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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 17th, 2023

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  • Signal no longer requires a phone number. You can now create an account. Not sure if that helps your outlook on it, but yeah. It was a fairly recent update that this was rolled out.

    Edit: being told we still do need numbers to register. I haven’t gotten a new phone since well before the change was made, so I haven’t actually created an account and gone through the process. It looks like I misinterpreted what was going on when I read the changelog.







  • Is linked to excess deaths? Technically it could be saving lives at a population scale. I doubt that’s the case, but it could be. I’ll read the article now and find out.

    Edit: it doesn’t seem to say anything regarding “normal” auto related deaths. They’re focusing on the bullshit designation of an unfinished product as “autopilot”,and a (small) subset of specific cases that are particularly aggregious, where there were 5-10 seconds of lead time into an incident. In these cases a person who was paying attention wouldn’t have been in the accident.

    Also some clarity edits.






  • Here is a wiki source (insert error bars here) discussion of his stance on his work being officially licensed. He thought that use of his work outside of a comic strip would cheapen the value of the strip itself. This was frusterating as a child (who wouldn’t want a fucking Hobbes plushy) but now later I can see that it was at the very least a very defensible choice. Compare how people feel about C&H vs something that was commercialized to death like Garfield. Anyway, hope it’s useful.




  • In the book “Highrisers”, which is about the Cabrini-Greens housing developement in Chicago, there’s a short section talking about how certain buildings were turned over to the tennents in a management capacity. It didn’t fix all of the problems, and it didn’t save Cabrini-Greens, but it did have some measure of success over beurocratic management by CHA, which was a joke. (FWIW I read this several years ago, so take it with a grain of salt)

    That model has stuck out in my mind since. Why not have a simple budget for each building and let the work of maintenance be managed by the people who live there, with resources from the appropriate housing authority. The US is so fucking paternalistic about poverty and the people living in it. We build huge beurocracies incapable of truly scaling that then result in obsene waste like shown above. With some management some of that could be put on tennents, with them keeping some of benefits as well.