How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie should be required reading for everyone. It’s full of things that are so obvious in hindsight but go against our natural instincts so we blunder through attempts to persuade not realizing that we might be increasing resistance rather than decreasing it.

Like the whole, “you might be right but you’re still an asshole” thing. Being correct just isn’t enough. In some cases you get crucified and then after some time has passed, the point you were trying to convince others of becomes the popular accepted fact. And they might even still hate you after coming around on the point you were trying to make.

That book won’t turn you into a persuasive guru, but it will help avoid many of the pitfalls that make debates turn ugly or individuals stubborn.

Or, on the flip side, you can use the inverse of the lessons to become a more effective troll and learn how to act like you’re arguing one thing while really trying to rile people up or convince them of the opposite. I say this not so much to suggest it but because knowing about this can make you less susceptible to it (and it’s already a part of the Russian troll farm MO).

When I first heard of the MS feature, my first thought was that there’s gotta be a more efficient way to do this than taking screen shots and analyzing the image. The window manager has all of that information plus more context (like knowing that these pixels are part of a non-standard window that uses transparency to act like a non-rectangular shape, while this thing that looks like a window is actually an image because the user was looking at someone else’s screenshot).

Even better would be integration with the applications themselves; they have even more contextual information than the window manager has.

Maybe, instead of telling everyone they should switch to Linux at any opportunity you can, you should try switching to Linux.

Catholic masses are extremely cult-like. There’s a choreographed stand/sit/kneel dance, “everybody please give us money” phase, plus a part where everyone lines up to eat their unappetizing snack.

And they speed kids through the initiation process so that they are “committed” before high school, when they might start thinking for themselves.

I don’t understand how anyone can look at that religion and not immediately see that it’s mostly a power grab dressed up as a salvation from inherited sins that were made up in the first place. And then later, it’s, “Hey yeah, you’ll get into heaven, just tell us all the dirt on you!”

A glass of milk. Might get that 3 months down to 2 months and 29 days.

Watch out for falling Mankinds and Undertakers, especially if you are or are near to an announcer’s table.

Insert copypasta of angry nerd ranting about using regex to parse html.

If you like doing the web dev work, it’s not hard to implement a simple bbcode using regex matching and replacement. At least, it was pretty easy using php and sql.

I wish I knew how I went from having extremely painful hemroids in my early 20s to having painless hemroids ever since. But I highly recommend it, whatever it was.

I dunno, I’d say them deploying an update that bricked machines at the scale they did shows they didn’t test it very well at smaller scales. They could have even still used their users as beta testers, just needed to do a subset of them first.

What do you mean by fitted perfectly? Like it had a right angle to fit in the corner or something more than that?

I have a plastic container where I put all instruction manuals plus hardware that comes with it that I don’t need right then. It was very useful when I decided to mount my soundbar a decade after I bought it and knew exactly where the mounting clips and template were. Any time I need to check the manual for specs or something, I just need to look through a pile and will find it.

Yeah, sometimes using your shirt works, too, just because it will absorb sweat and give a dry grip.

Rubber band can also spread the grip out. Like when you squeeze on the lid directly, you can press into the side of the jar and grip there, making it harder to turn it. Especially if there’s dried sauce between the lid and jar, squeezing it lid against it can make it less likely to break. A rubber band spreads some of your grip away from your fingers because it is soft, and the rubber can grip along where you aren’t pressing, so more force ends up going towards torquing the lid and less towards squeezing it.

A firm but gentle grip can also work. Don’t yank on it, just apply slow and steady pressure and sometimes it’ll loosen up after a few seconds. And once it starts to turn, it’s over. You’ve won.

The mRNA itself would behave the same from person to person. The immune response and specific cells that get “infected” can vary.

The immune system works to produce cells that can produce antibodies that bind well to the antigen, the specific part that they bind to can be different from person to person. The immune system tries to avoid antibodies that also bind to other things, but it’s not perfect.

If the injection ends up getting into a vein, then the mRNA could infect heart cells, which then later get killed by killer T cells and can affect heart function in the short term. Or potentially, they could end up anywhere in the body before entering a cell.

But, the same applies to the actual virus, only to a higher degree.

When you have a live virus infection, the immune system has the full virus to target with antibodies, so the variance will be higher compared to people only getting a subset of the virus, and has more chances to overlap with things we don’t want our immune system targeting.

And a real viral infection generates copies of the virus to spread to other cells instead of just producing proteins that the immune system will target. It’s like getting another vaccine shot every time the period it takes to produce more virus copies passes, from the moment you get infected until your immune system manages to get the upper hand (though distributed very differently).

It makes sense to be wary of new things you’re advised to put into your body, but it’s also important to frame them correctly. It’s not just risk of vaccine going wrong vs no vaccine means no risk. It’s risk of vaccine going wrong plus risk of infection breaking through times risk of vaccinated infection going wrong vs risk of getting infected times risk of unvaccinated infection going wrong.

An analogy to thinking faster conveyers means faster production is thinking faster speed limits on the highways leads to higher reproduction rates (or faster graduation or whatever).

One thing it will affect is how long a part takes to go from initial production to release. But there’s a trade-off with how many products are “in fight” at once.

What if it doesn’t have the bit that goes between your legs?

I bought a seat like that because I understand that the normal bike seats put pressure on that area in a way that can lead to impotence. I haven’t tried the seat yet because I’m lazy, so I don’t know how comfortable it is. Though even if it isn’t comfortable, it’s a trade-off.

My weekend was interesting. Opened my gaming mouse to swap the left mouse button switch since mine had started doing random double clicks. Discovered the battery was building pressure. Kinda a pain because it’s still sitting disassembled while I wait for a new battery, but I’m glad I did find it like that instead of it eventually starting a fire when the package ruptured.

Oh also apparently some spiders successfully mated in my place and the spiderlings hatched on Saturday. I’ve relaxed my “catch and release, no kill” rule for spiders until further notice, though the one bigger one that showed up last night still got that. Looking around, I don’t see any right now. Guessing I’ve killed like 40 so far. Apparently it’ll take them a week or two to starve, assuming they don’t catch some of the few bugs in here.

There’s plenty of value on there! For the CCP, but still.

So you’re saying that that number keeps going up as I get closer and closer to the actual weekend when I install it as my daily driver?

Also exclusivity deals should be treated as the monopolies they are.