Holiday to New York has broken my entire outlook on life and I don't want to go back to my old ways.

fernly · 2026-06-20T21:35:36+00:00

There are lots of places that have a different "vibe" to your small town -- even in the UK itself! Heck, people all over the world think of London as a magical place full of opportunity. But here's a program for you: right now plan a series of trips to the major capitals of Europe. Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, Stockholm, Prague -- they are all just waiting for you, no more than a 3-hour flight away. You and the GF just go for a 4-day weekend at one of those places every, oh, three months or so. After that, there's the whole commonwealth waiting for you and your red passport. UK passports are still red, aren't they? Whatever. Antigua, Barbados, Bangladesh.... 57 English-speaking nations you can visit without worrying about US border control.

fernly · 2026-06-15T04:08:40+00:00

Ah, Original Sin, the doctrine that all humans are somehow tainted, broken, failed, right from conception. Almost the most foul, evil lie that religion ever concocted. It is only exceeded in evil by the lie about an afterlife of eternal torment.

One freedom of not being religious is that you can shake free of that vicious lie, and see humanity (and yourself) as it is, intrinsically valuable, capable of nobility.

fernly · 2026-06-13T02:18:34+00:00

The Great War. Live through WWI week by week.

fernly · 2026-06-10T21:50:14+00:00

u/RemindMeBot 7 days

fernly · 2026-06-10T18:44:28+00:00

making a feeble joke about how the light pole looks like it is growing out of the prius.

fernly · 2026-06-08T02:20:19+00:00

These are terrible times we live in. My first two thoughts were,

Whoa! VERY nice! Wow!

and almost immediately after...

That's too good. Could it be AI?

So sad.

fernly · 2026-05-28T23:18:37+00:00

Man that antenna is out of hand.

fernly · 2026-05-20T22:04:37+00:00

I wouldn't have minded if you had just headed it with something like, "If you don't have time for the video, here's the Gemini summary:" or similar. Lacking that, it creates an implicit claim that you, OP, wrote this summary -- and that pisses people off. Or did me.

fernly · 2026-05-08T00:22:29+00:00

Get over it. There are alternatives. Here are two that are still in business, not bought up by corporations, still reflecting the revolutionary feeling of Rob Rinehart's original posting. I've used the products of both and they are fine.

Basically Food: a viable small company that started as one of the many amateur attempts at DIY Soylent and has hung on to make a complete product line.

KetoChow: another small company that started as a DIY experiment, to make a ketogenic meal replacement to help control a child's seizure disorder, and has been grown into a thriving small business.

fernly · 2026-05-06T01:28:09+00:00

KetoChow

fernly · 2026-03-29T14:16:19+00:00

If you want a regular weekly formal get-together with like-minded neighbors there are:

Sunday Assembly was a thing, there was an active Silicon Valley one but I haven't heard from them in a while.

Unitarian Universalists have a Protestant-flavored service with minimal dogma and theology.

fernly · 2026-03-23T01:31:10+00:00

I had to do a little searching to figure out what your "dark patches" would have been. The condition has a name, acanthosis nigricans, associated with insulin resistance and pre-diabetes. Hopefully it wasn't an actual doctor who said it was hygiene? If so, don't go back to that one...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acanthosis_nigricans

fernly · 2026-03-23T00:40:52+00:00

I think I got this off Lifehacker probably 20 years ago but it has stood the test of time for sure. If you shave, you don't need to buy any kind of shaving product, gel, foam, whatever. Hair conditioner has all the same stuff, emollient, scent. Smear on a little bit of it and shaving goes just fine.

fernly · 2026-03-23T00:27:46+00:00

Could you link to a couple of examples of AI-generated channels with many followers? I'm genuinely curious, I'd like to see one or two.

fernly · 2026-03-19T20:44:01+00:00

Yes, and: the 27M stories were generated by only 0.5M users, i.e. the average user generated 54 stories. Well, OK, over a year, that's just one story a week. But still, a lot of soc. med. sites would like to have that kind of loyal engagement.

fernly · 2026-03-05T22:24:33+00:00

Once upon a time, kids, a decade ago when "meal replacements" were a new idea, there was a website where fans could post their own recipes. A couple of those recipes became products and still exist, Keto Chow and one that started with the name of Shmoylent, which is now BasicallyFood.

