED were super hot if you didn’t let them cool down for a couple minutes.

But really, who under 40 ever waited for them to cool down? Nobody had time for that.

Too afraid to look.

referrer, meet referer.

probably the easiest way to spot someone that’s spent a decent amount of time messing with HTTP/1.x headers.

It wasn’t that, mass doxxing is still very easy, its just pay for play now. You know those random apps that (used to, mostly) ask for contact permissions? They’d send your entire address book to their servers, with the name and number of all your contacts. Now you pay per number to get a name from a phone number, or a number from a name.

Used to be that you paid to be unlisted and everyone was listed by default. This was necessary in the era of landline phones. If you really needed to get a hold of someone, it wasn’t uncommon to need to go through a call chain until you got through to them. Now that everyone has a phone in their pocket with their own number (not same number for each family) that’s no longer the norm.

ETA: The 4 billion people in the 80s was still growth. Infrastructure has been scaled up, and it will take a ton of work to scale down - work which we will be hard-pressed to find enough skilled laborers for. Also overpopulation isn’t the main driver behind climate change, overconsumption is. We are a society of consumers, we buy convenience, and evil corporations force planned obsolescence on us to make us buy more. Many of us will scoff at high-priced long-lasting items yet still buy a new iPhone every 3 years.

If you reduce the population as fast as its decreasing now, lower than replacement rates, all modern conveniences including infrastructure and faith in the economy are going to take a hit. That includes the internet and hospitals and all internet-dependant companies. Public utilities like trash, shipping - we already saw how many products were discontinued and companies went out if business because of the inability to get parts, over a 6 month (at first) brief shortage of truck drivers, which is still recovering 4 years later. If you think the economy is bad now, wait until faith in the market completely collapses and we have a full-on crash, not just a recession. It’s been showing signs for years now, and things aren’t improving.

Throw in experienced power plant operators, people that install and maintain pipes and lines, water treatment plants, public transit, the people that make parts for the machines that installs the infrastructure, the vehicles, etc. Everything you can think of will be affected, along with many things most people never think about.

Immigration is a way to slow it down, but almost every country on Earth has falling birth rates at the moment. Immigrants coming from, say, Mexico and Canada to US will only delay the problem, and cause a larger problem for those allied countries we rely so much on.

You can find pros and cons, and it’s been a while since I did heavy research into the subject, but my takeaway was that once we reach a certain point, mass deaths will start to occur, especially in population centers. Rural communities won’t be affected as much provided they have plenty of weapons and systems for defense, livestock, agriculture and close community. Knowledge will need to be retained - on disease, birth complications, fixing nuts and bolts technology, etc. Authoritarian countries who decide to force birth (whether by force or accommodations - see USSR support and metals for mothers with greater than X number of children) will become a serious threat.

There are many variables and moving parts, but one thing is for certain: there will not be mass population decline without major hurt for everyone.

I agree that a Phoenix will rise from the ashes, but make no mistake, there will be many ashes, you and I and most of us posting here likely included.

But we are long overdue for a reset. Maybe this time we can just skip the internet infrastructure during rebuild, and develop near-peer networks instead.

She knew full well, she was just playing ignorant since she knew it would be printed. better to play dumb while you think of something to say than to give ammunition to your opponents

I also liked this bit:

[Reporter] But again, you think that’s unfair because of who your mom is. Because she suffers. Something about her suffering catalyzed in you the desire to end suffering in other people. Does that make sense?

No, that doesn’t make sense. Unfortunately, not all disease is genetic. There will still be disease and suffering. We are not that much of an optimistic fantasy.

Like she knows it’s partly optimistic fantasy that will eventually work if she just keeps it going, but let it slip. E. Holmes thought the same thing… just a little more time and we’ll have it.

I’m very glad I found the link to read the full article. She really does come off just like Elizabeth Holmes. When there isn’t a viable product to sell, you really have to sell yourself. There are plenty female tech CEOs that stay out of the media, just like the majority don’t know the names of most male tech CEOs, besides the few largest.

The way she reacted to the question of “your company is basically using exactly the same style of claimed technology as Theranos” as “Ugh. You’re a meanie. Women shouldn’t only be slaves!” is really quite telling.

As long as you either have many tens of millions, or you don’t care about electricity, water, food, and you’re extremely physically isolated and/or hidden very well and armed to the teeth, it shouldn’t affect you much.

For the rest of us it’s something to worry about. Infrastructure needs a lot of trained people to operate. Once the train gets going it doesn’t stop, and that means as time goes on it gets worse and worse until it reaches a point of stability some X years after collapse. And you won’t be able to freely and adaquetely hunt/pick your food if you’re anywhere near a city until point X, because everyone else will be doing the same. Also some idiots will be bathing in the only still good stream near you with whatever leftover chemicals they can find.

Your country can open the immigration floodgates and become a country without borders (i.e. become whatever country is currently your neighbor) but that comes with similar problems listed above.

So as you can see, it’s not an issue for a small privileged few. For the rest of us, its a big fucking deal. I would encourage you to look into it.