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Someone told me if you are late to a meeting, say “Thanks for your patience”. I liked that and use it often. A Mefi whose name escapes me, when put in the spot. suggested saying “I don’t want to give you my first answer, I want to give you the right answer, let me get back to you”. I also liked that and use it often. What are the phrases you use at work that help better communicate / frame / set expectations / lead / work with your colleagues?
posted by jasondigitized to Ask MetaFilter on Apr 16 at 6:00 AM
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I love books that might be described as "mystery plus." That is, they work as clever, well-constructed, and fair mysteries... but they have a distinctive additional attraction on top of the mystery. For example, The Tuesday Murder Club is a mystery + unusually charming characters and humor. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is mystery + {SPOILER REDACTED}. Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone and West Heart Kill are mystery + narrative self awareness. Can you recommend other examples?
posted by yankeefog to Ask MetaFilter on Apr 16 at 5:48 AM
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“The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” is now available as a free download! Written by Christopher Schwarz and first published in June 2011, “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” is revered by many as a philosophical tome as well as a how-to book. The book includes instructions for building your own tool chest, as demonstrated here by MetaFilter's Own™ and JimCoin™ creator bondcliff!
posted by slogger to MetaFilter on Apr 15 at 8:25 AM
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It is the late 1800s. You are an innovative fireworks manufacturer in Yokohama, Japan, with an increasingly international audience (including, on at least one occasion, Ulysses S. Grant). But how to demonstrate to your worldwide customers what, exactly, you have on offer? Introducing the beautifully minimalist Hirayama Fireworks' Illustrated Catalog of Night Bomb Shells.
posted by nobody to MetaFilter on Apr 19 at 5:33 AM
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The Problem with Adam Savage's Favorite Pencil: Former Mythbuster and MeFi's Own asavage goes on a surprisingly emotional tear about tool acquisition in the maker space, Blackwing 602s, Jeff Tweedy's pencil nerdery (🔔), and the "encheapening the product to increasening the profit" that has befallen his beloved PaperMate Sharpwriter #2. (It's not really about pencils.)
posted by Rhaomi to MetaFilter on Apr 17 at 11:21 AM
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The Haudenosaunee Confederacy is arguably one of the oldest continuously functioning democracies in the world, and greatly influenced the thinking of the founders of the United States. This post is about the argument over just how old it is, why that matters, and what eclipses have to do with it.
posted by evilmomlady to MetaFilter on Apr 13 at 5:29 AM
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There are clear continuities between the two German genocides. Many of the key elements of the Nazi system – the systematic extermination of peoples seen as racially inferior, racial laws, the concept of Lebensraum, the transportation of people in cattle trucks for forced labour in concentration camps – had been employed half a century earlier in South-West Africa. Heinrich Göring, the colonial governor of South-West Africa who tried to negotiate with Hendrik Witbooi, was Hermann Göring’s father.

