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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: April 25th, 2026

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  • Infrastructure is important, and walking back from these gigabit targets is awful. There is no replacement for fiber. We all deserve to have access to fast internet.

    But to yell at a cloud for a moment, if we’re being honest most people should not need gigabit. I know everyone is a gamer now, but let’s forget about bulk downloads for a moment. For normal browsing most people should not need much more than about 12mbps. 12 mbps is fast enough to have two 1080p h265 streams running concurrently. And yet, when you try to use the modern web at that speed, it’s a terrible experience because of all the adtech bullshit that gets crammed into every page. When I measured this Ars article it was 6.53MB. That is, to borrow a yardstick from a blogpost I read recently, long enough to fit 3 or 4 of the great Russian epics inside. It is bigger than the shareware version of DOOM, big enough to fit the entire python standard package library documentation. For one article.

    Don’t let this cheapen the FCC being chickenshit and captured by specific perverse corporate interests, but publishers have sold us a bridge when it comes to the modern web. Web3 was supposed to fix all this with micropayments. I’d gladly pay whatever my paltry share of Ars’ CPM they expected to get out of my pageview, wouldn’t you? But cryptobros turned it into a get-rich-quick slopfest and then it died.











  • You’re right that it would be ideal to simply wash the dishes before they accumulate, but I often find myself in situations where I don’t want to do dishes before and after I cook. Moving the tub takes 5 seconds, washing the accumulated dishes might take 5 minutes, and if all you wanna do is rinse some berries and make oatmeal before you run out the door taking 5 minutes to do dishes might not be on the table.

    Ultimately the dish tub and keeping the sink clear is a strategy I learned to avoid domestic blockers. Regardless of what everyone else in the house is doing, I need to be able to use the sink without doing a bunch of extraneous labor first. And getting mad at them for being lazy or messy or whatever might feel good but it doesn’t solve my problem. There are edge benefits like the fact that I never find accidental mold in my sink, which is nice from a hygiene perspective, but mostly it’s that I want to be able to use the damn sink when I want to use the damn sink.





  • A dish tub is a tub in which you put your dishes. It’s like a bus tub but smaller. It’s useful because it stores dishes outside of the sink, and you can also use it to presoak. They’re honestly pretty killer if your apartment doesn’t come with a double sink. Someday I will have a triple sink, but for now I use the landlord special and a plastic tub.


  • Common was a bad choice of wording. ‘Not uncommon’ probably would have been a better way to put it. It’s more prevalent in certain cultures, often brought by immigrants from less economically developed regions. There are historical reasons for this, and we could get into the sociology of it, but the point is that where these people’s parents or grandparents came from, rinsing meat made practical sense. Industrial agriculture and cold chain logistics remove any benefit to washing meat, but culture doesn’t turn on a dime.

    Important to note that “washing” chicken sometimes involves a brine and citrus soak, which is closer to marinating if you ask me but they call it washing the chicken. Washing under the faucet is just a bad idea but people do it and they mostly don’t die. Another argument for breaking down socioeconomic barriers, I suppose.


  • “I don’t need a seatbelt because I don’t crash my car” ass argument

    I also don’t put knives in the sink. You know who does sometimes? Roommates, girlfriends, children, and guests. Keeping the sink clear ensures that you have visibility into what goes in. I’ll use the sink as a temporary swap space when I’m cooking or w/e but after that everything goes in the dishwasher or the dish tub.

    You might someday find yourself bleeding over the sink and blaming someone else for being an idiot. I will not.