deathmtn

Robinson Meyer points out how Twitter makes it hard for the left to build solidarity. It's understandable, but not intuitive:

But by 2014, the Canadian academic Bonnie Stewart had noticed a change in how Twitter worked as a social space. Tweets that were written as chatty musings for one group of users were interpreted as print-like declamations by another. “The rot we’re seeing in Twitter is the rot of participatory media devolved into competitive spheres,” she said, “where the collective ‘we’ treats conversational contributions as fixed print-like identity claims.”

It's another aspect of the reality distortion that Twitter does that causes problems in so many other ways.

We went to the hospital today to do an almond challenge. That’s a test in which you eat almonds (in the form of butter), then doctors check in on you a few times an hour to see if you are still allergic to almonds. If you are, they treat you and stop the test.

The guy is no longer allergic to almonds! While it hasn’t been a big deal in the great scheme of things, it’s to have one less thing to watch out for.

Also, almonds are delicious. They are the rare snack that is tasty that also actually does something for your body. We got a bag today, and they are hitting the spot.

(I think they also require an insane amount of water to grow, so we’re probably not going to go too nuts (sic) with them.)

I live in an elf state and am glad for that.

10-4-4-4-4-8. I think it might be OK to only do pull-ups twice a week for the benefit of getting in a run.

Mozilla has laid off 70 people, TechCrunch reports. It's a significant move for an organization that employs around 1,000 people worldwide.

This is bad news for a healthy web, both in the sense of technological diversity and for user privacy.

My friend Alex was telling me about audio bars in Japan — these small spaces where you go to listen to recorded music. Some of them are clubs (where apparently owners can get sent to jail if patrons are caught dancing?!) but a lot of them are just places for sitting. Alex went to a classical one, for example.

Those seem like amazing spaces, but I’m most interested in how much attention is paid to music in this situations. Having a place (and a ritual?) raises the value of music that, in many cases, they could just get on their phones.

I implemented zooming in Field (which is what I renamed Workings to). For some reason, I thought it'd cause all sorts of problems, like conflicts with dragging, but it went pretty smoothly. It does occasionally lock up, and I should turn off the physics stuff when zooming is happening.

Demo video:

Zooming in Field from Jim on Vimeo.

(And yeah, I need to declutter that UI. Property sheets, begone!)

The full name is Personal Forces Field because it's a field where you personally define a bunch of your forces. I'm not super sure about that name, either, but it is a step up from Workings. I was also considering Forces Sources, which amuses me greatly, but is awkward to say.

10-4-4-4-4-4 today.

I'm kinda feeling the hills this morning.

John Naughton on the difference in people's opinions about monopolies between the 1900s and now:

The conversation left me musing about why (and how) Tarbell (and her fellow ‘muckrakers’) managed to get so much traction with the American public?

One reason was outrage at the way ordinary smallholders were driven out of business by Rockefeller & Co. (Remember, as David Runciman pointed out in the podcast, that in the early days drilling for oil was what small farmers did in Pennsylvalia.) You could drill for your own oil, but if you needed to get it to market you’d have to pay freight rates determined by the railway monopolist — and beat the prices that Rockefeller could set. So even small folks felt the heat.

Another was that the idea of ‘monopoly’ had unique historical resonance for American citizens: it was linked in the public mind with the American revolution — seen in part as a revolt against the charter-granting proclivities of the English Crown.

Also, the rise of new industrial Titans was seen as a challenge to the American dream — of how lowly immigrants seeking a better life in the New World could flourish by their own efforts with no monarch or grandee to stop them. The big trusts could therefore be portrayed as an attack on the very idea of what the US was supposed to be — and thus as a threat to its democracy.

As a result, Tarbell and her peers may have been preaching to people who were ripe for conversion. At any rate, public hostility to the monopolists of the first Gilded Age seems to have flourished and spread. This was manifested in the 1912 presidential election, for example, where the three main candidates were extremely hostile to the monopolists, though in different ways.

I'm not caught up on it, but Talking Politics is a really good podcast in general.

Here, we are Spinball Whizzer people.

We had our windows open all night. It's 70°F out. It is January 12, 2020.

There is is not these freak spikes that matter, it is the rise in average temperature over long periods. But. This is a freak spike.

The guy suggested on his own taking apart a Lego structure he finished in order to build something new. My work is complete?