I use a custom filter in uBlock Origin to hide the recommended sidebar in YouTube (all except the video of what’s next). Even so, there will occasionally be a video in search results with a topic that might be interesting from a channel I don’t normally watch.

I’ve learned to right click and open the link in a private browsing window so that my search results (and that one remaining sidebar thumbnail) do not become poisoned by that one channel/topic.

It’s insane that clicking on one video makes YouTube think that I’m now obsessed with that channel. And, it’s going to fixate on that for the next few weeks.

While I do not think that the company needed to modernize the site’s UI, it baffles me that their anti-spam tools are so rudimentary. Most searches yield irrelevant keyword-bombed results, and, such results tend to be nearly identical listings.

I had yearned for a viable Craigslist alternative for years. Sadly, Facebook Marketplace won. I don’t feel comfortable searching for anything due to the fact that Facebook will inevitably use my queries to further profile me.

This sounds good, but I suspect this is only applicable on a surface level due to the fact that the decision making will involve an extensive amount of stem-based analysis.

But that got me thinking, if an intelligence goes around collecting species, how would they keep their specimen populations from evolving? How could they possibly keep so many specimens alive over the eons?

Perhaps their strategy would be to take a vast amount of genetic samples and preserve those species as data. Rather than abduct dozens of T-Rexes for some zoo exhibit, they take the genomes from tens of thousands of T-Rexes and make a population snapshot. After they depart from Earth they could clone or create as many as they want, as needed.

That being said, the toll roads keep expanding so that they can continue to be operated by the private company that built them.

This is an arrangement the state government is quite happy with, because they do not have to budget for the maintenance of those roads and they are able to collect taxes on the revenue collected by the toll authority. Converting those toll roads would cause a spike in expenditures and a drop in tax revenue.

Therefore, there is a perverse incentive on both sides to keep the toll roads from being converted into public ones.

I have no idea if this sort of thing was prevalent in the past, especially in the UK. But I wanted to chime in about why several toll roads that were supposed to be paid off thirty years ago are still going strong. I suspect that 500+ years ago “build toll road, hand toll road to the public” was a lot more straightforward.

I see no malice in the decision to make peace with the fact that no mere mortal is capable of putting a dent into the level of suffering around the world as a whole.

Living one’s life reasonably and not being a burden is remarkably beneficial to society. At the very least, it’s one less unhappy and broke individual.

Eusocial Security?

The defendant fears that the news coverage of his case means that no woman would ever be interested in him again. Once the judgement and the payout is announced he finds himself being constantly approached by gorgeous women.

They seem to have distinctive two-caw sounds for “human sighted, food is about to be thrown”, a “food is here, no sign of the human” and finally, a “human, we’re here, you coming out to throw us some scraps?”

They make plenty of other calls too, but I haven’t been able to associate those with anything I’ve observed them doing.

I may just be over anthropomorphizing, but I’ve recorded them and those three dual-caw calls sound subtly different (to my untrained ears). I’m certain actual ornithologists have looked into this. Chances are, though, I may be suffering from “I want to believe” syndrome.

My employer embarked on a yearlong effort to standardize job title, roles, and responsibilities.

The first problem was that every manager inserted responsibilities specific to their own teams into the expectations intended for the entire organization.

The result is that no one is realistically expected to fulfill this laundry list of duties, but, this extensive list can now be weaponized if they want to PIP or fire someone. We also suspect that this will be used against us when asking for raises or promotions. All bullet points are weighted equally. I may get called out for not mentoring junior developers, even though there are none on my team.

Second, the entire job description itself is far too flowery - even accounting for corporate puffery. It reads like a wishlist.

Corporate is thrilled, but I sense nothing valuable came from the effort.

We wound up trudging through the stack. In order to lighten the mood I told I joke I heard from somewhere else:

“We should shuffle the pile and throw half of them in the trash. I don’t want to hire unlucky employees”

I have no idea how to go about implementing such a thing, but it would be cool if someone picked up the idea and ran with it.

All I received in reply was “Thanks!”.

I was thrilled. I earned an exclamation point from an academic who would never deign to use such punctuation lightly.