I had heard about the online discourse in this area, but I’m glad to hear that something has come of that movement.

Fucking hell, that must have been terrifying

This is hilarious. I’m deeply sad that I don’t think my irl friends would appreciate this joke, because I want to share it with everyone.

(I am personally irked by vibe coding because some assholes in my life have been real smug about how much better of a programmer they are than me due to vibe coding. )

I recently used Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/) as a static site generator. I found it easy to use. I personally used Gitlab pages, because I didn’t feel confident hosting on my home internet (didn’t want to inadvertently cause issues for my housemates when I’m still learning this stuff).

The nice thing about static sites is that it’s pretty easy to find free or extremely cheap hosting for them.

Very cool.

Got any plans for this coming Halloween?

“Some people say 100% cotton thread breaks easier than blend or polyester. So far I haven’t had any bad experience with cotton threats though.”

Cotton thread is just objectively weaker than polyester thread, but I’ve never had that be an issue while sewing.

And in terms of the thread tearing when it’s sewn into a seam, sometimes that’s a feature, not a bug: sometimes it’s better to have the seam blow out and need to be resewn than for expensive or delicate fabric to tear. The right thread for the situation is always relative

Seconding someone’s advice that kits are a bit rubbish. The only things you need are needle and thread. Start with a multi pack of needles, and observe how they’re different. Different needles may differ by: the thickness of the needle; whether the tip is sharp or blunt; how large the eye of the needle is; how long the needle is. Different needles will have different roles, but it’s so easy to get bogged down in complexity, so just get an assortment and discover as you go. Part of learning is building tacit knowledge around what the right tool for the job is, so just give it a try and feel free to try other needles to see how they feel. Personal preference matters…

My main advice on hand sewing needles is to invest in high quality ones, because they’re much nicer to use and last longer. For perspective on what counts as “high quality”, my current ones that are my favourite cost me £4.20 for a pack of 6. That’s expensive compared to a supermarket multi pack, but not excessively so. These ones were particularly fancy, by my standards (Clover Black Gold), but they’re a useful benchmark as being about as fancy as you can really get. John James is another good brand. If these aren’t readily available where you are, don’t sweat it — just use this as a benchmark to see what the rough equivalent is where you are.

A pin cushion is useful for storing needles temporarily, but you don’t need to buy this. You can make one as an early project with some small swatches of fabric and some scrap paper stuffing.

I strongly recommend a thimble for anyone who is going to do significant amounts of hand sewing, because it makes it much easier to build a rhythm and sew neat and fast. It feels clunky at first, but once you practice, it makes things far quicker and easier. Unfortunately, most people’s experience of thimbles is of ill-fitting ones that probably came in some kit. You need one that fits comfortably on your middle finger without falling off or squeezing too right. A simple metal thimble will do, and they’re cheap, but it can be a faff to find the right size. The sizing is sort of standardized, and usually printed/engraved/debossed on the thimble, so you can use that to ballpark if you have some ill-fitting thimbles around. Otherwise, it’s best to go to a craft store and try poking your finger in some thimbles to find one that fits.

I don’t have good recommendations about thread. I got started using generic machine sewing thread, which you’re not meant to do, because it’s worse and harder to use. I find it hard to tell though, because by the time that I got specific hand sewing thread, I had enough skill that I had my own snobbish preferences and specific projects requirements. You don’t need a multipack of thread though, because that’ll be more likely to be crappy. Pick a colour that matches most of the stuff you wear/will be repairing (for me, it’s black). Also get some thread in a contrasting colour, because sometimes that’s useful (such as for temporary lines of stitching). You probably want some cotton thread, and also some polyester thread. In general, repair like with like: so polyester thread for synthetics, and cotton thread for cotton or other naturals. Beeswax can be nice for reducing the friction of the thread, but that’s not super necessary.

I worry that my advice may overcomplicate things, when that’s the opposite of what I want to convey. If there’s any recommendation I could give you, it’s to just get something and start. Hell, if you feel overwhelmed by how granular this is and are at risk of not diving in, then go for a kit if it helps — just don’t spend too much and know that the lesser quality will give you a worse experience. However, the most important thing is to just get started. You can upgrade your stuff or buy specifics as and when you need them, or you feel you’ve outgrown your existing tools.

You will botch repairs and need to redo them. Sometimes you will make it worse than what you started with, but that’s part of learning. However, the sooner that you start to tackle the simpler repairs, the sooner you’ll have the proficiency to be making all sorts of repairs and alterations. I give you this advice as someone who accidentally became proficient in sewing: I dove in and spent a long time being mediocre, and I still feel mediocre at it, but people regard me as being quite skilled. There’s no cheat code, but to take at crack at it.

I got it laughably wrong

I remember way back when I was still intimidated by the command line, I was having issues with a video, and the only info I could find was on using ffmpeg to do some conversions directly. I laugh at the memory of me being nonplussed at trying to launch ffmpeg and expecting a GUI to pop up.

I am glad that I spent some time getting to know ffmpeg directly. There’s been a few times where knowing that it was ffmpeg under the hood helped me.

