Pihole runs on a 10-15 dollar computer (raspberry pi) and blocks anything you want, and is free as in freedom software. It is also zero cost.

If I needed to say something in a two item list and wanted to say that the list could work either way, I would say something like,“meat and potatoes or potatoes and meat, either way” so I would be restating the list in the opposite order. But I also use the words vice versa. I just noticed that people say it when they want to sound smart. It’s not like it’s only said in order to sound smart. There are lots of phrases that are short, succinct, and have a very specific situation where they are applicable. These are the phrases that people have a tendency to use to punch up their sentences.

Milquetoast, vice versa, vice-sa versa (sic), erudite, illucidate, confusing size for importance (saying big meeting instead of important meeting), commensurate, je no se qua, anything in Latin, anything in another language, latent space, probability space. We use lots of techniques to try to punch-up our perceived intelligence, neurotypical people do it sometimes because they have a tendancy to associate station in a hierarchy with “good traits” like intelligence and use these smart sounding words to try to project authority… ? Maybe? Sometimes I use smart sounding words to talk over/around people when I don’t want to engage them for whatever reason. People after weird. I think it’s easy to see when people are dumber than you, and much harder to see when people are smarter that you; especially the degree to which (to which, being another smart sounding word particle. Particle when used to ike this, another smartness showing phrase.) they are smarter than you. My rule of thumb is that if someone’s dumb, that’s easy for you to tell, but if you can’t tell that they are blatantly dumb, they are likely to be at least close to you in intelligence. If they seem smart, they are likely smarter than your best case scenario guess (they are likely smarter than you think). Everything goes out the window when you start talking about people who learned English as not their first language. Also acronyms.

I think it would be a few months of Mortal Kombat on the off-roads to interstates and at all kinds of junctions as the assholes on the road fight each other to the death. After these guys (it’s always dudes) get out of the way, there will be a long period where statisticians say loudly over and over again that getting a licence before the age of 26 is the most dangerous thing a young man can do. They will run campaigns about it, with Republicans somehow convincing people that the safer thing to do would be to get the 16 year old boys in the country driving as quickly as possible. The higher up Republicans will be saying that the men who are getting into Mortal Kombat are the better drivers and that the ones that die are worse at driving and manning, so the roads are safer as a result of the Road Kombat Accord (RCA), especially for men, even more so for young men. The lower down Republicans will act like the RCA is a great honor to get to fight in and that Road Kombat is how our ancestors have done it for generations. Liberals will be sweating and wringing their hands while weakly citing the statisticians. The Republicans will Uno reverse this line of thinking into a no-brain slogan by the name of, “trust 'Ole Statty” so that liberals are afraid to tell people to look into the statistics for fear of getting told that they are in the pocket of 'Ole Statty. Republicans will tell liberals that they are in love with, “'Ole Holes”, glory holes that Ole Statty is said to frequent. Liberals will then get confused at this bizarre line of attack on their heterosexuality even though they don’t believe that homosexuality is negative or deviant and so all efforts to reverse the RCA will end. Most men would just sigh and not get their driving licenses until they turn 23, with the daring ones only waiting until 20. This would settle into a constant, relatively few, Road Kombats in the end; just a constant statistic of young white trash + minorites getting killed along with a bunch of 20-something’s. Most people end up assuming that the deaths were unavoidable and that there is no way to stop them. People state the stats as if they are the natural order. When people point out that the all-cause road deaths are lower in countries without Road Kombat, they will be treated as unpatriotic and ignored, becoming crackpots in the eyes of the many.

Let’s take the opposite approach: look at all the top echelons of all past societies, assume that this subset of people was the most free to live in any way that they so desired, then count how many of these people did sex work. I think that we can safely assume that the amount of people that willingly engage in sex work is zero.

I am curious about this. Would you please discuss it further? I like the idea of mental models that can be used in useful ways, or programmed in some way. The method of loci comes to mind. I have a mental representation of a semi permeable membrane that helps me intuit about which way osmotic pressure will push fluid in a given system. Some other useful mental models: SCP cognitohazard (to think of/perceive a cognitohazard is hazardous), mental models of triangles are useful for estimating load angles when rigging heavy machinery, tenth thicknesses are a useful model to determine how much radiation shielding is needed for a given radioactive source of x rem strength. Mental models can be very powerful tools, and the best part is that they have a very low cost of replication, being information. They exhibit the property of medium independence, being able to be replicated as a series of interactions that serve as the holding media of the information. Your brain holding the mental model of the item is an example. I have mostly pondered the mental models relating to straight lines and closed regular geometric forms. Help me ponder the orb.

I always use this command as $rm -fr and read it as remove, for real

I also only knew the Stein’s;Gate reference!

Cream soda. I had a plastic dinosaur shaped cup to drink from one summer and was required to keep it the entire time. I drank a 2 liter of cream soda over a couple days then every single other thing I drank from it tasted like cream soda. Water, milk, other soda. For a whole summer. I don’t drink cream soda now. Weirdly enough, my brother, another dinosaur cup haver from that summer, loves cream soda.

For me: get enough sleep and/or do exercise. Getting 9 hours is my ideal but I settle for 7 more often than I should. As for exercise: running, hitting the heavy bag, jump rope, rowing, weight lifting, swimming, walking, VR boxing (got too sweaty for it to be a long term thing), rock climbing; all these things have been good over the years or whatever you want. Cortisol builds up in your system and exercise breaks it down. You can’t be stressed if you’re exhausted. I think of the two as shielding and loading. Sleep increases my shielding from stressors and exercise decreases my baseline stress load. The two together are the actual answer, in my opinion.

You try’na sell that laptop whenyour get the other one?