the tool, called EpsteIn—as in, a mash up of Epstein and LinkedIn

A better mashup might have been “SteptIn”.

It’s not that the watch is an added vulnerability (there’s no info accessible via the watch once the phone is locked)—it’s just a missed opportunity.

One shortcoming of lockdown mode, as far as I can tell: you can pair your phone and watch so locking your phone will lock your watch as well, but you can’t do the reverse. It seems more likely that a hostile party would get access to your phone first while you still (temporarily) have control of your watch, so being able to lock your phone from your watch would be extremely useful. (Or for that matter, set lockdown mode to trigger automatically if your watch is removed or your watch and phone move to different locations.)

You can have a phenomenon that looks like noise at small sample sizes, but becomes obvious when the size increases.

For one small business, a 5% change in productivity for one day might be business as usual, while for a nation it would be alarming.

deleted by creator

That, and Spain (or whoever else) wouldn’t be coming in fresh off the surrender of Granada, with the attitude that all non-Christian states must be conquered as a matter of principle.

Columbus’ return to Spain.

His failure to return discourages further attempts for a while; and when contact is eventually made, it isn’t Spain in the immediate aftermath of the Reconquista looking to continue its momentum.

Meanwhile, the New World is made aware of Europe and perhaps acquires some resistance to Old World diseases before any larger confrontations.

In the late nineties, I thought the availability of online knowledge would make universities obsolete.

I dunno—on the one hand, I can see where data consent that’s folded into a long user agreement might get overlooked and approved without thinking, and a second verification would be helpful; but on the other hand, the more times users are asked for consent, the more likely they are to agree reflexively to everything.

It seems like a user-configurable setting would be the best solution.

@remindme@mstdn.social 14,000,000,000 years

Saag paneer.

I ate the last one yesterday.

Did you really expect me to resist?

Global Thermonuclear War.

Reflective inner surface that can double as a solar cooker.

Even if your claim were correct… with every infection the pathogen potentially gets better at infecting humans, and you’re giving it another opportunity to improve and spread to others.

Entire species have been wiped out because natural immunity doesn’t always outpace pathogens’ ability to adapt—letting nature take its course has no predictable winner.

Those who benefit from the way the police currently operate are incentivized to preserve the status quo—mental illness and all.

Cucumbers or radishes?

The way Linux treats many things as part of the file system (devices, sockets, etc.) that Windows doesn’t.

Bureaucracy.

I think humans are natural storytellers who rely on the construction of narratives for most of our basic thought processes. But the natural world is inimical to narrative, so we employ narrative worlds whose functioning is adapted to the requirements of storytelling. (Even “naturalistic” storytelling relies on subtle tweaks to the laws of causality and probability, if nothing else.)

So I believe that we can’t make sense of the world without relying at least implicitly on the supernatural, but I don’t believe that it corresponds to anything external to our own cognition.