Napster was a godsend, as I couldn’t afford to buy music. I installed it on the school computers, and I had a sneaky little hidden folder with my mp3s. I’d plug in my headphones and listen over lunchtime. I eventually figured out how to use multipart rar files to put them onto floppy disks, so that I could get them back home and listen on my parent’s computer. I was eventually able to buy a portable CD player that played mp3s on CD-RW, which really opened up the possibilities. Without piracy, I don’t think I would be into music in the same way - I simple never would have had the opportunity to listen to most stuff.

None of the young Oxford and Cambridge grads who write everything for The Economist have ever known someone who does manual labor for a living.

80s and 90s era wargame art was awesome. It has glam, but also a hand drawn grittyness.

One of the biggest moments for me or realizing how propagandized westerners are is when I discovered how much improvement happened in the USSR and China under the “bad” leaders. These facts are not in dispute or being surpressed, but the western public is being effectively kept ignorant of them.

This is what they took from us

No way, I was taught that private equity brings reforms to distressed organizations resulting in higher efficiency and better outcomes for customers. Surely the invisible had will correct this obvious failure of the market

This just looks like a normal water jug. Am I missing something?

It kind of makes sense now, I had the causation backwards. It’s not that people write like chatgpt, it’s that so much of the web’s content was written this way when chatgpt was trained.

It’s a combination of comfort and contrarianism.

And of course, then they immediately hide behind LGBT and women’s rights when someone says “hey, that sounds a little racist”

Okay, then I won’t buy them.

I love my little server that I’ve been running for my friends since 2011. I keep literally every map we’ve ever had running on the multiverse, and it’s very nostalgic to go exploring and look at what people built years ago. A very cozy little legacy. Every couple of years we’ll get active again and work on some new project.

A trolly is heading down the tracks towards a philosopher. Do you pull the lever to redirect it?

Thought experiments are only useful if they’re actually plausible hypotheticals, otherwise it’s just a circle jerk.

Trump leans in to the mic, and says “physical challenge”

Host rolls out a giant banana

Come play insanely complex train board games at 18xx.games

Mr. Softie is very handsome

What strikes me is the way some people talk about Hasidism with the attitude of “those are the backwards jews”. Obviously it’s awful online, but that leaks through in NYC based media.

Mint is a good distro to start with, since you’ll be able to find guides and stuff online when you run into problems.