Alex Vranas @Alex@vran.as

Fond memories of the Windows XP days, running through the PCs at Best Buy, opening Windows Media Player, playing "Like Humans Do" by David Byrne which was included with every copy of Windows, cranking the volume all the way up, and fullscreening the visualizer.

Those were excellent days. It's a shame it was before smartphones, because I would probably have a video of this.

Just renewed my Sustainer membership with @calyxinstitute.

I don't know how I would survive without my little uncapped, unthrottled 5G hotspot.

I mostly work from home, and especially as the weather gets nice, it's invaluable to be able to go anywhere with my laptop and still get connected. No need to stare out the window on a sunny day wondering when I can end my day and go outside. I can just do my job at the park.

Say it with me everyone: "Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump"

I honestly didn't think he'd get his ass handed to him this hard. It rules!

Looking to spice my kitchen up.

What's a local (USA) food product that you can't live without, that can be bought online (Nationwide or beyond)?

Mine is "Hot Jawn" hot sauce, made in Central District Seattle, where I live. It's $10 and it goes great on everything: https://www.allthejawns.com/

I am pretty sure that @KEXPMusicBot leverages this same API for what they're doing.

I have already done a little bit of analytics on the data, and found ~600,000 unique tracks. Looks like there's maybe 5% junk data just looking at random samples.

Every play is timestamped, so I suppose I could do some year-by-year breakdowns of what #KEXP played most. I have 2006-2023 fully captured in JSON format.

It is also classified by show, but I haven't figured out the key for the show IDs yet. Could have fun with that data, which also looks to be available via the API.

So I noticed that the "now playing" info on the KEXP website comes from a paginated API endpoint that let's you see previously played songs as well as the currently playing track.

It was kinda neat to poke at it to see how far back I could go. You could just keep rewinding to see all the tracks that aired going pretty far back.

And just how far back was that? 2,650,000 tracks, all the way back to 2005.

I love finding little secret info holes like this. I scraped all that data up to play with.

Ladies and Gentlemen, America's 6th most liberal state:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/vermont-governor-vetoes-bill-to-restrict-pesticide-that-is-toxic-to-bees-saying-its-anti-farmer/?utm_source=RSS&utm_medium=Referral&utm_campaign=RSS_all

I love it when Outlook doesn't auto-refresh the date, but does for some reason auto-refresh the time, showing me in my calendar view that I was supposed to be an an all-hands meeting 30 minutes ago (that was actually yesterday).

I love panicking for no reason first thing in the morning.

The #Apple "Crush" ad would have done better in the 90's. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzAo9HzOgtQ

So next time someone dumps some ridiculous "just my opinion" statement, follow up with a "why?", because they'll likely go on to prove that their opinion wasn't worth respecting. Opinions, even pure opinions, can be based in BS and discarded.

6/6

But what if someone answers "Vanilla! They don't want you to know this, but chocolate is made from geriatric dog feces from farms upstate where they send old dogs. Cocoa beans aren't even real, wake up sheeple! Chocolate is just dog shit!"?

Immediately you understand that the opinion of vanilla over chocolate in this context is based on an easily debunked conspiracy theory. That's enough for me to at least determine that this opinion is invalid, as it is rooted in a clear falsehood.

5/6

Following up with "Why?", and get might neutral answers like "I prefer vanilla because I find chocolate bitter", or "I prefer chocolate because it is richer than vanilla", or even "I don't know, I just like x better than y". None of these are invalid or wrong. They're still solidly in the realm of pure opinion.

There's no belief here to be challenged, only subjective statements of preference that extrapolate on the original question.

4/6

But what about a pure opinion, like the answer to the classic question "Do you prefer chocolate or vanilla". There are only 4 real answers to this question (Chocolate or Vanilla, or less frequently Both or Neither), and none of them are based in disprovable belief.

Or are they? What if you followed up with the question "Why?" - would the answers still meet the definition of pure opinion?

3/6

Take for example, a political opinion like "Universal Basic Income will make most people stop working".

This is far from "pure opinion", it is basically a hypothesis. The only way to prove it right or wrong is to test it, and absent a controlled test we can discard the opinion as baseless.

That's good enough for me to call an opinion wrong. Claims require evidence. For this example claim, there already exists some experimental evidence to the contrary.

2/6

I've been mulling over the question "can an opinion be wrong?". It's an interesting question to answer.

It seems dependent on what kind of opinion we're talking about. If the opinion is pure opinion, like an aesthetic or other personal preference, it seems pretty ironclad, but opinion rooted in belief can definitely be debunked if the beliefs are demonstrably untrue.

1/6

Never let yourself fall into the trap of defending a freedom if the person begging the question hasn't offered their explanation as to why the freedom shouldn't exist.

"I am happy to offer a rebuttal to your reasoning for banning x" is a great way to force a conservative troll to give up that they have no valid arguments. They wouldn't start with questions if they had answers.

Conservatives fighting their dumb culture wars love the question "Why should x be allowed?"

The only acceptable answer is "Because we live in a free society and nobody has presented a rational, truthful, constitutional, or democratically agreeable reason for why x should be banned."

We don't live in a country of allowances, we live in a country of freedoms, and the burden of answering questions on whether or not something should be allowed lies with those that wish to implement a ban.

Deleted my Lemmy account. It's a solid Reddit alternative, but it's a little too much like Reddit now.

I mean, it's nice to have an ad-free federated Reddit alternative with numerous third party frontends, but it just feels, you know, full of Redditors...