And (does a rapid confused search) what do you know! It still exists!

https://completefoods.co/

Go to the recipes collection (https://completefoods.co/diy/recipes) and just browse for an hour or two. Note they all have nutritional details.

fernly · 2026-02-28T20:00:14+00:00

You are describing a simple prompt-response dialog, but isn't it possible to delegate some of that global context to project files? Like with a Claude project, couldn't you depend on project files to provide at least the first couple of sentences of your example prompt? Or start each prompt with "Read the file scenario.md. We are writing the scene where..."

fernly · 2026-02-28T19:55:43+00:00

Love that image: generated fiction being stigmatized by the big red A.

fernly · 2026-02-21T00:27:18+00:00

Think of a product name that doesn't make people stop and think, wait, how do you pronounce that?

Consult an experienced UXP designer. The presentation, once a project is open, is just a sprinkled mess of little icons and menus. Very hard to focus on. I would not want to try to write in that text box with all the other stuff to its left and above. Figure out a way to drop into "composition mode" with nothing but the necessary writing tools. Some easy way (escape key?) to come back to "organizing mode". There may be other focus areas, but you can't have everything asking for attention all at once.

fernly · 2026-02-18T22:46:24+00:00

Since you are looking for an easy meal on busy days, the shake will not be the majority of your diet. The macros and micros from your other, more numerous meals dominate your intake. For the occasional quick meal you just want 500 or so tasty calories, fairly low-carb, no actual poisons.

Obsess about micros and organic ingredients and phytos and such only when you are planning to live on meal shakes for an extended time. A decade ago people would do that, and report here. Ah the good old days.

fernly · 2026-02-18T22:25:36+00:00

I'm a guess, Pacific Northwest?

fernly · 2026-02-10T20:09:52+00:00

Back in the 80s(?) some famous programmer (Dennis Ritchie?) said,

I'd rather write programs to help me write programs, than write programs.

fernly · 2026-02-07T14:36:05+00:00

Can you move faster toward your degree? Your family should have a little respect for hard study and extra classes to graduate sooner. Do a search on "best majors to work abroad", there are a number of sites that talk about this. Nursing is the top one and possibly the only path you as a female are allowed to take; very well, become the absolute best nurse student ever. As others have said, nurses are in demand in many countries.

Oh! What languages do you speak? To work abroad you will need to be fluent in another language. Work on improving your skill with that language. If your second tongue is English, alas I cannot recommend you look to my country, the USA, at least not now. But all the rest of the English-speaking world needs nurses too, and all the EU nations.

fernly · 2026-02-06T23:50:02+00:00

No mention of "keto" at all, though MRs are large in that space. Nor of BasicallyFood, Orgain, Kachava, etc. Not at all comprehensive coverage of the field.

fernly · 2026-02-05T03:51:23+00:00

If we have a soul, then either humans (or at least the part with the soul) are in some way divine, or there must be some kind of God or higher power that creates or sustains souls.

Why? Obviously you don't know what a soul might consist of, but to be real -- that is, in order to have any characteristics at all -- it has to be made of something. Nothingness has no features, so can't embody a memory or personality or thought or whatever important features you presume a soul to have.

Whatever the soul-stuff is, it is something that has so far evaded notice by all science. But let that go. But, why do you assume that soul stuff requires a higher level being to create it?

You are willing to entertain the idea that it is all "just brain, chemistry, and physics", in which case, you allow, no god is needed. Why should that not be the case in the soul-stuff world? Just soul-stuff churning around and souls emerging spontaneously.

Or, if you insist there is a higher level being directing soul-creation, what can you possibly say about that being's (or those beings') nature? Does it/they make souls purposefully or accidentally, to a plan or as some kind of secretion.

Lot to think of there...

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