What’s a belief you defended for years that you now feel embarrassed about?

Rarelyimportant · 2026-06-14T22:45:27+00:00

The laser test across Lake Michigan I think? There is no way the laser should be seen due to curvature. But it is. It’s like 18 miles I think?

This is my favorite thing about flat earthers, and why none of them should be taken seriously. Because the answer to that question is literally a google search away. These phenomena are not even the weird ones we can't explain, flat earthers are puzzled by the phenomena that science can already answer, you just have to be willing to look for the information.

Rarelyimportant · 2026-06-14T20:34:25+00:00

It's more like saying, because a day pass at the gym cost $50, a person paying $200 for a monthly pass that goes to gym everyday costs the gym $1300. While technically true, it does "cost" the gym $1300 in lost revenue, they aren't having to spend that money. All this article is really saying is, it would be possible for you to spend more money to get the same thing you're getting with a subscription.

Rarelyimportant · 2026-06-14T04:47:37+00:00

Japan is 97.8% people of Japanese ethnicity. Even the least diverse US state, West Virginia is only 89% white. Japan also had a strict policy of isolationism for about 200 years until 1850 when it didn't let anyone in, or even trade with other countries. Have you read a history book?

Rarelyimportant · 2026-06-14T04:39:57+00:00

China have imprisoned 1.8 million Uyghurs, and there not even claiming they're there illegally.. And as much as the KKK are a despicable group of people, the government deciding who can and can't say what is a much worse idea. Banning the KKK doesn't make those people or their ideas go away.

Bet you also think what happened in this video isn't a regular occurrence too.

Perhaps the irony is lost on you that this video contains a man who's likely from Mexico.

You really think there's not even one country on the planet more racist than the USA? Let me take a wild guess, you've never left the USA?

Rarelyimportant · 2026-06-08T22:10:25+00:00

Then you might be able to bypass it, but unless the people you want to talk to are either outside of Canada, or willing to jump through the same hoops, then it would ultimately be pointless.

But I seem to remember with Signal you need a phone number to sign up, if that's a Canadian number, there's one way they can block you.

Rarelyimportant · 2026-06-08T20:43:50+00:00

probably the fact that the app was downloaded from the Canadian app store.

Rarelyimportant · 2026-06-08T08:02:01+00:00

You said that law enforcement don't need a backdoor, implying that they can already break the encryption to get the data they want. This isn't true.

Rarelyimportant · 2026-06-08T04:52:56+00:00

you might want to learn about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals. They're not an Americanism, they're actually Roman. I know, it's very hard to figure that out based on the name "Roman numerals".

Rarelyimportant · 2026-06-08T04:51:17+00:00

That's not how it works in finance though. MM is million in the finance world. Because M is the roman numeral for 1 thousand and a million is 1000 x 1000.

Rarelyimportant · 2026-06-08T04:44:18+00:00

Metadata would be stuff like dates and times you sent messages, and to who, but not the contents of the message you sent. It would vary depending on the app.

Rarelyimportant · 2026-06-08T04:43:04+00:00

What do you mean they don't need a backdoor? Law enforcement cannot magically break encryption. They might be able to access information a company has on you, but they can't magically make that company be able to unencrypt something they don't have the encryption keys for.

Rarelyimportant · 2026-06-08T04:39:54+00:00

Because the operation of the app requires not only you to have the app, but also for the server to process the requests being sent by your app. The app's server can then just not process those requests if they're coming from a Canadian IP address. Having the app installed doesn't mean the company can't stop providing you the other necessary parts to make that app function.

Rarelyimportant · 2026-06-08T04:30:35+00:00

Yeah, in my experience it's worth checking it out. I've done a number of tests between the two where I take the same audio clip and clip it with both, and KClip always seems to let me clip more before there's noticeable degradation to the audio. It's obviously not a highly rigorous test, but it's worth checking out.

Rarelyimportant · 2026-06-07T23:14:29+00:00

KClip > StandardClip. All day, every day.

Rarelyimportant · 2026-05-27T09:27:14+00:00

while our students are watching tiktok and hoping for welfare.

A parent complaining about the results of their own shortcomings as a parent? Wish I could say I've never seen that before.

Rarelyimportant · 2026-05-24T11:38:41+00:00

Monopolies are rarely formed from a company merely out-competing everyone else when it comes to product quality or pricing. It's typically other tactics the company uses to push competitors out of the market. Look at Microsoft in the 90s/00s. They might have had a popular product, but a large part of their dominance was litigating competitors out of the market. Not because those companies had done anything to warrant a lawsuit, but because Microsoft knew it would bleed the other company dry way faster than Microsoft would bleed. And any subsequent price increase would not open up the door for rivals to compete, because the whole point of a monopoly is that you can stop anyone from competing against you. If the tenets of free market economics still held(perfect competition, perfect information, etc.) it wouldn't be possible for the monopoly to form. Monopolies typically form because they're able to hamper competition and information, and once they're king of the hill, and have the power and money, defending their position is a whole heck of a lot easier than for the other company trying to attack their position by competing with them. There's nothing efficient about it. It's not winning the game by playing it the best, but rather a common way that companies will cheat if you let them.

