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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 5th, 2023

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  • Ooh! There was an episode of the Past, Present, Future podcast a couple of months ago that touched on this very subject. Tariff policy was set by congress up until the Smoot-Hawley act, which was considered such garbage that they decided that it should be left to the executive.

    Back when it was a congressional power, it was also the source of some of the worst horse-trading, as representatives from rural areas would seek protection on agricultural imports (with low tariffs on imported machinery), while representatives from manufacturing areas would seek to lower food prices and increase the cost of imported manufactured goods.

    Edit: Not saying that handing it to the executive is the best plan, as we can see by what’s going on now, but letting congress do it was also problematic. It’s funny how a lot of us grew up with the idea that no/low tariffs are the natural order, when it’s actually been a fairly short-lived anomaly in historical terms.




  • I’m disappointed that none of them seem to have gone with the random convergence approach.

    Set the three corners of an equilateral triangle. Pick a random starting point on the canvas. Every iteration, pick a random corner from the triangle and your next point is the midpoint between the current point and that corner. While the original point is almost guaranteed not to be a point in Sierpinski’s triangle, each iteration cuts the distance between the new point and the nearest Sierpinski point in half.

    If you start plotting points starting with (say) the 50th one, every pixel is “close enough” to a Sierpinski point that you see the triangle materialize out of nothing. The whole thing could be programmed in about 20 lines of QBasic on DOS 30 years ago.







  • Wow… Indiewire should find someone who reads their own site to proofread their articles.

    If you click on Jeff Bezos’s name, it links to other articles mentioning him, like the 2021 article saying that he would step down as CEO of Amazon in 2022, which is what happened. Yet this 2025 article refers to him as “Amazon CEO”.

    Sure, he still owns a lot of Amazon stock and nobody knows who Andy Jassy is, but getting facts that that wrong is pretty ridiculous.






  • This was my first thought, too.

    I started taking antidepressants a few months ago to treat ADHD-related anxiety and depression. (The doctor suggested that I could try ADHD-specific meds, but pointed out that I’m already a relatively successful adult, so clearly I’ve built coping mechanisms over the years.)

    I’m surprised by how much more rational I’ve become when dealing with stuff.

    I first really noticed it when I was crossing at an intersection and a driver turning right didn’t see me and almost hit me. She slammed on the brakes and waved her hands in a clearly startled and apologetic way. Before the meds I probably would have flipped her the bird and had my heart pounding in my ears for the next half hour as I seethed with anger. Now, my thought was “She made a mistake. I’m fine. She knows she made a mistake and she’ll certainly be more careful next time. It’s okay.”

    That’s not to say that I don’t get angry anymore. I just get angry about stuff that matters or where I can change something. It feels a lot healthier.

    Standard disclaimer: I’m not a doctor. This is not medical advice. It’s just my anecdotal experience. Maybe talk to your doctor about getting tested for depression and/or anxiety. (I had never thought to before this year, because in my youth I was just called “disorganized”, “lazy”, and “scatterbrained”.)