Over-hopped is a major style here, and I find it baffling. Give me the toasty, malty, barley, coffee, bitter, chocolate notes of a good porter or stout any day of the week. But no, the menu is 6 IPAs, 2 ciders, a bock, and a weiss.

Jerry Falwell was raising alarms about Tinky Winky all the way back in 1999, because they had a male voice actor but carried a bag, and had a purple triangle on their head.

There are no depths too stupid for the culture wars.

I think they care a lot about the lawful axis and not at all about the stupid axis.

Is this what “I double-dog dare you” refers to?

Does it support adoptable storage for its SD card?

Note that it only has 32GB of internal storage, which could be kinda limiting for general Android use.

I think you’ve read a lot into that person’s comment that wasn’t actually in the comment. What they said wasn’t that the government should spend with abandon; they said it shouldn’t be arbitrarily limited. And insisting on zero deficit spending at all times is indeed arbitrary.

If, for instance, they issue bonds in order to pay for better public education, that has a significant positive effect on the growth of the local economy a few years in the future, which they can reasonably expect to result in increased tax revenue at that time, and indeed a larger increase than what they’re spending in the present. Borrowing money to spend in this way isn’t fiscally irresponsible; quite the opposite. It pays for itself over a slightly longer time horizon and improves the city.

There are often similar effects with programs to support low-income residents, because support to these residents has a higher “velocity” than aid for higher-income residents. Infrastructure spending is also frequently justifiable.

Conversely, giving tax cuts to AI datacenters doesn’t become responsible stewardship if you offset the cost by increasing payroll taxes.

Budgeting for a government is really complicated, and oversimplifying that, whether it’s by saying “we need zero deficit!” or by saying “we have infinite money!” is gonna lead to bad decisions. But “we have infinite money” being false doesn’t make “we need zero deficit” true. Both are oversimplifications, and the right has been using the latter as a propaganda bludgeon for at least 40 years now.

It’s because in the US pixel phones are one of the only ways to get a phone with an unlocked bootloader. Or, in other words, to actually own a phone.

Also do it when nobody else is around.

Yeah, I certainly wasn’t saying these would be hard to get. And yeah, a lot of cheap laser pointers are also dangerous. What I’m saying is basically, “Hey, this is potentially dangerous, read up on this before you reach for your credit card.”

For me the best tech purchases aren’t really the ones that bring me joy. They’re the ones that become invisible because they take away points of friction.

So I would say my Brother printer is one. It’s been incredibly reliable for more than a decade now.

Switching over to Ubiquiti Unifi access points for wifi has been worth it too. It’s a pain to run wires for them, but having a solid signal everywhere in the house in all kinds of weather is just amazing. They’ve been running for a decade too, though I did just replace one so I can have a 6GHz connection in one room. Not really sure that particular upgrade was actually worth it, but the system as a whole has been so nice. There’s just never anything to fix about the wifi anymore. (Well, okay, occasionally there’s something to fix with the Internet, but it’s usually just “Comcast is down,” and we have to wait until they fix it, and sometimes also reboot the modem. The wifi itself is pretty bulletproof.)

So yeah. Tech that works reliably and invisibly for years on end is what I find really valuable. Gadgets can certainly be fun, but great tech is just there in the background making things easier.

I think they may have fixed the app switcher thing? Or at least one of them.

Here’s the scenario I kept running into on my 6. I’ll give the apps names to simplify the description, but the problem was generic. So let’s say I’m in Firefox, and I want to glance back at something in signal. So I double-tap “recent” to switch to my previous app, but what comes up is instead WeatherBug, because I forgot I glanced at that between Signal and Firefox. So I still want to go to Signal, but when I get there, I want my previous app to be Firefox, not WeatherBug, so I double-tap recent again to get back to Firefox as an interim step. Then I hit recent yet again, and this time the whole screen freezes up and won’t respond to touch. The workaround I found was that if you interacted with the screen on WeatherBug–usually I’d just scroll it down and back up a tiny bit–it wouldn’t lock up. So I got in the habit of doing that.

Recently there’s been a change, though, and it seems to fix that bug. Unfortunately, it also screws up the “switch to last app” functionality sometimes. Now I’ll be in Firefox, open recent apps, scroll past Weatherbug to open Signal, and when I double-tap recent, it’ll switch to WeatherBug.

So it’s still a screwy mess, but at least it’s not locking up as often anymore.

A laser pointer is supposed to be limited to a maximum of 5mW, so these are really freaking powerful (200 times stronger). I don’t have experience with lasers that strong, because I value my eyesight, and that of my pets. Please learn more about lasers than I know before purchasing something like this.

The photo in the OP would beg to differ.

Love that one. For anyone who hasn’t read it, this is the full text: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

But not in 2053. We have “the post-atomic horror” to look forward to first.

This was my experience with ketamine therapy as well. I think they gave me way too high a dose.

Don’t forget Mr. Card Game!

(it’s actually pretty okay to forget Mr. Card Game, it’s not great)

For anyone else who was gonna check: yes, it’s the fifth circuit.

Oy. Soon we’re gonna have a separate word for films that starred a particular actor when they were actually alive, as distinguished from the rest of the films starring them.

I should rewatch The Congress.