This must vary by region. We get paper bags with a reflective liner. They’re re-usable if the super adhesive they use for the label stickers doesn’t require ripping the bag apart to open it, but they’re definitely intended to be disposable. Sometimes they just use regular paper bags and let our stuff get warm. It seems random whether they stuff the bags to the gills or have a single item per bag. This happens with both Fresh and Whole Foods.
I don’t have to imagine the offense of others to take offense to slurs intended to denigrate them. If I tell you not to use the n-word in my presence I’m not doing it for black people. I’m doing it for me. I don’t want to hear that shit because it offends me. The entire mindset that would think it is okay offends me.
A slur applied to anthropomorphic programs is the same mindset to someone who really believes the programs are experiencing, quite different from “rust bucket” being applied to a car they know doesn’t think and feel. While I can’t quite get offended about it, it does make me wonder if they’re not using other slurs because of the socially unacceptable nature of those slurs rather than because they’re not awful people.
You see, I believe that cars with enough mileage have a soul. My car definitely has grown a soul. Yours might be a rust bucket for all I care. And yet it has a soul of its own.
Programs also have souls. Especially the little well-crafted programs which are works of art. Their authors took a part of their soul and put them into code, and you can see it in the way the code is written and in the way the programs work. They are not anthropomorphic, and yet they have a soul.
A clanker is anthropomorphic in a way that an advanced enough mimic in a dungeon that looks like your ideal waifu is anthropomorphic. It will infect you the moment you get kissably close to it. It subsists on egregious acts of copyright infringement. It’s a parasite that seeks to destroy a part of your brain and replace it with itself, making you quiver in pain each time you try to think for yourself, and the pain stops when you let it mimic your thinking while paying its creators per word-chunk it outputs.
The clanker seems anthropomorphic enough for the people it has infected, so they get offended to the point of blind rage when someone points out that no, this is its mimicry, and that it doesn’t actually experience things.
When I need to write something, and I have a computer, and something is inconvenient, I can quickly (well, within minutes, maybe 30 of them) alter it to my liking, and return to writing.
When I only have a pen and paper (which I used extensively for writing at school), many things may be inconvenient, but there's no way to fix it. This may turn into a source of a low-key stress, and interfere with my writing much more than tweaking a computer would.
I use Emacs, an ultimate tweaker's tool, for writing every day. Last time I had to tweak something in it was a few weeks ago, and it took maybe 2-3 minutes. It's a small price to pay for a tool that just does what you need, when you need it, with zero mental load, and zero frustration.
For my two main uses pen and paper has two opposite effects. For creative writing it is freeing because it isn’t the last stop but I don’t have to worry about format or placement or anything. I can just go. Typing has a sort of “technical” feel for me, probably due to code, email, and to some degree comments.
For notes during study pen and paper are constraining and force me to organize the thoughts in my mind first and then commit them. Mistakes needing to be corrected here is good: It reminds me what I misunderstood.
But, like the sibling poster, the writing goes onto the computer for later editing.
My thoughts are so all over the place that I've settled on 3x5 note cards. It also makes the transition to the computer much easier, because I can re-arrange them in a way that is somewhat organized before taking a picture that gets transcribed
You might want to check out Scrivener (Mac and Windows). I use that in lieu of note cards. The cork board function lets you re-arrange text and media to your hearts content and then compile the final output to Word, PDF whatever. It's designed for non-linear writing.
The point here is imho that you intentionally remove the computer from the path (in some part of your work) if you want to achieve some focused deep work (in case that you aren’t coding ofc :)
I agree with this. It's not that the digital tools don't exist, it's that my best think gets done when I go for a walk with nothing but a pen and a stack of blank 3x5s.
At one point I had a physical filing system, but now they get converted to digital pretty quickly since I don't have to pay 10/hr to get it done. I also usually keep a daily card, and sometimes a few weekly/current lists on the note cards and just carry them around until I'm done with them.
It's mainly the capturing of the ideas that I prefer writing physically. After that, being able to move them around my digital system makes them most useful because I can have dynamic views that surface priorities and related notes without having to physically sift through the stacks.
I am similar. If I physically write a couple times a week, my hand adapts though. It's a skill like any other.
Fountain pens are nice too since you don't need any pressure.
My writing looks a lot better if I just force myself to slow down and be deliberate, but honestly it's a constant battle. I'd definitely benefit from practicing penmanship on it's own.
Worth mentioning - for a long time, I found my handwriting messy AND my hand would tire out. When I was about a teen-ager, I decided to write in call-caps, very clearly. I've been doing that for a long time now, and worth giving a try.
teen-ager? call-caps? Cursive (several hundred years old) fixes this.. all-capitals(caps) or block-caps makes writing more laborious, possibly easier to read (which is why it used to be requested on hand-written forms?)
I don’t see how the death penalty adds anything here. There are already significant consequences. People who commit such crimes either do not expect to face the consequences or don’t consider the consequences at all.
Sure, and that might as well be said for any punishment at all for them. When you take mass human life you should not expect to stick around for your cronies to bust you out of jail in 10 years when the political winds have shifted for the worse again.
I am opposed to the death penalty in all cases, for a variety of reasons.
However, currently the court has to at least find that a murder has occurred or in some cases child rape (sometimes with conditions like a second offense). These are categorically different offenses that are unlikely to occur during the normal course of a public servants job, except perhaps if police kill someone there may be a question whether it was murder.
If “violation of trust” is given the death penalty than any normal act in the course of a public servant’s service history could potentially be used to hang him by questioning the legitimacy of the act.
For the record, I am also against the death penalty. I just thought it would be a funny Venn diagram to keep it for the existing crimes, but only if the perpetrator is also a public servant. But better abolish it completely.
I think that if the pattern exists, it is strongly muted for GenX because everything we are seeing (and more) was virtually promised to be here “any day now” during the hay day of science fiction media. If anything, 2026 in the real world isn’t futuristic enough compared to what was “supposed” to have happened by now.
I played Shadowrun. I am both disappointed but mostly glad it is not happening according to that game universe history! I do want cool cybereyes though...
I don’t know what you consider to be an advertisement but just off the top of my head:
Many (most?) streaming services advertise their own shows and other content ahead of other content you elect to watch even on ad free subs.
Hulu’s ad free subs have some shows that show unambiguous ads.
Prime and others muddy their interfaces with others’ “channels” and content that you can subscribe to through their service. They also show other content you can purchase or rent through them that aren’t part of your package. These things are included in search, viewing UI lists, and banner ads.
A poster commented that he read parenthetical remarks in an old-timey voice (I’d guess the trans-Atlantic accent). I love that idea. But for me they read almost as if you’re saying them under your breath (or a character is breaking the fourth wall and talking to the camera quietly). I read them but my brain assigns them less importance.
Em-dashes keep everything on the same level of importance in my brain.
Commas don’t feel as powerful. To be fair to the comma I’d probably do this:
Em-dash matches how I speak and think: A halt, then push onto the digression stack, then pop. So I use them like that.
Edit: I accidentally used an em-dash in the word em-dash. Interestingly HN didn’t consider changing the dash to be a change in my text so didn’t update it. I had to make a separate change and take that change out for my dash change to stick.
For me, a sequence of sentences, strung together by commas, is more in line with how I output thought, and better matches what I believe my speech pattern is.
...I'm fired, aren't I? I'll see myself out.
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