All politicians meet with lobbyists. It’s hard to get a handle on the needs of the nation (or state, or so on), and lobbying is how people inform their representatives of that need. Now whether those lobbyists are scumbags or saints, that’s a different question.

They’re still helpful in sorting out a 600 calorie meal that’s going to keep someone on track to lose weight versus a 1200 calorie meal that is going to make them gain weight. Even if it’s not exact, it’s a useful guideline.

Wonder Bread is just gross junk food. Also, if you consult the label again, it’s worse than that. The 5g added sugar is for 57g of bread, so it’s nearly 10% sugar by mass.

There are good brands here. I usually get Dave’s Killer Bread. It still has some added sugar, but there are varieties with fairly small amounts.

Oh, sure, I’ve been there. Am there. And Reddit may have gotten to that point with these features where maintenance costs overtook the costs of removing them.

I was ready to hear something like a story from someone who had signed onto a medical trial and was upset the trial was ending. Nope, instead an absurdly short support period that seemingly is fed by the same culture of replacement over repair that has infected our economy.

Code that exists still needs to be updated and maintained. It interacts with the rest of the code. Sure you can leave it lying around, but at a certain point the technical debt is going to catch up to you.

During the US occupation, the Taliban absolutely did attack civilian targets to further political goals. They attacked everything from restaurants to embassies to a university.

I’m doing a series of conversations/interviews with my parents’ generation to keep a voice record of their stories. As part of that, I’m doing transcripts that start with the transcript feature of Google’s Recorder. It can do some nifty things like assign speakers to individual voices. I have to clean up the transcripts some, but it’s far less laborious than dealing with a 15-20 minute conversation. I can fix up a transcript in maybe 5 minutes.

You don’t need to look hard and long enough. You just need to insinuate hard and long enough, then people will believe it eventually.

Fortunately, I have a Charge 4. And there has been some enshittification since Google bought them up.

Fitbit for fitness trackers. I had one of their smartwatches and never found it useful. The trackers are stripped down versions that do everything I need and have a week of battery life.

What does that even look like as a business model, though? There’s an expectation now that you don’t pay for web browsers. What would a standalone Chrome, Inc. look like?

The most mediocre dining experience (for the money) I’ve ever had was at a restaurant called “Smallwares.” Emphasis on small, it turns out. Case in point, we ordered duck breast, which cost a fair bit. I was picturing at least a fair amount, but it was the smallest smidgen slivered up with a dollop of sauce. It was the same with every dish, high prices for not much food.

Sure there were other places that had worse food. One remote dinner lacked any fresh food, but you can’t really help that when you’re in the middle of nowhere. But never have I felt like I was being fed by Famine from Good Omens.