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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • I think I’ve heard that the USA federal gov is bigger than in the past, as in controlling more of an American’s life than in its history.

    My first thought was they this is really two separate questions but the I realised a stat like this might answer both:

    the number of public sector employees as a percentage of the total workforce.

    1. If we view government’s role as intruding on our freedoms and controlling our lives (I don’t), then the more people they employ the more able they are to assert that control.
    2. Its the ratio of the workforce that have their working hours dictated by government, its hard to be more controlling that that.

    (Its not considering the non-working population, and with variations to lifespan, unemployment, etc that may be relevant … I don’t know.)

    And international comparison is available here:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_sector_size

    For a 30 year historical comparison of US federal data see figure 1.1 here:

    https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60235





  • Its a fine line. I try to offer a (legal) ad free experience for my son as a matter of principal. But he asked to watch Naruto and it was only available on crunchyroll.

    I signed up and the crunchyroll PlayStation app didn’t seem to have a functional search, recently played or favorites list. The best we could so was pick “all titles” and then scroll page by page alphabetically until we get to “N” then we had to remember which episode we were up to and the navigate to that season/episode. Then it would occasionally crash so we would have to repeat the process to resume playback. It probably only took a few minutes by it felt like an eternity of busy work. Needless to say we canceled that shitshow and torrented, if they are a major publisher and they can’t beat the convenience of casual privacy they are in trouble.

    Personally its the convenience and UI that does it for me. I’m not using anything fancy but I have a USB HDD plugged into my home router this is accessible as an SFTP and UPnP media server any device on my network. It won’t transcode or anything but for >95% of content it will play fine on any PC/TV/phone/tablet in the house. The biggest issue is tracking viewing progress which can be an hassle is we do it manually instead of having Netflix/amazon/whatever track it for us. If crunchyroll can’t do that much then they don’t offer any advantage over their free alternatives and not worth an $x per month fee.








  • As physical tech:

    • we have lever door handles at work and wheel and axle door knobs at home.

    As digital tech:

    • Comma Separated Values as a notation predates computers. Then CSV has been uses as a computer file format since at least 1972.

    • The implementation has changed as filesystems evolve but the basic directory/subdirectory/file model of data storage and the associated tools ls/dir, cd, rm/del have been around a while. ls has been known by that name since Multics in 1969, but can trace its linkage back to listfon CTSS in 1961.

    Anything that predates copy/paste is doing alright.


  • And given that, most of the population lives in northern hemisphere, is there a body of dad jokes and culture tropes related to the fact that “we’re different”, or is it just too cringe and boring.

    Nothing anyone wound mention but there are some ironic Christmas clothing like a shirt with Father Christmas with sunglasses and cooking a barbeque, or a rashie with a knitted sweater pattern.

    We are also aware that if a foreign studio announces a game or movie with a season for their release window they probably mean the northern season. Our studios tend to just use a month instead.