Yeah, this thread cannot be a representative sample of any population. I mean, I guess I would be surprised if “users of an open source, decentralized, federated link aggregator” was a representative sample of anything. Where I live, I see a couple people wearing masks per week, and I work with the public, I’m out all the time with friends, idk. I’d see masks if they existed in my area, so where I live they’re gone.

It’s a phrase used in a few different ways, but the main one is that if there’s a need to specify an exception, that indicates the existence of a general rule. Wikipedia gives the (good) example of a sign saying “No parking, Saturday 8.30am - 1.30am”. The fact that an exception has to be described for when parking is disallowed allows a driver to make the inference that parking is generally allowed.

I think EternalExplorer is saying that the degree to which people with masks stick out on the very rare occasions that you see them, the way they need to be specified as something other than the default, just makes it even more clear that the general case is that masks are now absent from public life in their city.

I’m in the US and I don’t know the last time I saw someone wearing a mask outside of a medical setting. Most still don’t even then.

All I know is that I’m in the same situation and the gmail mobile app works, so there’s something you can do.

I was gonna say, I tried it a couple months ago and I’m pretty sure it hadn’t been changed since when I was using it in like 2012. I thought a theme might help so I checked out the available themes, and the “popular” ones were ones that felt like they were from back then too. Everyone remembers Firefox / Thunderbird themes from back then: frosted glass, photos of space, flames, lots of gradients, themes that look like wood for some reason, that gross red text on black-white gradient background. It was like the entire app was aesthetically trapped in the early 2010s, even the community’s themes.

I sometimes forget how many different ways Foundation has been published. By the first book, I mean the first compilation from like 1951 just called Foundation. It’s got five stories, most but not all of which had been published before. It starts with Seldon getting exiled in “The Psychohistorians” and ends with the fall of Korell in “The Merchant Princes”.

Yeah, I’m just saying it’s not bad, deliberately or otherwise. It’s deliberately a lot of things that you’re parsing as bad but work for, idk, certainly the vast majority of people who watched it, critics and audiences alike.

Jeez, won me back at the last second there. I don’t particularly like the first book, but I thought the sequels were maybe the worst sci-fi I’ve ever actually sat all the way through. Never read the prequels.

I’ve seen a lot of people mad that the Apple TV show isn’t a faithful adaptation, but I don’t think they really had any choice. The first story in the first book has the strongest hook of any of them, and kinda has to be where you start. The sequel books are basically not adaptable by virtue of being borderline incoherent. So that leaves you with more or less just the first book, which would already be a complete mess to adapt faithfully because you’d have to completely restart the show over again and shift POV to Salvor after the very first episode.

Rise of Skywalker is barely a movie. It feels like a reddit post written by someone mad at TLJ.

I think calling Mandy so bad it’s good is a massive misread of what Mandy was trying to do. It’s a funny, over-the-top movie at a lot of points, deliberately.

Related to the second one, I made a batch file that opened a whole bunch of pictures of cows in paint, then opened a copy of itself, then looped, so that infinitely many cow pictures would open, and it would open exponentially more of them per loop as time went on. It would usually bluescreen a school computer in about 15 or 20 seconds. Did the same folder icon thing.

I put it in my student drive as a landmine to protect myself after I had told a lot of people that the admin had fucked up and all students were able to read and write to each other’s drives. This had rapidly become bedlam, so I hid all my stuff in a maze of hidden folders and shortcuts that had copies of this cow file as dead-ends.

Unfortunately, people who ran into this cow file thought it was cool, so they started dropping it into each other’s drives to blue screen each other’s computers. Eventually, the school admin figured out what was happening and fixed the privileges, so everyone stopped being able to write to each other’s drives, but they could still read. Weeks later, when searching for games in someone else’s files, he accidentally triggered the cow file, crashing his computer and apparently losing dozens of hours of unsaved work.

Since all they’d copied was a shortcut, it was still pointing to a file in my drive, so I was the one who got in trouble. Which is fair. For months my computer privileges were taken away lol