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> IMO, adding a queen to the Borg destroyed the Borg.

Having more than one episode about the Borg destroyed the Borg.

1st appearance: there are some things out there that human civilization isn't ready for. You wanna see an example? You really wanna see? Okay, you asked for it. OMG it's the Borg!

2nd through Nth appearance: Demystifying Borg Internal APIs


> As in I'm obligated to throw the damn ball.

Just imagining your retriever feeling obligated to sit patiently by your side as you contribute to the pack by deconstructing your life while staring lifelessly at a flashing screen.


> Couldn’t it be the other way round, that changes in health caused by other external factors erroneously get blamed on COVID?

It is possible, but not to the degree that all long Covid cases are being confused with external factors.

> Menopause can cause brain fog

Additionally, long Covid can cause brain fog. This was shown in brain scans from a popular HN post about a research paper just yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45539845

Those patients were 20-59 and had "no previous history of neuropsychiatric disorders."


>It is possible, but not to the degree that all long Covid cases are being confused with external factors.

Didn't mean to imply that all cases are, just that our definition of and knowledge about long COVID is nebulous enough that some nontrivial proportion of cases are likely attributable to external factors.

>Additionally, long Covid can cause brain fog. This was shown in brain scans from a popular HN post about a research paper just yesterday

Absolutely, just as other infections can cause severe lingering symptoms [0]. But we don't really know how prevalent these are, nor the severity of the prevalence. Studies like the one you link typically select for the most severe cases. We don't know whether it's useful to generalize from those.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-acute_infection_syndrome


You can't see "brain fog" on any imaging scan. That study didn't demonstrate any such causation. At most you can establish a correlation between certain imaging patterns and patient symptoms (which are notoriously noisy for any sort of behavioral health condition).

> Who do I sue, and who has insurance, if something goes wrong?

You sue the Red Hat-like support company with whom you ostensibly signed a contract.

If your question is who does the Red Hat-like support company sue if they want accountability for the code they are leveraging, I guess I don't understand the question or its relevance. E.g., with regard to proprietary code, who does Microsoft microsoft when Microsoft microsofts Microsoft? (Fun to write, but I don't think that sentence really makes sense.)


> Almost all copies of the critical biography of John MacArthur, "The Stockholder", have disappeared.

After an intense 30 second investigation into this mystery, I have discovered a physical copy on campus at UCLA. Do I dare check it out?

> Now that's a successful cover-up.

You seem to have only sent one small piece of evidence for your claim.

Is it possible that you are keeping the rest of the pieces of evidence together so you can send them all at once, for the sake of efficiency?

If so, please send them now that I've acknowledged receipt of the first small piece of evidence. :)


They cover the possibility of people potentially migrating to Mastodon with this gem:

> But not everyone is looking forward to the idea: “I’d go back to Usenet before I went back to Mastodon,” wrote Bluesky user Count Von Horse Knuckler. “I do not need people yelling at me for not putting cat pictures behind trigger warnings or unwanted Linux advice.”

But I'm suspicious because:

1. That doesn't appear to be a valid Bluesky handle and,

2. Even if it's a pseudonym-- which is understandable-- how could there possibly be a former usenet graybeard who didn't love trafficking in unwanted Linux advice?

Edit: clarifications


Your argument doesn't make much sense.

Short term changes in Gaza/Ukraine/PFAS proliferation will all have very little effect on the current daily lives of most Americans.

But those same short terms changes in all of the above will have massive changes in the future of most Americans.

E.g., if public pressure had prevented the U.S. from invading Iraq on March 20th, 2003, not much would have changed for Americans on March 21st, 2003. But by the end of the war, that would be over $1 trillion that would have been spent differently by the U.S. government. You apparently like statistical estimates-- tell me how much of that $1 trillion you estimate would have gone to research grants for PFAS proliferation risks and/or alternative technologies over a 20-year period.

And that's just the opportunity cost. With Gaza and Ukraine there is further escalation of weapons use and drone tech, damage to the Chernobyl sarcophagus, potential use of tactical nukes, endless appetite for incorporating AI into war and mass surveillance... the list goes on and on.

It just cannot be overstated how wrong it is to blithely assume that focus on current events is somehow short term thinking while armchair quarterbacking PFAS proliferation 100,000 generations into the future is somehow more consequential and erudite.

Edit: change "stated" to "overstated" (hehe)


> I, the user, can already control the content width by resizing my browser, thank you very much.

Nearly every techie and non-techie I know has a bazillion tabs open 100% of the time. The likelihood that even the top 10 are all single-column text is 0%. And I'd sooner read web pages hot off a dot matrix printer than constantly pecking at the edge of an un-maximized window, resizing it like some kind of meth-addled chicken.

Note: I may be overstating slightly for effect.


The art of opening windows instead of tabs appears to have been lost to time.

Oh the irony that lots complain that mainstream OSes window managers are oh so poor when all people seem to be able to do is fullscreen everything and then tab around.

Meanwhile, macOS gave up on the absolutely brilliant if misunderstood Mac OS X green + a.k.a "zoom" which would miraculously resize windows to the maximum size of its content but no more.


