Jam is mashed, preserves have chunks of fruit. With some fruits it’s hard to leave large china during processing (like raspberries, which break easily when properly ripe), at which point raspberry preserves might have less sugar then raspberry jam.

I went to a party that lasted all weekend. We weren’t drinking or anything else, so I want to emphasize I did all this to myself, completely sober:

We were tossing lightsticks back and forth in the dark; I was barefoot. I leaped up to catch a lightstick; when I came down, my right foot landed fully on some kind of spiny, prickly, thorny plant, and I got a bunch of the pointy spiny bits embedded into the sole of my foot. This was particularly ironic, as I had made a point of pointing out the plant to everyone else earlier and telling them to avoid it.

The toilet backed up and I had to clear it with a plunger that had a broken handle. I cleared the toilet, and also managed to flay about a fifth of the skin off the palm of my right hand.

I slipped on the stairs and wrenched my back pretty badly. The dog ran underfoot and I sprained my left ankle. Something else happened, I don’t even remember what, and I injured my right hip.

The worst part was that I had driven myself and a group of friends to this party, which meant I had to be the one who drove us back: my car had a manual transmission and no one else knew how to drive stick. So envision this:

My right foot, with the spikes still in it, was used for the gas and the brake. My left foot, with the sprained ankle, had to delicately balance the clutch as we drove up and down these narrow back hills. There was no way to balance my weight on my injured right hip, so every movement on the gas or clutch put some torque on the hip - as well as twisting my injured back. And I had to shift with my right hand wrapped like a mummy’s, but the shifting pressure was still on the part of my hand with the flap of skin. And the roads just kept jostling every single injury I had.

It was an incredibly, insanely painful drive home. And it was still one of the best parties I’ve ever been to.

Are they looking meaningfully at you while they’re doing it?

When you check in, just tell the desk that you don’t want housekeeping sitting your stay.

Serious Trouble, by the further hosts of (and essentially a continuation of) All the President’s Lawyers.

Nocturne, by Vanessa Lowe. A podcast about the night, and things that happen during the night. Favorite episodes: Night ways about what ancient people use to do at night and how archeology and anthropology are changing their perceptions; Finding the Void about a guy who lived inside a mall; On the North Face about a guy who got lost while climbing Mount Shasta; What’s Would You Do about the fear of night.

I usually check in on The Daily like once a week to see if anything interesting has been covered.

And This Week in Virology, which I got into during the pandemic. Usually the weekly update on Friday on what contagious diseases are currently circulating, and about half the time their Sunday episode.

In addition to those, consider getting a hypoallergenic mattress cover and hypoallergenic pillow covers. And wash your bed linens more frequently.

Snow or static. It’s cosmic microwave background radiation - the remnants of the big bang.

Well, spez and the COO sold over a million shares. I thought they’d be tied down by some kind of lock-in period.

Are there upgrades that would make it usable - more RAM, switch to an SSD?

Have the vomiting cat(s) been checked out by a vet? Vomiting can be normal, but it can also be a sign of various health issues.

He’s literally trying to build up and stock his doomsday bunker.

I think what they stated was that they spent $400 on R&D in 2023 - you know, the year where, after 20 years of twiddling their thumbs and doing shit-all, depending on volunteers to run the site, and RES and 3rd party apps to make it usable, and imgur to provide hosting, etc etc - the year when they finally had to actually do some real coding.

I’m wondering how much of 2023’s R&D was spurred by restricting the API code, and then allowing certain applications access; having to finally take seriously their decade-old promise to develop mod tools with no planning or preparation; their total surprise at having to provide access to disabled people; and having to update their app. Those are all areas where they were extremely happy to let languish, and which they suddenly had to provide expedited support for after the protests.

The cheapest one is apparently in the town next door. It’s a 3 bedroom, 1 bath, 984 square foot single family home built in 1955, on a third-of-an-acre lot with no HOA.

All the pictures are of the outside only, so I’m assuming the inside is pure shit. However, I also have to assume it’s some kind of liveable shit, because the places that aren’t liveable generally have to list as “0 bedrooms”.

It’s $60,000, in south/central New Jersey. Or $665 per month, which includes 30 year mortgage as well as property taxes.

They said years ago that they only kept one previous version, which is why everyone overwrote and then deleted their stuff.

It’s possible that reddit changed that, but honestly? That requires a level of foresight that I believe is entirely beyond spez. He didn’t foresee AI products, he literally paid all the bandwidth for them to harvest the data, he didn’t foresee changes to API pricing, he didn’t foresee the protests, how long they’d last, or how many people just walked away.

Hell, in the previous big “closed subs” protest they’d never even considered a moderator rebellion: once the mods took the subs private, the admins were accidentally locked out as well - they had to negotiate to get them re-opened while they worked on backdoor changes that wouldn’t break reddit.

I just don’t see them having the foresight to add in preservation code, nor to allocate the database and storage space to keep up with it. I think if you overwrote and then deleted your stuff, reddit doesn’t have it anymore. Of course, it’s still out there, in Google’s cache and the internet archive and all the other snapshots she preservation schemes and the data already harvested for the various AIs, but at least it’s no longer indeed reddit’s control, and they won’t be able to profit from it.

Spez has spent his entire time as CEO chasing the latest tech shiny - reddit crypto, reddit NFTs, reddit video a la TikTok. And he’s always managed to do it after the craze has started to peak. So now he’s chasing the latest shiny, reddit AI, starting a full year after everyone else already released their products.

He’s late yet again, and he’s proven repeatedly that’s he’s failed to understand reddit’s greatest strengths and value. This “reddit AI content” and the IPO is his last chance to get some value out of reddit, and his last chance to make money for nothing because no one is going to hire him in a leadership role ever again. I just wonder if he’s smart enough to understand that, or whether he’s just hoping to get enough money to fully build out and stock his personal doomsday bunker.

For the communities I participated in, I usually hung out in /new, not /rising. There was absolutely hate speech going on: the troll and influencer accounts also hung out in /new, trying to get their comments in early enough to be read by anyone else entering the thread. It’s particularly noticable late at night, when more of the US is asleep and more of Asia / Russia is awake.

This is actually what I think Huffman’s biggest weakness as a CEO is. CEOs are supposed to be forward-thinking, coming in ahead of or on top of the next new wave. But Huffman sees an exciting new tech trend, waits until it gets big and then tries to cash in on it. He didn’t start reddit crypto until crypto was at it’s peak. He didn’t do reddit NFTs until they were peaking. He didn’t try to do reddit video until after TikTok was huge. He only shut the API door after he’d paid all the bandwidth and infrastructure cost to transfer all of reddit’s valuable user commentary to multiple AI companies, including some of the richest corporations in the world. He absolutely fucking sucks as a CEO.

He wants the money for his doomsday bunker.

They don’t. But the dot-com frenzy where people threw money at anything tech-related is long over, and investment firms aren’t going to give lots of money to a barely-profitable business with a long history of bad decisions. Oh, they’ll buy some stock but it’s not going to be the massive frenzy Huffman desperately wants. He’s going to take whatever he gets and work on his doomsday bunker, and reddit will continue to contribute to the enshittification of both the internet, and society in general.

Archive link.