Eh, that’s a lot of work. It’s no wonder why there’s such a large “Malware as a Service” industry nowadays

This is delightful

I would press the button because I’d be super curious at how strong the shock would be. My guess would be that it would be quite a mild shock, because it wouldn’t have gotten past the ethics committee if it was going to cause harm to the average person. That curiosity would lead me to press it at least once.

But also a big aspect that I feel they’re not considering in their conclusion is that agency plays a huge role. When I was a kid, my brother was curious about what it was like to use my uncle’s diabetes blood glucose monitor, and my uncle offered him the chance to try it.

After my brother and my mom tried it, they asked if I wanted to try and I was not keen, because I don’t like needles. My brother then tried to force me to have my finger pricked, and I became increasingly upset at the coercion (and the threat of physical force). My mom thought that my reaction was disproportionate, and asked why I was making such a big fuss when it barely hurt at all. Being forced to do something is so much worse than having the freedom to choose to do it to yourself.

It’s like forcing a cat into a box. If you just leave the box out, there’s a decent likelihood the cat will sit in the box of its own accord. If you try to force the cat into the box, then you will likely not escape unscathed. Choice matters.

I’m in this image, and whether I like it is irrelevant because I have fully committed to the bit.

My view is that genocide is not just the eradication of a culture — for instance, one of the widely accepted definitions of genocide includes the forced removal of people from an area, which isn’t necessarily the eradication of a culture. You raise an interesting question though, about why genocide is bad. Honestly, I can’t answer that question because much of my view here is based in the deep sense of moral wrongness I feel when I think about the blanket eradication of a people.

I suspect that the “blanket” part of things is what I most object to. There’s always going to be people who fall through the gaps, the question is who we’d rather fall through the gaps: would we rather have war criminals escape justice, or murder people who don’t deserve it. We get to decide which side of caution to err on, but the problem is that it’s not a 1:1 ratio.

To use an example from a completely different domain, in my country, there is a lot of harmful rhetoric around people who receive social security benefits, especially disability benefits. Even though benefit fraud is extremely rare, this rhetoric (and the policies that result from it) lead to extreme levels of bureaucracy to ensure that a handful of “benefit scroungers” who are not entitled don’t receive money, at the cost of huge numbers of vulnerable people who are entitled falling through the gaps. People have died because of this, and the number of people harmed is far higher than the reduction in benefit fraud (given that levels of that were already so low).

I get that when we’re talking about such egregiously awful acts that are happening today, it’s a completely different situation, but the blanket killing of people in the way you describe feels to me like an overly retributive approach that will not lead to lasting peace.

I understand what you are saying by highlighting past times where justice was not done, and I see how those past failures have continued to cause strife right through to the present day. I don’t know what would have been a more appropriate approach, but I agree that more needed to be done.

That being said, I can’t ever feel okay with the extreme approach you describe. I realise that this may well be a naive view, because I know that a big part of why I feel this way is because I need to believe that people can be redeemed. I’m not saying that everyone can be redeemed — “true justice” may well involve the execution of people who are responsible for these atrocities. However, for the large number of Zionists who merely hold reprehensible views because it has been taught to them from a young age, I need to believe that people like this can change — I cannot bear thinking about what that would mean if such change weren’t possible. Whether we call it genocide or not, I don’t want to live in a world where mass murder is okay.

To cap off this comment, I want to say that I really appreciate your comment. We disagree profoundly, and I suspect that neither of us will have changed our mind by the end of this. However, part of why I wrote this comment at all is because I felt like your comment was made in good faith and was earnestly engaging with my points. Even if we don’t see eye to eye on this topic, I appreciate that we’ve been able to have this discussion

Things are dire enough that I can’t even fathom what peace would look like, but I don’t believe that genocide can be an answer to a genocide.

I realise that this may seem like a naive view, but based on what I have learned from anti-zionist Israelis, I think that there are many Israelis who are, in a way, also victims of Zionism; fearful, traumatised citizens are easier to funnel into the Zionist cause, so Israelis are subject to pretty extreme propaganda from a young age.

We need to hold war criminals accountable for their crimes if we want things like human rights or international law to ever have meaning again. However, there are a great many people who haven’t committed any such crimes, yet hold abhorrent views such as actively being in favour of the ongoing genocide. I fear that eliminating all such people would only serve to fuel Zionism in the long term.

That sounds like you’re doing TDD, albeit informally.

This quiz was stressful. Like, there were so many times when I knew I was being cued up for a trick question, but I still fell for it.

I think that Linus becoming less of an abusive asshole over the years has been a positive development, but I wouldn’t mind the return of the old for this event

I’ve not used it, but I’ve heard a lot of good things about Helix

Perchance do you have autism and/or ADHD? I ask because I experience the same thing as you do, and for me, it feels like it derives from my autism/ADHD. Like, sometimes the first cue that I am severely dehydrated is that I get a headache. I get a similar thing with hunger, where I could legitimately go for multiple days without noticing I’m hungry if I don’t get reminded that food is a thing.