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It occurs to me that there seems to be a big difference between how I think about "human nature", vs. how a lot of other people do.

When people bring up "human nature", whether their view of it is correct or not, they almost always do so from a perspective of "this is how human nature will ruin any attempts at improvement".

Whereas I think of it as "this is how traits of human nature can be relied upon to shape a culture that lasts and perpetuates itself". Which seems to be a much more useful interpretation to me?

I guess I should define the context a bit more: I'm trying to solve the 'holy grail' of theming, namely "how do you simultaneously allow applications to design custom controls that work best for their usecase, while also allowing end users to personalize their whole system in a genuinely expressive (and mostly consistent) way, that can be shared between people?"

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(Unspoken part: without restricting the theme engine to recoloring and such only, and still allowing for structural changes)

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local public library is temporarily closed because a protected bat colony was found in the building. unexpected consequence: my toddler now thinks “full of bats” is a common reason not to go somewhere, and has variously claimed his bed, bath, grandparents’ house, etc, are full of bats

Thinking about software theming and the distinction between style themes (how the UI looks) and structural themes (how the UI is arranged and organized), how these are really two separate things from each other, and how recognizing that separation may allow for designing a theming system that can apply a custom theme across arbitrary applications of arbitrary purpose

Most dutch millers are volunteers, and we are no exception. One of the logs of walnut on our terrain has sprouted a branch, and it would be nice if we can give the owner not only his ordered planks, but a new tree sapling as well.

So I taped a plastic bag the base of the green branches, filled it with a mixture of soil and compost, and watered it. I really hope that roots will develop.

I wonder if anyone has done an analysis of why Old School Runescape is so much less social-interaction-driven than it used to be in the mid-2000s

Warrior: I swear I will have my revenge for the death of my brother!

Elf: You have my bow.

Dwarf: And my axe.

Necromancer: And your brother.

It occurs to me that there seems to be a big difference between how I think about "human nature", vs. how a lot of other people do.

When people bring up "human nature", whether their view of it is correct or not, they almost always do so from a perspective of "this is how human nature will ruin any attempts at improvement".

Whereas I think of it as "this is how traits of human nature can be relied upon to shape a culture that lasts and perpetuates itself". Which seems to be a much more useful interpretation to me?

I recently had a customer survey that uses Net Promoter Score. I assume they've encounted problems before, because it came with a careful explaination that anything scored below a 9 "will be seen as a need for us to improve our service".

This led to my general impression of how culture affects this sort of scoring...

People in the US are looking at what's happening in Venezuela like “Oh, my God! It's so terrible over there! What are they doing?"

Has one person stopped to look at what Venezuela would have been like if the US wasn't trying to undermine the Venezuelan government at every turn?

Like, what do y'all think the CIA does all day?

Another day, another fight with a Linux command-line utility misparsing my arguments

politics 

Should be stated.
Patriarchy does not really respect men.
And white supremacy does not really respect "white" people.
They're toxic, self-devouring systems that are built on oppressing the out group much more than the in group, but restraining them both.

food (vegan), low-salt bread recipe 

Success! Some small adjustments need to be made (forgot to add water in the oven so the crust was too tough, and the liquid ratio was too high in the dough mixture and I needed to adjust that later), but overall I'm very satisfied with the result.

The outcome: a roughly 600 gram bread containing only 2 grams of salt, yet at about 0.3/100gr salt, it tastes slightly nicer than your typical supermarket bread in NL (which is usually around 1/100gr salt), and has a much nicer texture. Without using potassium salt, and therefore kidney-disease-friendly!

The original recipe:
- 2gr dry yeast
- 2gr salt
- 350ml lukewarm water
- 400gr flour
- 1 teaspoon ground fennel
- 2 teaspoons ground cumin
- 2 tablespoons cooking olive oil
- 2 tablespoons oat flakes
- 1 tablespoon peeled sunflower seeds
- 1 teaspoon broken flaxseed
- a bunch of pumpkin seeds

Mix all at once, *except* for the pumpkin seeds, knead thoroughly, let sit in bowl overnight at room temperature (would've been around 10 hours for me), *do not* add sugar or use an oven (dough proofing is deliberately slow).

Next morning, flatten and fold like you usually would with bread. Add some cuts at the top, make a bit wet, and add some pumpkin seeds on top until it looks nice.

Let sit for an hour, then bake it for 40 minutes in a preheated 200C (convection) oven. Add an ovenproof bowl of water in the oven, to keep the environment humid. Beware that it will increase significantly in height!

(Picture is missing the top, because uh, well, see previous post - but the rest of the bread was salvageable, and still nice!)

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in maths and theoretical cs, we’re in desperate need of editors for our books. I can no longer take this amount of bad writing, jokes that don’t land, ridiculous babbles about “smartness”, symbols that were never defined, inconsistent notation, etc.

food (vegan) 

Oops, burned the top because it expanded more quickly than expected in the oven - but otherwise it seems to be a success! It tastes basically like bread, which is the success condition given the low amount of salt

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The first thing you need to know about Elon Musk to truly understand him is that if we taxed the fuck out of him we wouldn't care what he thought about anything.

#TaxBillionairesToExtinction

Something obscure that's fascinating to me as a UX designer, are the many "fan redesigns" of major operating systems and applications like Windows, Chrome, media players, and so on.

They often have UX deficiencies, or don't scale to dynamic and more complex UIs, but that's not the interesting part - the interesting part is how you can infer from them how people are experiencing the "official" UIs, and what they find deficient about them.

It's like an accidental critical analysis of widespread software. Hugely valuable in understanding what makes UIs work or fail for people.

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