I switched mostly to using an RSS reader to see the headlines, and then read what is interesting. Plus I follow several writers that I trust (eg. Heather Cox Richardson).

I don't want to get my news from social media.

Everyone is acting like rss feeds aren't still a thing.

Curate your news sources, people.

I use a self hosted commafeed. Super easy to setup and I also follow blogs along with my news sources.

Commafeed looks nice. Can it also auto download a full article and strip any kind of formatting and ads? That's kinda what I'm looking for. And then have an LLM filter on top of that to filter out all the stuff I don't care about.

HCR is social media. She posts to Substack, which has a feed, likes, recommendations and commenting.

Machines are mostly used to count votes. Ballots are still on paper.

Not every state has a paper trail for ballots. It should be required by law, but it's not.

That isn't universally true. Many counties in the US have used or still use touchscreen machines with no paper ballot.

For one thing, why is the text of posting light grey on greyish background? It's almost unreadable on a phone.

So, number of software developers doubles roughly about every 5 years. So if you have been in the field for 5 years, half of the developers will be younger than you, if you were in the field for 10 years, 3/4 will be younger than you. You can do the rest of the math.

I've been working as a developer for 40+ years, so most other developers are younger than me. Although, on my current team there are two people older than me.

As I recall, Assembler was the first "no-code" tool. After all you could get rid of all those pesky programmers who knew all the number codes for instructions. Anyone could write "ADD R, R2". See!

As a comedian once said "They say that alcohol kill brain cells. Yeah, but only the weak ones!"

Who owns the wires?

British Telecom. Most of the infra was laid down when it was a government owned monopoly. When it was privatized and the ownership went into (mostly) private hands, it was required to lease out access to competing networks. I understand several other European countries have similar arrangements. In the UK we have the same for electricity and other utility provision as well. It's not ideal, but seems to work ok and has genuinely driven down prices for consumers a lot.

You need an app to give your seat up to a pregnant woman?! WTF? What happened to manners?

There is a great advantage to an e-Reader (like Kindle) in that you can turn any book into a large print book. As you get older and you eyesight gets worse this is no small advantage, since you can continue reading the stuff you like.

There are some magazines (looking at you New Republic) that we stopped subscribing too because the font is too small to read - I can still see it, but trying to read it causes eye strain.

I wonder, has there ever been a challenge to magazine publishers under disability discrimination laws?

Businesses in UK & USA, AIUI, have to make reasonable accommodations for disabilities. It would be supremely easy for a magazine to forward a PDF copy that a legally blind person could use with an eBook reader or similar.

Actually the health cost really ramp up when 20 or 30 somethings start having kids.