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When developing a large feature, writing Good Commits is hard.

Last night, I watched the Star Trek Voyager episode Critical Care. In it, the Doctor is abducted into a hospital that is undersupplied & understaffed. He immediately gets to work helping the sick and lambasting the inequity of the hospital's coverage. The rich and powerful get top quality care; the poor get beds to die on. It turns out the hospital's resources are allocated by a computer (the Allocator), which calculates scores for each patient based on a consequentialist rubric. If you're the CEO of a fertilizer factory whose death would result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, you get a high score. If you work in the mines, game over.

What colour is the pepper on this skewer?

I say yellow. My colleagues said green.

I value open-mindedness, and in similar situations will defer to the group, but this felt like being persuaded to deny my own subjective experience: a tall order for words alone. I couldn't look at the pepper and say "green green green" and see it as any other colour.

I don't know why this feels like some sad or significant thing to say - it's one of the internet's oldest clichés - but, anyone else feeling like comment sections kinda sucky these days?

handy if you're running a site with pictures but you want everything to maintain a consistent aesthetic and colour scheme. might be better to just process the images and save them already dithered, but this way can be customized. (note that the original image is still there beneath the filter, and that's what gets loaded, so, again, this doesn't save bandwidth - but it also means users could vary the effect per theme or toggle it off)

These are all repeated ad-infinitum across the internet but I may as well republish my own no-nonsense repository.

I watched the TV show Plur1bus recently.

I checked out Twitter for the first time in ages to see if anyone had been finding anything in the Epstein files

Another More Perfect Union critique, I guess

This time, a video on government-run grocery stores.

I feel like if you're arguing in favour of government-run groceries, you should probably spend more than 15 seconds on the municipal case studies (that all failed!) instead of talking about military commissaries.

This part was interesting:

So maybe you take all this to mean that it's true: the secret to all this is that taxpayers foot the bill for some giant subsidy. But actually, the subsidy is quite small. The defense budget is almost $1 trillion, and the subsidy for DeCA is roughly 0.2% for the whole defense budget. This is for almost 250 stores serving 8.8 million households

Saying that the subsidy is small compared to the whole defense budget is a sloppy rhetorical move. What matters is is it cost-effective, how does it scale, etc.

One thing I've noticed in the last few months of intentionally monitoring it - the headlines on the homepage of Fox News are always focused on specific people and characters. They're obsessed with AOC/Mamdani/Sanders and anyone else they can paint as a Radical Leftist.

There's never a story that's framed in the Vox/Atlantic way: “here's what's going on with this abstract problem”, let alone anything longform or curious.

There's also usually one scam-adjacent story about some new remedy for the elderly (in the same way that the NYT always has a story about some yuppies buying a million dollar apartment).