> macOS gave up on the absolutely brilliant if misunderstood Mac OS X green + a.k.a "zoom"

It’s still there. Window > Zoom from the menu bar, or ⌥ + click the green window button.


It's almost like window management is primarily being used for facilitating inter-app interactions, rather than intra-app interactions... almost like tabs were invented for a reason...

Did people lose the old art, or have you never managed to grasp the "new" one?


It wouldn't be a problem in the first place if we hadn't migrated away from 4:3 aspect monitors to these ridiculous widescreen things. ;)

Maybe someone should invent a tiling tab manager for the web browser.


Firefox had an addon for that before Quantum killed so many addons.

https://betanews.com/2014/07/12/view-all-your-firefox-tabs-a...


I really wish mobile browsers had windows (true windows that could be switched easily, not the weird crap where you go into a submenu to find the list of windows and try to figure out which one has your tab, and Firefox doesn't even have that). I would love to split up my browsing into multiple workspaces on my large tablet, but instead I get to have four browsers installed.

I think a big reason it's lost to time is because it was poorly-specified and therefore a non-portable art.

E.g., there's no way for you to easily send me the desktop state of the open window sizes and dimensions you have in mind. And even then, I'd have to hack the window decorations and fonts myself. I'm back to meth-addled chicken pecking!


> A dose that might give a regular user a gentle buzz could render a first-time user completely stoned.

So until we have more research, we legislate to the case of the "first-time user completely stoned," no?


THC can remain in your system and be detected for 30 days. You are effectively proposing that it should be illegal to drive if you have ever used a THC product in the past month

Not sure I understand what you're saying.

* THC threshold for a first-time user to register as "completely stoned": $foo

* THC level of someone who smoked the maximum amount they could 30 days ago, and hasn't smoked or eaten an edible since: $bar

Are you saying that $bar >= $foo?


The degree to which any given dose of THC affects an individual varies so wildly as to be completely useless as a baseline. To guarantee that 100% of debilitated users are detected, the threshold would have to be so low as to also detect a heavy user who smoked a joint two days ago.

Your argument is built on the supposition that there's a hard lower boundary on debilitating dosage. There is no such magic number, or it is nearly indistinguishable from zero.


It's sort of shocking. Compared to alcohol, where someone might plausibly get as drunk off of 1 drink as someone else might from 5, with THC the plausible ratio is more like 1:50 between naive and heavy users (IME).

That's the way it was in my state until it was overturned on appeal, and they only did that due to an accident of the way weed was legalized.

That’s what Germany does (roughly)

That seems to be a very reasonable rule.

>"Phosphatidylethanol (PEth) is a direct marker, formed only in the presence of ethanol, and can detect heavy or binge drinking for up to 4 weeks after consumption."

We should simultaneously use this marker to prove drunk driving instead of the clearly outdated direct measurements.


Totally agree.

If we’re going to be this cruel it only makes sense to apply the same penalty to using a smartphone while driving, since it results in the same level of reaction time impairment as DWI.

I take issue with calling it "cruel". But yeah we should have really strict penalties on using smartphones while driving.

I wonder at what age the typical person has reached this impairment threshold just by normal mental decline.

>So until we have more research, we legislate to the case of the "first-time user completely stoned," no?

Throwing everyone under the bus because of the lowest common denominator is a shitty thing to do when we're talking $10k+ life altering fines here, but your attitude is how everything else involving driving is done so you'll probably get your way even if it's not moral or right.

INB4 people call me a stoner, haven't smoked weed in decades.


You say it's "not moral or right"; so, what would you suggest? I agree applying the lowest common denominator is not necessarily the best (nor fair) way to do it; but, how do you handle it?

Do we agree that there is some level that effects everyone, even if that level is different? Do we require all THC users -- smoking, edibles, vaping, topicals, etc -- be tested to determine the level where they become impaired?


Or, lacking evidence, punish people based on fault and liability that is defined.

Speeding is speeding, causing a crash is causing a crash.


Doing nothing is a perfectly valid option too. We don't have to react to and legislate every single thing.

Those aren’t the only consequences for DWI

No. What ought to be done is impairment testing, which is the direct way of checking if a driver is safe to drive regardless of the source of impairment.

The police cars should have a driving simulator installed that works with the steering wheel and the pedals of the car. Have suspects do on the spot a driving test in the sim. Pass/fail should be deterministic (the game would determine it).

Lmao that’s actually kinda awesome.

I suck at driving computer games, I would definitely fail on my first few tries.

This is a good point. Because we know that the THC level in somebody’s blood is so bad an indicator that it’s completely useless, we should use that measure to put the maximum number of people in jail with it for the maximum amount of time.

Once we have self-driving cars widely available, sure.

At least with hex dump you know you're gonna look at hex dump.

With XML you dream of self-documenting structure but wake up to SVG arc commands.

Two positional flags. Two!


True, any format can be abused, though I'm not sure SVG could really do much better. What I really love is when people tell me that XML is just sexps in drag: I paste a screenful of lisp, delete a random parenthesis in the middle, and challenge them to tell me where the syntax error is without relying on formatting (the compiler sure doesn't).

Mind you I love the hell out of lisp, it just isn't The One True Syntax over all others.


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