not so much a costume as just me being hot in a slightly more goth-inflected direction. we got one group of trick-or-treaters quite unexpectedly and they said "whoa what smells so good" (it was the hot pot)

Me: You ever think about how amazing consciousness is? Like, how everything beautiful in the world exists not just in itself but also in the reflection in the minds and hearts of every single person who appreciates it?
Zandra: Except for Jim the Philosophical Zombie.
Jim the Philosophical Zombie: I deeply appreciate beauty! ...as far as you can tell 😉

speaking of Windows my computer has developed a delightful little quirk where it hisses and pops over headphones but only if there is not a Windows settings window open. I discovered this by opening up the sound settings to try to fix the hissing and popping and succeeding but not in the way I had intended

Bruno Dias posted 18 October 2024 on azhdarchid.com

Microsoft is basically discontinuing Windows. What will happen, then?

First, it just won't run on the majority of hardware that currently runs Windows 10. This isn't just, like, ancient hardware; I have a desktop gaming PC that is perfectly fine to play current-gen AAA games on; it's what I played Cyberpunk 2077 on and that was totally okay. But somehow it doesn't meet Win11 requirements because of the CPU; it has a Ryzen 5 1600X in it, a CPU from 2017 that is apparently still actively being manufactured.

[...]

Second, win11 is unsecurable, because they implemented a feature (recall) that is just constantly screen recording everything you do on the computer, creating a sort of one-stop-shop for compromising literally anything. It functionally means that you can't be sure your computer hasn't, say, saved a password in plaintext (effectively) just because you had the 'show password' switch flipped once.

Those two things make win11 untenable for probably the majority of its users. Hardware compatibility will stop a ton of people on older or lower end personal machines. Individuals, small businesses, the public school in your town that hasn't had money for new computers in five or ten years. Recall being a major security flaw will, I fucking hope, give pause to a ton of institutional users. Is a computer with Win11 even legal to use in some restrictive settings like government offices, militaries, or hospitals?

…

Shel Raphen posted 18 October 2024 on shelraphen.com

We have really been struggling with this at work. The advantage of Windows over Macs used to be that it was highly customizable and excellent for Enterprise systems with a lot of users. It also used to have cheap and free licenses for "learning institutions" which is a category Microsoft has slowly been shrinking to include fewer and fewer institutions causing already under-funded public institutions to have to spend exorbitant amounts of money on windows licenses that they can't even use because the Recall feature is a violation of federal laws regarding computer security for certain public institutions. It's totally a disaster. We've had brand new windows 11 machines for our patrons to use just sitting in the back for nearly a year now because our IT department can't figure out how to essentially hack windows to comply with federal security regulations and every time they get it usable, a new update reverts everything because in Windows 11 you can't customize which updates you accept it's all just a bundle. Our IT guys are also just complaining that the ability to make the computers locked down enough to be for public use really does not exist in windows 11 in the way it used to in older versions of windows.

…

I've been worrying about this as well. I consider myself at least moderately a Linux sicko—I've had at least one daily driver Linux desktop consistently since before college, although most of that time it's been my work device—and…

gonna run an rpg with two guards one of whom always lies and one of whom always tells the truth. whatever the players ask one will say "sorry, I'll be right with you" and the other will say "I don't have to answer your fuckin questions"

I have spent too much time in Manhattan to have a hope in hell of answering this question accurately. Sometimes a random hotel room or whatever is on the 80th floor and you barely notice

I take pride in my cocktail mixing. I've put in a lot of work into honing my judgment of flavor combinations, learning how to construct an effective cocktail recipe, and building a stable of excellent ingredients. Whenever anyone comes to visit my house, I do my best to give them a beverage experience that's perfectly tailored to their desires, whether it's sweet or bitter, punchy or mild, alcoholic or not. Although sometimes experimentalism takes me in a direction that is not worth repeating, by and large I believe the drinks I make are excellent.

But excellent is not always what's called for.

Liz and I used to love going out to bars. Our signature move was to take off work early of an afternoon, show up just as the doors opened around 4pm or so, and just shoot the breeze with the bartender during the easiest hours of their shift. Bartenders are great conversation because they're always up to something else in their lives, and the best ones also care a lot about the craft of serving people just what they want. We'd stick around for a few hours, get some snacks, maybe order dinner if the bar served it or head out for pizza, and end up home by 8pm feeling like we'd had a full night out.

All that ended, of course, in 2020. Other than a few mostly-outdoor visits during the vaccine honeymoon^[1], we haven't been back to a bar since, and every day I miss that experience of lazily sipping on the latest Negroni variant while merrily chatting with someone who an hour ago was a total stranger to me.

For Liz, that experience was wrapped up inseparably with the particular flavors of happy hour, during which bars served cheaper drinks off a special menu to draw customers. Happy hour drinks are usually well-known classics such as a Manhattan, and they're usually substantially less fancy than a cocktail bar's primary menu. They'll often use only "well" ingredients, the inexpensive stuff that the bar buys in bulk to form the backbone of cocktails that are then made more flavorful with higher-shelf ingredients.

So when that's where Liz's mood takes her, I put away my high-end vermouth and adulterate my usual mixing whisky. Sometimes an excellent experience calls for mediocre flavor, and I try never to let my pride get in the way of mixing the right drink for the moment.