Thomas (unchained)

@leokrukowski @ESYudkowsky Banger

@ESYudkowsky The sound is what cooks the potato

To understand the user interfaces on microwave ovens, you need to understand that microwave UI designers are aliens. As in, literal nonhuman aliens who infiltrated Earth, who believe that humans desperately want to hear piercingly loud beeps whenever they press a button. One junior engineer who hadn't been taken over and was still actually human, suggested placing a visible on-off switch for turning the sound off -- for example, in case your spouse or children were sleeping, and you didn't want to wake them up. That junior engineer was immediately laughed off the team by senior aliens who were very sure that humans wanted to hear loud screaming beeps every time they pressed buttons. And furthermore sure that, even if anyone didn't want their microwave emitting piercingly loud beeps at 4am, they would be perfectly happy to look up a complicated set of directions for how to turn the sound on or off, rather than needing a visible on-off switch. And even if any humans had trouble remembering that, they'd be much rarer than humans who couldn't figure out how to set the timer for popcorn without a clearly labeled "Popcorn" button, which does a different random thing in every brand of microwave oven. There's only so much real estate in a microwave control panel; it's much more important to have an inscrutable button that says "Potato", than a physical switch that turns the sound off (and which stays in the same position after power cycles, and which can be inspected to see if the sound is currently off or on). This is the same species of aliens that thinks humans want piercing blue lights to shine from any household appliance that might go in somebody's bedroom at night, like a humidifier. They are genuinely aghast at the thought that anyone might want an on-off switch for the helpful blue light on their humidifier. Everyone likes piercing blue LEDs in their bedroom! When they learned that some people were covering up the lights with black tape, they didn't understand how anybody could accidentally do such a horrible thing -- besides humans being generally stupid, of course. They put the next generation of humidifier night-lights underneath translucent plastic set into the power control -- to make sure nobody could cover up the helpful light with tape, without that also making it impossible to turn the humidifier on or off. Nobody knows why they insist on hollowing out and inhabiting human appliance designers in particular.

I’m calling it now, the new FAANG is going to be Facebook, Apple, Pornhub (FAP)

is it just me or are questions on quora like a big game of jeopardy with the clue 'no, because a carrier never travels without a carrier battle group'

flamingos in zoos have their wings clipped to prevent them from escaping their unclipped offspring never learn they can fly, so they don't life in a nutshell

@dthorson Clearly written before Pornhub twisted men’s ideas of female sexuality

Y'all remember that Rumi poem where a donkey fucks a woman to death?

@breaking2morrow the solution was there for the taking but we all missed it

@thommers Lol I tried Thomas

dry january but dry like in the weather app

next hour will be dry (not saying it won’t rain btw, just that it might not rain)

evidence for unidentified floating objects keeps mounting futurism.com/the-byte/mappi…

reach the ‘in popular culture’ section of a Wikipedia article realize it references the exact passage in the book that made me look up the article (which I completely forgot ofc) why aren’t all sidetracks like this?

@wolftivy @trading_indian @ESYudkowsky back through the return wire obv

@trading_indian @ESYudkowsky If it's 90% efficient, where does the other 10% go?

It has been years since I first noticed an electric space heater advertised as "high efficiency" and I'm still not over it.

@amirism_ What’s this song called I like it

noticed that me practicing on the couch looked cool in the window

@teortaxesTex @divyeshkrx @granawkins Intuitively the solar cells should provide enough surface area to radiate away the heat no? Like use the back of the panels or something? If they didn’t how could they absorb so much radiation energy in the first place?

@divyeshkrx @granawkins That's exactly the problem! Vacuum isn't cold, it's just empty. If you don't have heat supply, you radiate heat away, but if you do have heat supply, you very quickly run into the limit of your radiation capacity!

Just got Tom Meuller pilled - "The amount of power to run compute by 2045 will be like the base power of earth right now. The drain on resources is so high - you need to put that compute in space. Make the solar cells and do the compute in space and just beam the results down."

@relic_radiation this looks like such a cool course, I am deeply jealous here

Oo here’s an assignment for a data visualization class playing with designing & programming animations of - unusual clocks

going through old storage boxes in preparation for a move and, wow I’m enamored of the handwriting I took math notes in

@macrocephalopod @IronEconomist Hypothetically, if all companies in the index committed never to pay dividend (only buybacks) the index retains value, but it would make the intrinsic value of the bond zero and there is no arb. So no reason they would be pegged imo.

@IronEconomist There isn’t really a point, I’m just interested in seeing opinions. FWIW I think it would trade at the same level as the index (because of arb activity) or maybe a bit above, because ppl assign some value to the fact that it says “obligation of the US government” on the outside.

The S&P 500 is currently 4478. If the US government issued a perpetual bond with face value 4478, that guaranteed to match all dividends paid by the index, forever, it would trade

If there’s one thing the LK-99 saga indicates it’s that we can certainly come up with complex status economies to incentivize people in a post abundance era. Bragging rights is all you need.

@TylerAlterman archspire: youtube.com/watch?v=MlnGYc… which I found in this thread here: reddit.com/r/Metal/commen… there might be better bands out there but just wondering if this feels like it's in the right direction?

@TylerAlterman ok I think I know what you are looking for you want some kind of extreme metal (eg death/black) but the players need to be extremely technical, because as you up tempo and wall-of-sound-ness, it starts sounding like mud unless timing is extremely good quick search got me /

For some reason heavy metal puts me deeply at ease. Can anyone recommend metal to meditate to? I love, eg, Slipknot, but looking for: • Minimal vocals (ideally just instrumental or guttural screams) • Monotonous/low variation/no sections

@niplav_site Don’t know about flossing cuz I live on the toothpick side of the Atlantic, but if I stop for 3 months, the first session after will be a blood bath. Surely it’s going to be obv to your dentist if your gums start hemorrhaging as soon as they touch it with that picky instrument

Idea: I flip a coin to make the decision to floss/not floss for at least 3 months. Then at the next dental inspection, when the dentist asks whether I floss, I tell them my setup and ask them to predict. Should I bother?

I always heard it’s easy to marry a pretty girl when you’re rich. I was like that’s not true, all the pretty girls I meet, I don’t want to marry. But now I realize, I think marriage is an outdated concept