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Not the OP, but I'll try to unpack it for you.

Reading online, listing to public discourse, etc. these days is like taking the Tide Pod challenge; people feeding you inedible or even toxic garbage that superficially looks like candy. If we fed others actual food with the same care we employ when producing "food for thought", we'd all be, at best, very, very ill.

When compared with what people wrote in the past (especially through a survivorship bias filter, where the best writing is preserved longer and distributed more widely) what we produce today seems crude and disgusting.


Thank you for putting it this eloquently.

Even stranger, for me, is the current prevalence of collective shunning, the so called cancel-culture, that is triggered by the most diverse reasons, but seemingly never buy the negativity and toxicity of the discourse. It is always lone individuals leaving because of that. But as soon as another reason - political, cultural etc. — is added, there is a collective exodus and condemnation. twitter/x is good example.


The innovation here isn't the generation of ridiculously small micro-currents from raindrops (we've seen that before) but the use of expensive carbon fiber materials (that don't rust) to do it.

"Instantaneously" in this instance meaning "for a fraction of a second" -- specifically, the time between the drop hitting and it bouncing/reforming into a bead. Probably (back of the envelope) for on the order of 0.1 seconds.

It wasn't always this way. Comedy has deep, deep roots as a channel for speaking truth to power. Only in recent decades does it seem we've discovered that you can flip the parity on both aspects and run it in reverse.

Totally agree with your larger point, btw.



I'm going to steal that line. Brilliant!

> Evolution does not work maximizing individual success.

Yes it does. In fact, unless you want to get nit-picky about intra-gene, inter-allele selection, that is _exactly_ what it does.


That's called a constant.

That’s not quite the word I was looking for, since a function returning a random number isn’t a constant, and also doesn’t depend on it’s inputs.

If we're talking "proper math terms", if it "returns a random number" it isn't a function. In math, the value of a function can't change unless the arguments change. If you evaluate it repeatedly with the same argument(s) you'll always get the same result.

Argggh! Seeing “tell—tale sign” when it should be “tell-tale sign” is even worse! The point isn't to use punctuation, it's to use punctuation properly!

Have you ever noticed some people can't even use basic punctuation like question marks.

No, I haven"t?

Sure'ly you must be jok–ing.

No; I shan/t[sic].

Ärh yhü sh'ure ah-bou't þat?

    Blot out, correct, insert, refine,
    Enlarge, diminish, interline;
    Be mindful, when Invention fails;
    To scratch your Head, and bite your Nails.

    Your poem finish'd, next your Care
    Is needful, to transcribe it fair.
    In modern Wit all printed Trash, is
    Set off with num'rous Breaks⸺and Dashes—
― Swift, Jonathan (1733). On Poetry; a rapsody

That's an intentional overcorrection for humor

I know. It still grates on my nerves.

I totally agree!

When I was growing up, I saw plays also use it like this:

  The two are in a room.
  -- Some guy says this
  -- The other guy says that
You just don't see em-dashes used like they used to -- and it shows!

They used two hyphens -- instead because typewriters don't have em dashes —.

Sure, but that's not what I was talking about :)

This use in dialogue is common in Continental European languages, especially Romance languages. I think it's also common in English among writers who were influenced by other European languages?

Which languages are you talking about? It looks unfamiliar to me.

Here's someone talking about an example in French: https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/fr-em-dash-usage.364...

I believe I've also seen it in Spanish and Portuguese.


Brazilian here. That is indeed the standard way dialogue is represented in literature. We call the em-dash a "travessão".

I think Romanian uses that too and it just occurred to me that "linie de dialog" is not dash, but em dash.

IIRC Joyce was a fan.

"In protest, I wrote [1] a plugin to convert all hyphens in this blog to em—dashes. Even ones that really should just be hyphens."

I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Related and perhaps interesting: https://mathstodon.xyz/@mjd/114730157688607856


Here's another one: "I can't be bothered to use em-dash?"

Why highlight seniors then? The same factors apply to younger patients. The only explanation that makes sense is that "seniors" is a valuable ad word for the market this clickbait gibberish (or rather, "tossed factoid salad") targets.


Seniors are almost all on Medicare and have obesity-related health issues more frequently than young people.


> Medicare covered it for treating Type 2 diabetes but not for weight loss

> [...] to Bucklew’s surprise, her Medicare Advantage plan covered it even

> though she wasn’t diabetic, charging just a $25 monthly copay.

> [...] Then her Medicare plan notified her that it would no longer cover

> the drug [...] With coverage denied, Bucklew became part of an unsettlingly

> large group: older adults who begin taking GLP-1s and related drugs [...] and

> then stop taking them within months.

This feels like it's really straining the facts to jam them into a narrative, then mostly fails to construct one. Is it an article about drug side effects? Insurance fraud? Health benefits of GLP-1s? Medicare policy?

Strangely, it feels like something that would actually have been more coherent if it had been written by an LLM.


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