When I visited Kigali for 2 weeks in 2022, I observed a labour-capital ladder:
At the bottom, the poorest workers could earn a living by carrying fuel to and fro on foot.
Next, people with bicycles did the same thing faster.
If you saved enough from cycling, you could buy a motorcycle and become a mototaxi driver, providing transport for the city's middle class.
Taxi car drivers were on the next rung with air conditioning, personal space, and higher profits.
For all the cynical things I had to say about internet comments, I also cherish them.
I love the bootleg concert guestbooks, the votive candle shrines underneath golden oldies.
Or the 100x-distilled nostalgia underneath the minecraft OST as children begin to realize they are going to die:
Or the thousand-person roast of RZA's terrible beat for the guitar center promo:
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?
update 2026-05-8: hello hackernews - whoops, yes, i should have filtered out the noise specks. thanks to kevinsync for the reminder.
this is not a power or bandwidth saving technique à la low tech magazine. it's principally aesthetic.
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