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Bad idea of the day: Prevent any party from having representatives in more than 10% of the seats in congress or senate, including at the state level. If any party goes over 10% we redo the election in all affected areas.

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You’ve heard about ghost kanji, but what about yokai kanji – hapax legomemna that, if they don’t occur enough times in the modern corpus, come to life and play tricks on us, drinking lamp oil & jumping backwards over corpses to ressurect them.

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Slate is complaining that the witches in Suspiria (2018) aren’t scary. Has the author seen Suspiria (1977)? It’s a wonderful film but the scariest thing about it is the sound track.

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Bunny-Girl Senpai is an interesting show. It seems to be going for a theme with the various arcs: each one seems to be about how communications media change our behavior & self-image by exerting social pressure with expectations.

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In one sense, ‘the computer revolution is over’ because the period of exponential growth behind the tech ended 10 years ago. In another sense, it hasn’t begun: we have sheltered ourselves from the social and intellectual ramifications of computing. Documents are still simulations of paper, & capitalism still exists. So it’s like that period where printing presses existed but everybody used a faux-calligraphic font.

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‘Do you prefer horror movies or comedy movies’ is a good way of phrasing ‘with what degree of intensity are you comfortable having your mental constructs challenged’. ‘Hausu is my favorite movie’ is a valid & illuminating response.

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The Shining has apparently forever turned Midnight with the Stars and You into a ‘horror song’. I’m sure some flapper ghosts are very unhappy with that categorization. They can’t do anything about it, though: ghosts are weak.

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A possible future: SSSS.Gridman’s popularity causes a bunch of mecha-inspired toku adaptations to be greenlit & ‘tokusatsu remake’ becomes the new ‘isekai light novel adaptation’ for about 5 years.

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Hot take: moral hazard is an information problem with its roots in systematic overconfidence & optimism bias. Either important domains of risk are ignored or the effectiveness of mitigations is overestimated.

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Hot take: in the absence of full information, provide reasonable defaults that are easily overridden. Making users repeat normally-identical pieces of information several times just because they CAN differ in a corner case is bad design.

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Hot take: any command that a user might want to use regularly should be short, memorable, and built-in; any command that a user might really NEED to use should be documented & included in the examples in built-in documentation.

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I sort of can’t believe this, considering Maven’s bloat, but there appears to be no build-in command for taking a package name specified on the command line, searching maven-central for it, & installing the latest version from the command line…

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Bad idea of the day: write poems, one a day, each on the back side of a tile, cementing it into place after you write it. your bathroom wall becomes a hidden book. tell no one.

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How to get rich quick, apparently: rephrase the obvious as though it is the revolutionary for the benefit of the stupid, and pepper it with the wrong to drum up ‘controversy’. (Worked for Peterson)

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Isn’t it great that outlook just prevents people from emailing jar files to each other? Like, it’s not as though people occasionally need to send each other internal proprietary jars that aren’t conveniently hosted.

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Better metaphors for community management than ‘social engineering’: ‘social gardening’, ‘social pickling’, ‘social brewing’, ‘social stewing’, ‘social mixtaping’

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If Halloween 3 had been Halloween 2 (i.e., if Michael Meyers was a one-off & there was never the expectation set that he’d come back) we could have had a great yearly horror anthology series for the past 40 years.

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It really pisses me off when people use ‘infinite’ to mean ‘really big’. If something’s actually infinite, adding more to it produces the same number (like in Hilbert’s hotel)

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Bad idea of the day: a database of maps of conceptual spaces that are drawn like maps of physical spaces (ex., xkcd’s map of the internet & Knuppe’s map of the fields of mathematics)

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