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Forgot about Maddox! I used to love this stuff back when I was like ~16, read it again and still great! The flexible straw, for example, was invented by a guy who saw his daughter struggling to drink a milkshake at the counter of a restaurant.1 Instead of, say, asking his The innovation nobody needs or wants. daughter to pick up the drink, he went home and made a shitty invention instead. These straws were invented for a child who was too lazy to pick up her drink, by an adult who didn’t have the foresight to ask for a smaller cup for the child. And now I’m relegated to using these drippy pieces of shit forever. ...

“Strzalkowski has a lot to say about the way the game was marketed in the United States: how the bizarre scratch and sniff cards included with the strategy guide may have turned off consumers, but little to say in the way of gameplay mechanics or particular characters from the game that spoke to him in a way that might help explain his obsession, with one exception.” Via: http://thehardtimes.net/harddrive/huge-earthbound-fan-excited-play-first-time/

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If one link in that chain had broken, through 13th-century legend, to 16th-century insult book, to 19th-century writer, to 20th-century phone book flip, if one of those small events hadn’t happened, Batman would live somewhere else. Source: Tom Scott, Batman’s Village of Fools: Gotham, England

Man - I’m such a sucker for these long, detailed reverse engineering/security posts. This one does not disappoint! The video is full of not-so-subtle hints that HP’s printers are secure and buying a non-HP printer is bordering on criminally negligent. For example, the opening sequence, white text on black background states “There are hundreds of millions of business printers in the world. Less than 2% of them are secure”. From here, the “Wolf” executes a series of unlikely attacks that leverage the insecure printers to own the companies network and sensitive data, with the obvious implication being that HP printers would not be vulnerable to these attacks. ...

I have to admit I knew very little about Marxism going into this comment thread – this person’s comment blew my mind a little bit. When you consider this as a background for what ‘class’ means, the whole idea of class based on income amount risks scrambling and obfuscating everybody’s relationship to the means of production in society. Marx would think that even when people make pretty different amounts of money, the pressures and stresses from society they experience are a lot more similar within each class section. For example when Donald Trump went bankrupt he had negative money, negative income, but that didn’t make him suddenly a lumpen, or a prole, there was still something categorically different about his life which income figures wouldn’t catch. I remember his daughter once saying to her that during that time he pointed to a homeless man and said ‘that man has billions of dollars more than I do’, and while that technically might be true, it’s also importantly not. ...

Man, I love this blog - always seems to make me see a problem I’m facing from a different angle. The sole incentive they are biased towards is their own self-preservation, which is equivalent to the preservation of the entire group. They cannot stereotype any particular group as they could be members of it. They lack commitment to their prior selves as they do not know who they are." When considering whether we should endorse a proposed law or policy, we can ask: if I did not know if this would affect me or not, would I still support it ...

I always find these looks ing mental illness issues interesting. something that especially stuck with me was the psychologist talking about – I forgot how he phrashed it – like mindsets - basically, if you go around the world with the basic assumption that “there are peoplea actively spying on me and I have to be careful” then every little blip will confirm that. that on it’s own wasn’t particularly grounbreaking, but it just struck me beceause lately I feel like I’ve been stuck in a mindest where everyone is out to get me or…I dont know, pin me down. Based on past experiences, my body and brain seem to just go down the same path, with similar confirmation bias. ...

How could it be any other way? The odds that a pure meritocracy chose you and you alone to inhabit your spot on the ladder is worthy of Dunning-Kruger status. You’ve been getting lucky breaks for a long time. We all have. Source: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2017/10/imposter-syndrome.html

This is cool! PVC pipe is a valuable material to the backyard hacker. It’s cheap, readily available, and comes in a range of different sizes. However, what do you do if you need to bend it? The typical approach would be to grab a heat gun or blowtorch, warm it up, and go from there. Source: How To Bend PVC The Nice Way