Sundar @digital_carver@social.cleverlibre.org

I keep trying to write about Netflix's 'The School Nurse Files', but what's good about it is too elusive a thing to capture with a concise review.
I'll just say this: it's hypnotic, gentle, and engaging in quite an unexpected way. If some fantasy stories are like a workout for your forebrain (eg. Death Note), others like a shot of redbull straight to your lizard brain (eg. The Dresden Files), The School Nurse Files is like a warm bath for the whole of your brain to luxuriate in.

TierZoo is one of the best YouTube binges I've been on. Top tier content.
Animal footage should honestly make for more of our media consumption time, and not just cats and dogs at that.

When back pain, disturbed sleep, worsened depression, and dense mental fog, all attack at the same time, and you're not sure which one's the cause and which are the effects... 🥴

@jmehne I've been using Sprinkles (https://github.com/ajgrf/sprinkles). vim-colors-github (https://github.com/acarapetis/vim-colors-github) is another good one.

@friend I've had mixed experience with the "remove x" features you mentioned. I did find the notification thing pretty useful for my usage. And the unused apps thing, while annoying, has also been an overall positive, at least as a reminder to "start using this cool app I once found and installed, and then forgot about".

@friend I'm not a fan of the "smart" recommendations either, never found them particularly helpful, but if they're going to keep nudging me to add stuff (which they are), I wish they'd also have similar nudges to prune and slim down my feeds. If that part of the app UI is going to exist anyway, might as well have it be at least somewhat useful.

@f3ew I sort of like that though, I get to slowly but organically discover people through interesting content they post that gets boosted, rather than from what's "trending" or from people gaming whatever the discoverability system looks for. This is like the old 90's/00's Internet, and it feels good to not be a target of an "intelligent" algorithm for once.

@bull500 Yeah, I've found and followed a bunch of good posters, it's just the ratio of inactive-to-active people was larger than I expected. It doesn't help that I avoid people who mostly post politics, so that filters out about 3/4ths of the active folks too!

It's still a better experience than I get on most other social media nowadays 🙂

@khird I think it's sort of what @namark said, but indirectly and unintentionally.
Taft was famous enough that the podcasters, comedians, etc. remembered his name (the others too forgettable even for them), but didn't stand out as significant compared to the others they had in mind, the Lincolns and Kennedys.
He just barely passes the significance threshold to be on the fame ladder, but only to get on the last rung of it.

@nik That seems to be the thinking, that less content in my feed = less time spent on the app. Though these modern tech optimizers never seem to consider second order effects, that it gets overwhelming when there's too much content, and people stop even opening the app coz it feels like work

https://karkanirka.org/2020/10/04/roman-soldiers-in-tamilnadu/

Many different interesting little details. My favourite is his theory on the difference between Yavanas and Milecchas (both old Tamil terms for foreigners): "Possibly, anyone whose language was known and could be understood were called Yavanas. People who could not understand or talk either in Greek or Tamil could have been called [Mileccha]." So Mileccha was like "barbarian" in the original Greek sense - people who spoke "bar bar bar" as in you couldn't understand them.

#tamil #history #India #Roman

Why are recommendation engines always about consuming more and more?
With attention becoming a precious scarce resource, apps should stop limiting themselves to "you'll like this, add this, and this, and this" suggestions, and instead also give smart suggestions for things like "you don't seem to be enjoying this podcast, remove it" or "this RSS feed content seems crap, stop wasting time on it".

I've reconsidered, I want three actually - one in matte silver for when I'm just hanging out, one in my own skin colour for formal occasions when I want to look somber, and one in a cool glossy black for those cool sexy parties that I totally go to all the time. three tails, in return for a unicorn startup idea, pretty good deal I think!

still not giving up on the tail though, what nature taketh away technology shall deliver. detachable prehensile tail, get to work on it tech people! I don't even want patent money for this billion-dollar idea, just a nice long tail in matte silver.

Got thinking about this when I read some English news outlet call Hanuman "the Monkey God" - that reminded me of my theory that maybe the Vaanaraa-s of Ramayana were early Hominids, that looked more ape-like but were sapient enough to communicate and cooperate.
#Hindu #mythology #anthropology #totallymadeuptheories

sometimes I wish we humans had tails so we could do even more acrobatics and other cool stuff.
but then I remember how pleasurable it is to rest with your back on the ground, and a tail seems like it'll be such a pain in the ass (literally) for that.

@orekix I wanna say Lojban or something but probably too weird to catch on. Our new AI overlords will make us a new language, fit to our puny human minds, and we shall all learn it.