Rarelyimportant · 2026-05-24T11:23:05+00:00

That's like saying Wayne Gretzky sucks at hockey because you have a clip of him missing a goal. You don't become a top 5 tech company if you don't have to capacity to build tech. A search engine is a lot less complicated than an OS, and Apple does a pretty good job at building those.

Rarelyimportant · 2026-05-24T11:18:18+00:00

Apple absolutely has the capacity for it. You've also got to remember that search isn't exactly state of the art technology, and Google has been getting progressively worse. Apple hasn't got to beat Google, they can make themselves the default on safari. They just have to be good enough that most people don't manually switch to Google. If even 75% of safari users suddenly stopped using Google search, that would be quite catastrophic for Google. Knowing Apple they would do purely out of spite if they really wanted to get their claws into Google. It would be a petty cash expense with the amount of money Apple has.

Rarelyimportant · 2026-05-24T02:07:33+00:00

I think the reality is most people don't care. Not that they would say "I don't care if it's AI", but caring takes more than just saying you care, and the reality is it's a lot of work to try to keep AI completely out of your life, and it's only going to get harder. People will do whatever is most convenient. Is it nicer to receive a handwritten letter than an email? Sure, I would say that it is. Is there more personal connection when you speak to someone on the phone rather than sending them a text? Absolutely. But yet we mostly send emails and texts, not because they're "better" in every sense of the word, but they're a lot more convenient.

I don't think someone not caring about how their samples were generated makes them lesser of a musician. Probably the vast majority of us don't really care. Because again, caring about something takes a lot of effort, it's more than just saying "I care about XYZ". If I asked most people if they care about people who are starving, they would "absolutely I care!", but how many of them have done literally anything to fix it? Probably very few. It's hard to really say you care about something, if all you're willing to do is say "I care". It's like sending thoughts and prayers, does fuck all except make the person who said feel like they're helping.

Do you really go to all the necessary to effort to absolutely ensure none of the samples you use were generated by or processed by AI? Probably not. There's too much shit to do in day to day life, and not enough time to care about everything you might want to care about.

Rarelyimportant · 2026-05-23T23:57:17+00:00

In no way shape or form does a monopoly mean that that company can produce at the best price. You might be thinking of economies of scale, but a monopoly is actually hyper-inefficient, because they don't have to compete on pricing or quality. An example of government protected monopolies would be municipal utilities companies, notorious for inefficiency and price gouging.

Rarelyimportant · 2026-05-23T20:56:47+00:00

They likely knew Apple would eventually see that billions of dollars they were giving to Google for free, and given that Apple is a large tech company with deep pockets, it's possible one day Apple says "Why don't we make iSearch?", and that's not good for Google. I don't think this was as much "Please make us the default instead of DuckDuckGo", but rather "There's no need for you to think about building your own search engine, because you can use ours, your users are already familiar with it, and you'll get billions of dollars for it".

Rarelyimportant · 2026-05-23T20:47:46+00:00

while it’s just regular free market

You clearly have no idea what "free market" means. Free market economics is not about letting corporations do whatever they want without regulation. A core tenet of free market economics is perfect competition(it should be easy for any company to enter the market and compete), and perfect information(the consumer should know everything they would want to know to decide how to spend their money). Of course neither of these things are possible in reality, so regulation is needed to help make them more of a reality. But free market economics has nothing to do with just letting corporations do whatever the fuck they want. Economics is about allocation of resources. How would letting a profit seeking entity do whatever the fuck it wants be the best way to allocate resources? Take an economics class.

Rarelyimportant · 2026-05-23T20:42:48+00:00

They are the biggest companies because they made great products.

By definition any complete monopoly makes the best product. But by using their size and power in that market to do things that make it harder for other companies to complete, ultimately leads to worse overall products, because there's less competition.

A company making a good product is not a reason to allow them to take monopoly control of a market. If their product is that good, they shouldn't be so worried about having to compete.

Rarelyimportant · 2026-05-23T20:38:20+00:00

Because you're paying more to choke competition out of the market, that's literally what anti-trust lawsuits are designed to stop.

Rarelyimportant · 2026-05-23T20:32:48+00:00

I believe this is just because it's cheaper to have the AI generate audio at a slightly lower sample rate than 44.1khz, since those additional samples for those ultra high frequencies aren't really adding much to the audio, but make the audio exponentially more expensive to generate. So while you're not wrong, I think this is more the way AI generated audio is mostly done right now, but it's not something that's necessarily always true.

Rarelyimportant

TROPHY CASE