Inb4 the Epstein File comes out detailing how Trump put a pillowcase over their head and threw them in a van

Or with water, frankly. Is the only option for the switch inside the bathroom literally in the sink basin? There shouldn’t be that much splashing in a work bathroom.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, it depends a little bit on the model of the e-reader (color takes more out of it, etc), but I only charge my Boox every other week, and I take notes on it, read on it, the works.

E-paper is easier to use outside or in bright light, and the battery tends to last longer. Anecdotally, it also doesn’t hurt my eyes as much.

Ok. The classic answer is “turn on the first switch for five minutes. Then turn switch 1 back off, turn on the second switch and go in the room immediately. If the light is hot, it’s controlled by switch 1; if it’s on, it’s controlled by switch 2; if it’s off and cold it’s controlled by switch 3.”

Except that a light bulb in 2025 is very likely to be an LED bulb, so it wouldn’t actually get hot. At least not hot enough to feel even a few moments later. And in a corporate setting (this is classically an interview question), the switch has been more likely to control a fluorescent tube, which can get hot, but typically not as quickly as an incandescent one.

My answer, if I were in an interview, would be to ask questions (Chesterton’s Fence).

• First of all, why do we have the one-visit limit? Is this a prod light bulb? We need a dev light bulb environment, with the bulbs and switches in the same room. (While we’re making new environments, let’s get a QA and regression environment, too. Maybe a fallback environment, depending on SLAs.)

• Second, what might the other switches do? What’s the downside to just turning them all on? If that’s not known, why not? What is the risk? For that matter, do we know that only one switch needs to be turned on to turn on the light, or is it possible that the switches represent some sort of 3-bit binary encoding?

• Third, why were the switches designed this way? Can they be redesigned to provide better feedback? Or simplified to a single switch? If not, better documentation (labeling) is a must.

• Fourth, we need to reduce the length of the feedback loop. A five minute test and then physically going to touch the bulb is way too long. Let’s look into moving the switches or the light in our dev environment so that the light can be seen from the switches.

If you think you’re above it, the propagandists have already won.

Yeah they do.

That’s just not borne out by statistical evidence. Study after study (not to mention my own experience) disprove this idea.

Its on the person to verify them.

Sure, but relying on that to help assumes that the propagandists haven’t captured sources of verification, or convinced victims that they’re unreliable.

The only time they dont is when the individual decides for themselves to ignore the facts. Its people choosing to hold onto thier own prejudices and assumptions rather than accepting the truth for what it is.

That’s literally what propaganda does to someone. It seems like you’re thinking of just standard misinformation. Propaganda is a whole different thing; it has been intentionally crafted by very intelligent people who have been paid a lot of money to make you believe what they want you to believe. It’s not just a choice someone makes, it’s a virus that they’re infected with.

This is what propoganda depends on, stereotypes, assumptions,

Your mind isn’t magically immune to propaganda, either. You likely have a stereotype of conservative people as dumb and uncurious, for instance (and, to be sure, many are), but in reality many are quite clever; that intelligence is just turned toward selfishness, or some other warped view of reality.

A lot of propaganda works on that exact kind of binary, black and white view that dehumanizes other people. Propagandists know that you can be convinced to act more easily if you can first be convinced that others are fundamentally worse than you in some inherent way.

This is what I mean about “intentionally crafted.” Propagandists have been honing enough messages that they can likely tailor one to you. The only way you can escape one is if you (1) know it’s happening, and (2) are willing to think about it critically and with nuance. I’m probably being targeted by propaganda right now without realizing it.

and a lazy mind unwilling to challenge itself.

The mental gymnastics required to believe some of the things that propagandized people accept actually require more mental work, not less. You can call it cult programming, or even mind control, but it’s not laziness.

Absolutely true. I like to think of myself as pretty intelligent, at least. Definitely not someone who would fall for something obvious. But propagandists are subtle and good at their craft.

I did fall for it. I was a vehement conservative/Republican all through high school and the first year or so of college; I bit down hard on the propaganda and bought it fully. What got me out of it was meeting people not like me and learning that they aren’t as evil as the conservative media machine says they are. Once I realized that that was a lie, it was just a process of investigating the other lies. In the meantime, friends from the conservative world started to insult and even threaten me for voicing questions, while progressive folks welcomed me to hang out with them and talk about what I was learning.

That process started in about 2006 or so.By the time Trump came down the escalator, I was fully deprogrammed. At this point, I more or less identify as a democratic socialist.

My experience matched pretty well with the research: it’s almost exclusively personal relationships that break people out of the bubble.

Facts don’t counteract propaganda, at least not on their own. This is well studied.

This news is about lobsters, specifically.

But how would it slow their metabolism down? Unless they’re just eating non-stop at room temperature, that colder weather is what they’re adapted to.

“…There was more than one lobster present at the birth of Jesus?!”

I’m totally unfamiliar with how to cook a lobster, but “chilling them” doesn’t seem to make much sense to me. They live in the North Atlantic, where water temperatures tend to hover in the “refrigerator” range most of the year, and with salinity lowering the freezing point, probably goes even lower over the winter. Seems like chilling a lobster would just make it feel at home.

I’ve only ever had it work for me once or twice, and it was always near the very beginning of a project when I was only losing a few days or a week of working code at most. When I discover that I fundamentally misunderstood or misjudged a core assumption and everything needs to be reoriented. Never when I already had code in production.

That’s fair, but even with that, it’s got to be easier to shove it into existing code. Especially if you’re trying to do it in a way that people don’t notice!

And actually, the Windows 10 start menu infamously had ads, too. So it can’t be that.

But this was four years ago! Actually it was released four years ago. This decision was almost certainly made before there were widespread code assistance AIs.

Tali Roth, the then product manager working on the core Windows user experience, including the Start menu, taskbar, and notifications, took up the question and talked about how building the taskbar from scratch meant that they had to cherry-pick things to put into the feature list first, and the ability to move the taskbar didn’t make the cut, for several reasons that Microsoft values.

WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!

If you have working code, why would you rewrite it from scratch? Refactor, sure. Overhaul, maybe. But why rewrite the whole thing?! You’re gaining nothing but unnecessary bugs.

I know all the joke answers. To justify a product manager’s salary, because Microsoft gonna Microsoft, whatever. I want to know the real reason. Why would you ever rewrite working code from scratch if you don’t have to?

Four years ago, Recall wasn’t a thing. Microsoft was caught as off-guard by the AI hype machine as the rest of us. So I doubt this was originally the reason.

Might be now, though.

The women who were presented to America had many more problems than their gender. I’m not discounting the reality that a woman has to be exceptional to be considered adequate by the electorate, but “America will not vote for a woman” is true until it’s not.

The mayor of New York City makes policies that affect more people than the governors of all but the twelve largest states. More than the smallest ten combined. His policies affect almost as many people as live in the rest of New York State.

Mamdani is about to become a massively powerful figure in American politics.