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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2024

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  • n9d was not very memorable for me so I think I probably agree with your taste overall. if you’re really only going to read one more then I would make sure not to skip The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I think Ghostwritten is one of his earliest books and I think it really shows.

    It’s really really interesting to imagine a different order to read these stories when you think about which little overlaps you would or would not be able to appreciate.

    One of my favorite things about his books is that all his gimmicks with the overlapping characters and the horologist stuff doesn’t really matter all that much if the story is just otherwise also extremely well-written. so the “gimmicks” really do feel like a bonus and not like the main point.







  • My understanding of hard water is just that there’s more calcium and magnesium ions than would otherwise be present in softer water. The varying degrees of hardness would just be the varying concentrations of these ions.

    The way you experience as a human (as opposed to measuring this with a water probe) is that soap will form a complex with these ions and maybe precipitate out a little soap scum, and this reaction will happen at the same time as the reaction which complexes with any oils or dirt so it’ll effectively be wasting some of your soap and you will have to use more soap.

    So you’ll be shampooing your hair and you’ll use the same amount as you used back in the soft water city and you’ll be thinking “I used the same amount of shampoo as I always do so why does my hair still feel oily?”

    I have one of those articulated segmented hose things on my shower head so you can pick it up and move it around while it’s spraying and the whole thing gets all covered in limescale super fast because the hard water evaporates and precipates out the magnesium and calcium as calcite or aragonite crystals. I had never seen this happen so fast and it ruins the hose so often that I thought I was dealing with excessively hard water.




  • So whatever way the camera output is being signed, what’s stopping you from signing an altered video with a similar private key and then saying “you can all trust that my video is real because I have the private key for it.”

    The doubters will have to concede that the video did indeed come from you because it pairs with your key, but why would anyone trust that the key came from the camera step instead of coming from the editing step?


  • The actual message doesn’t have anything to do with any facts about what he said, it’s more just that he thinks it’s a “really big bomb” to drop.

    The actual message is just “I am turning against this guy in a way that I think is a big deal so anyone who has more loyalty to me than him should know that you have to pick a side now.”

    It’s a really big bomb for Donald Trump to see that Elon is taking staking a position.



  • They gotta blame the people who designed the city. If these kids were a small fraction of the same age and in Japan they would be on TV for braving their first solo trip into the market to buy a vegetable for dinner. It would be a cute TV show called “Old Enough” on Netflix with English subtitles instead of a cruel reality on this side of the same planet where a kid is now dead.

    That part of it isn’t the fault of the parents, but the fault of the society we have created.

    Btw that TV show is a few decades old but my point is that the world is possible. We don’t need to be like Japan was in that TV show, but we do need more walkable cities.