It’s funny how much this varies from family to family. We never eat dinner before 9PM. Usually two meals per day, lunch at maybe 1PM and dinner between 9 and 10PM. We’re just doing desk-work though, so no extra calorie needs. If I’m doing physical stuff I’ll usually add a light breakfast.

huh, Windows still distributes a handful of .com programs. Neat.

I liked .com back in the day because it was easy to write assembly and dump it through the MSDOS ‘debug’ program to create an executable.

No, I agree that allegiance is a behavioral motivator, but I think it is distinct from loyalty and that people tend to conflate the concepts (similar to how people sometimes conflate or confuse infer/imply and borrow/lend).

Loyalty, a behavior, can be observed; allegiance, a commitment (maybe supported by emotion, maybe not), cannot.

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s thumbthing weird about that image.

It doesn’t say ‘open with your thumb’. Open it with a knife or some other technique, then insert your thumb & lift.

loyalty is earned

For me, it’s not even that. Loyalty is not owed, nor is it earned. It is nothing more than a description of behavior.

Think of it this way: I always do my grocery shopping at Target instead of Walmart, even if I see that something is slightly cheaper at Walmart I’ll still most likely go to Target for it. Some might see that and say, “Look, he has loyalty to Target”, assuming that I shop at Target because I am loyal to that brand. But that’s backwards. Really it is that I can be described as ‘loyal’ because I consistently go to that brand. ‘Loyalty’ is a description of the behavior, not the cause of the behavior.

it can be used against you

Only if you have bought into the coercive bullshit that ‘loyalty’ is itself a reason to do something. Employee or customer loyalty is nothing more than an observation that people consistently support the company. That loyal behavior is seen because those people consistently have reasons to support the company. If you observe that people are loyally supporting your company, that is because they have reasons to do so (for example, you might be paying them to show up and do shit. Or maybe they think the shit they are doing is important or fun).

People who want something from you for less than it is worth will try to convince you that loyalty is something you owe them or that they have earned from you because if you believe the lie that loyalty is a reason for action that makes it easier to get you to give them something for free.

IMO acting out of loyalty is never good. That is a backwards application of the concept intended to make you to act against your own interests.

Some people like to flip the idea of loyalty around from a description of behavior to a reason for behavior as a method of manipulating other people.

Like, if people see me consistently supporting my friends even when that is difficult they might think I’m ‘loyal’, but that’s backwards. I’m not supporting them because I am loyal, I support them because I like them and want them to succeed (and hopefully they’ll support me too). If someone wants loyalty from me, that’s an immediate red flag that tells me they either don’t understand why I do things, or they don’t care and just want me to do whatever they want.

Your own hardware as a “service.”

TBH, if they could provide a high-quality piece of hardware that would just work for years on end and automatically reorder ink (at no additional charge, up to some reasonable limit) when it needed it for a low fixed price, maybe 50 or 60 bucks a year, I might be interested. If they added large-format print-on-demand service with quick delivery (same day in cities, 1 or 2 day elsewhere) I’d probably pay a bit more. That way I could print regular documents up to, say 11x17, at home, and have big stuff like poster-sized delivered quickly and seamlessly with the same printing system.

I just want to be able to print stuff without futzing around with a persnickety machine, and needing to replace the infernal thing every couple of years.

the fact that I didn’t come in 2 hours early and nap at my desk meant I was lazy.

I’m curious, if you were in the office but obviously doing not-work activities like playing video games or table-top games with coworkers instead of napping would that be seen negatively?

perfect mechanical shuffle

What’s perfect in this context? It’s maybe a little counterintuitive because I’d think a perfect mechanical shuffle would be perfectly deterministic (assuming no mechanical failure of the device) so that it would be repeatable. Like, you would give it a seed number (about 67 digits evidently) and the mechanism would perform a series of interleaves completely determined by the seed. Then if you wanted a random order you would give the machine a true random seed (from your wall of lava lamps or whatever) and you’d get a deck with an order that is very likely to never have been seen before. And if you wanted to play a game with that particular deck order again you’d just put the same seed into the machine.

a couple years ago I asked an ER doctor to just let me die

Did they let you die?

Plus he’s just fun to listen to!

all of humanity’s radio communications have traveled about 200 light years from Earth

Also interesting is that because the energy of those signals is spreading out as they move away from their point of origin they become less detectable as they travel. Most signals would fall below practical detection limits before making it halfway to the nearest star. At the extreme, the Arecibo Message, transmitted with a ridiculous ERP, will be detectable to reasonably sized receivers for tens of thousands of light years, assuming they are located along the path of the beam.

Tom Paris and the Cochrane have entered the chat

Does Singer explore how the limits of one’s knowledge about the impacts of their actions might play into the decisions?

Like, I could send $5 to some overseas charity, but I don’t have a good way to know how that money is being used. Conversely, I could use it locally myself to reduce suffering in a way I can verify.

It seems to me that morally I should prioritize actions I know will reduce suffering over actions that may reduce suffering but that I cannot verify. Verification is important because immoral actors exist, so I can’t just assume that moral actions that I delegate to other actors will be carried out. Since it’s easier to have good knowledge about local actions (in particular those I execute personally), this would tend to favor local actions.

Thanks for that. I’ve been kinda-sorta keeping an eye out for a good solution for this. My house has three main panels (it’s set up for subletting) so solutions like Sense won’t work well, plus I don’t want it to be dependent on a cloud service. I’ll check out this product.

I think of an ambitious person as being one who is strongly committed to achieving a very difficult goal with a high risk of failure, usually something that will require near-daily effort for at least a few years, possibly decades.

To me it’s the level of challenge that the goal presents to the person attempting it that matters, it doesn’t have to be something with global or historical significance.

Check out DIY Solar Power with Will Prowse on YouTube for lots of great info! He also has a web shop with many of the products he thinks are good quality.

A lot of those door-to-door guys are indeed scams. Or if not outright scams, just incompetent.

It’s hard to find good installers that aren’t completely booked for a year or more.

Depending on your needs and skill level, a decent-sized solar setup isn’t hard to DIY. You don’t necessarily need to start with a huge system, you can set up a smaller system to run an AC system or some load like that. Then if you want scale up as you learn more.

Also, solar doesn’t have to be photovoltaic, solar thermal is great for hot water.

I could maybe see users supporting it if the instance in question were open about their finances and were using the money for purposes the users involved approved of.

For example if the money were being used to pay infrastructure costs and for one or more Lemmy developers rather than to make server owners rich.

Personally, I will always block ads and never use a service that I can’t ad-block, but I will sometimes pay for services that put the money back into the product. So I might support a patron model.