23 Data Miners and Me.

Thanks for the followup!

My employer generally sucks, but one of the few things they do right is give us no-questions-asked PTO. Nobody cares if we take a day, it’s part of our compensation.

I’m with you, I think it’s probably BS. But I suppose it could be taking highly compressed low resolution snapshots.

I had a pair of speakers (studio monitors) with rubberized plastic on them that did this. It was truly maddening. My guess is it’s something plastic/rubber like that. Your phone case is a good suspect, have you taken it off the phone and inspected it inside and out?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Qasem_Soleimani

The article which was removed for misinformation got me curious. So I finally downloaded and installed LibreWolf (which is Firefox under the hood). After using it for full day I really like it so far. Another user (thanks, @[email protected] ) gave me some good tips to pay attention to the two icons to the left of the URL bar, which was very helpful.

I would love to know how many civil servants plan on voting for MAGA. I would like to think it’s a teeny tiny percentage…but I’d probably be disappointed to learn that it’s not.

Thanks, for the tips! I’m familiar with UBlock Origin, have been using it for ages. Good to know about the cookies and persistent login.

I’ve been meaning to try LibreWolf, here’s my chance.

On top of all this interesting and problematic stuff about Silver himself, I think polls are very unreliable here in the post-truth world. Playing spreadsheet games with multiple polls might be marginally better. But IMO the whole thing suffers from GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). People lie to pollsters for myriad reasons. And that’s just the small population of people they can even get a response from.

Lina Khan is my hero.

Agreed.

grunting noises

Wow, I still use paint.net. My needs are pretty humble, and it still hits that sweet spot between MS Paint and Gimp.

There’s been a trend towards simplicity/minimalism in UX for a long time. Sometimes it works really well. Other times it makes it difficult to find things like setting preferences (or they just don’t implement them because the assholes think they know better than you).

For me, MS is a mixed bag. Some of the UX changes are good, some of it is horrible.

But I love a well done minimalist UX. Obsidian and Reaper are two examples that come to mind.

After a recent renovation, our new exaust fan is much quieter, and it kind of bugs me. It is nice to be able to leave it running longer, though. The old one was too obnoxiously loud to leave on after you finished a shower.

Focus on the lost revenue for small businesses owners. That’s all these shitfuck Republicans care about.

I’ve never put much stock in the “we are living in a simulation” but stories like this make me wonder if one of the sim developer’s kids is in here doing stuff.

I have so little faith in polls anymore. I know Silver and others try to patch over the shortcomings by analyzing multiple polls and running weighted probability equations on them and so on. But I always think of GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.

And of course, probabilities are just that: probabilities. So if they say candidate X has a 75% chance to beat candidate Y, that means candidate Y still wins 25% of the time. Which is much higher than we intuit when we just look at the 75%. Anybody who’s rolled a 1d4 in D&D knows that 1 will come up more than we’d like.

Allan Lichtman’s analysis is more interesting to me. He’s been right 9 out of 10 times. Which certainly doesn’t mean he’ll be right this time. But I think it’s cool that he ignores polls. I wonder if his methodology, while very clever, may not be up to date for 2024 with all the weird shit going on with judges, electors, etc. The “meta issues”, if you will, around his “Keys to the White House.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keys_to_the_White_House

I hope you’re right!