Sports betting screws extremely male.

what a funny Freudian slip for skew.

They get screwed alright.

Strange New World feels like TOS. Picard was amazing for season 3 (and, lord knows, most ST gets better in the later seasons).

It is also not really appropriate for HN.

Fuel prices is appropriate content for hacker news if EVs are appropriate content for hacker news. Just like electricity price is appropriate content.

What's appropriate for HN is decided by the attention of HN, no matter what you or I personally think or prefer.

There will always be people leaving companies because they don't believe in them anymore.

It seems unwise to dismiss whistleblowers.

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!O0R5!,f_auto,q_auto:...

I assume these companies are backed by the Chinese state.

Aren’t American AI companies drawing billions in federal contracts? Not to mention the federally-sponsored pushback on foreign competitors?

Too many times in human history we have decided that $GROUP was not fully human, did not have a full mind.

This is properly overkill, but that is literally what erroring on the side of caution is.

Sometimes I am convinced that there are no good products and so all advertising must happen for bad products.

I mean how often do you see an ad for a product, buy it (not even from the ad itself, maybe from a recommendation from a friend) and you are happy with the product and think the ad was truthful?

Advertising stopped really working on me as an adult. You just get burned too often with overly advertised products in the past and you get cynical with all of them going forward. I guess I just don't really buy stuff much at this stage of my life beyond necessities. I got hobbies with gear, but I already have all my gear, and know what I am looking for already with any new gear and have a good sense of enshittification.

Right and left has little meaning in modern politics. What is a bit more concerning is the allegations of getting money from Russian.

As for a resurgence of the nazi horror: their leader is in a mixed race lesbian relationship.

It took me more than a week to go through the first chapter in the first Harry Potter book.

It took me 4 days to finish the rest. This is because the pacing was wrong - the first chapter should have been the last.

Yeah same. I recently read the whole series to my son after he had begged me to stop after a couple of pages about 2 years ago. I told him: just keep your mind open for 100 pages.

The start is so cold, and weird. You can only feel the warmth and beauty that is coming on your second read, and part 1 takes some time to pay-off. What I like about Harry Potter is that many things are not what they seem when later looking back. It's clever like that.

On my own, 20 years ago, I couldn’t stop after starting. Sure the first chapters are a bit boring and different from the body of the books, but I have always given books about 100 pages to grab me, never consciously though about a Volta though, just almost always started to enjoy books after some time.

The follow-ups in a series can be enticing because of part one, but sometimes, as I had with 3 body problem, they disappoint so much or are so different that I just stop.

I've got the opposite problem with "Infinite Jest". I have had a hundred pages left for several years. I just need to sit down and soldier through those to say that I have read the bloody thing. It did not grip me.

I’ve had that as well haha. I have read many books for about 50%. I try not to feel guilty about it. Glass half full, right?

I started as a kid with the second book, as it was the only one in the bookstore on that day

Really? I thought the first Harry Potter book was very engaging. The second book had more dry spots for me.

Oh, for sure. It's phenomenally engaging. The main issue is that the first chapter is essentially a fly on the night sky, watching the events that happened on the day that Harry Potter's parents were murdered.

Super cool, but absolutely meaningless the first time you read the book because you don't know it yet.

I think chapters one—sorry, chapters two and three is mostly Harry getting his letter and the various hi-jinx that Uncle Vernon goes through to avoid the owls finding Harry at increasingly improbable addresses where somehow the owls still find Harry.

Then Hagrid shows up and explains to Harry that you are a wizard. And for 13-year-old me, that was off to the races.

isn't the first chapter like 10 pages?

When you transfer other people's thoughts. On this board, we are engaged in pursuits where the truth matters. A lot of writing is about showing that you belong to the right in-groups. That is better done by repeating their talking points than sitting down and coming up with an earnest way to show that you agree.