–From the essay Three Genocides by forensic architect Eyal Weizman.
posted by Kattullus to MetaFilter on Apr 16 at 5:35 AM
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The world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’s oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems, according to the industry tracking organization TeleGeography. The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world’s data. If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function.
posted by the duck by the oboe to MetaFilter on Apr 16 at 5:48 PM
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“So when I started working on the story that turned into All Systems Red, I realized right away I wanted to write an AI that didn't want to be human…I was thinking a lot about what an AI would actually want, as opposed to what a human might think an AI would want…. I think it would want that connection to other systems, that vast, astonishing, multiplicity of vision.”—Martha Wells, from her keynote speech at the annual Jack Williamson Lecture at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, New Mexico.
posted by MonkeyToes to MetaFilter on Apr 12 at 5:28 PM
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Are there blogs like Smart Bitches Trashy Books, but for other genres?
posted by 168 to Ask MetaFilter on Apr 13 at 2:07 PM
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The Etak Navigator "Today, I’d like to tell you about the Etak Navigator, a truly revolutionary product and the world’s first practical vehicle navigation system."[via]
posted by dhruva to MetaFilter on Apr 15 at 9:48 PM
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The Deaths of Effective Altruism [archive] by Leif Wenar is a critical assessment of the effective altruism movement, taking in Sam Bankman-Fried and billionaires, Peter Singer and other philosophers, and GiveWell and the wider network of charities working off effective altruistic ideas.
posted by Kattullus to MetaFilter on Apr 18 at 8:11 AM
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Lately I’ve enjoyed the movies Argylle, Spy, and The Lost City. I think part of what I like is that they’re witty action/comedies that involve ordinary, likeable women going about their routine lives who are then suddenly swept into espionage or adventure. Can you recommend similar non-sexist action/comedies that I might like?
posted by hurdy gurdy girl to Ask MetaFilter on Apr 13 at 9:15 AM
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Gaza in a Million Pieces - Arwa Damon, founder and president of the charity INARA, writes for New Lines Magazine of her observations now that she's able to enter Gaza || Le Monde: Despite promises, Israel still restricts aid to Gaza (ungated) || Washington Post: Crutches and chocolate croissants: Gaza aid items Israel has rejected (ungated) || New Yorker (Isaac Chotiner interview with Yuval Abraham): Inside Israel’s Bombing Campaign in Gaza || Haaretz: Israel Has Declared Record Amount of West Bank Land as State-owned in 2024 || Mondoweiss: ‘Come out, you animals’: how the massacre at al-Shifa Hospital happened || Sydney Morning Herald (12 April): Australian former reporter, now aid worker, shot at in Gaza
posted by cendawanita to MetaFilter on Apr 13 at 9:25 AM
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The two flat “blades” of a feather on either side of the main shaft are called vanes. In living birds that fly, the feathers that arise from the hand, known as the primaries, have asymmetrical vanes: the leading vane is narrower than the trailing one. It stood to reason that vane asymmetry was important for flight. And because fossils of Microraptor and its kin show asymmetrical feathers, some researchers argued, these animals must have been able to fly.

Recent work by flight biomechanics experts, including me, has overturned this received wisdom about feather vane asymmetry. Our research shows that feather shape is largely optimized to allow the feather to twist and bend in sophisticated ways that greatly enhance flight performance. Merely being anatomically asymmetrical doesn’t mean much. What matters is that the feather is aerodynamically asymmetrical, and for this to be the case, the vane asymmetry must be at least three to one—that is, the trailing blade needs to be three times wider than the leading one. Below this ratio, the feather twists in a destabilizing rather than stabilizing way during flight.

Scientific American: Why Feathers Are One of Evolution’s Cleverest Inventions [includes helpful illustrations -- and some truly stunning 4K+ photography]
posted by Rhaomi to MetaFilter on Apr 18 at 6:43 PM
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In the wake of SPD shutting down (previously), here is a books roundup focusing this time on recent releases from small presses.
posted by joannemerriam to MetaFilter on Apr 14 at 8:20 PM
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The prevailing philosophy about public facilities of all kinds is that they must be indestructible and require minimal upkeep, since that is what they will get. Fighting the forces of disintegration is too costly and requires too much vigilance. These are the arguments of a society driven by self-disgust.
posted by praemunire to MetaFilter on Apr 15 at 9:30 AM
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A rather large drama unfolded a couple of weeks ago when it was discovered that someone had installed a backdoor into an installation utility used by much of the Open Source community. Backdoor found in widely used Linux utility targets encrypted SSH connections [Ars Technica] This was found by accident, a worker was maintaining his own code and found discrepancies in computer performance and investigated. How one volunteer stopped a backdoor from exposing Linux systems worldwide [The Verge] This seems to have been largely the work of one online account that spent years gaining trust in the group that maintain this tool. THE OTHER PLAYERS WHO HELPED (ALMOST) MAKE THE WORLD’S BIGGEST BACKDOOR HACK [The Intercept] The Mystery of ‘Jia Tan,’ the XZ Backdoor Mastermind [WIRED] Today, Fedora announced its own systems all clear of this thwarted backdoor attempt. CVE-2024-3094: All Clear
posted by hippybear to MetaFilter on Apr 15 at 10:58 AM
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Librarians have never been a quiet bunch: Information, after all, is power. To mark National Library Week—typically celebrated the second full week of April—Atlas Obscura, fittingly, went into the archives to find our favorite stories of librarians who have fostered cultural movements, protected national secrets, and fought criminals. 6 Badass Librarians Who Changed History: How German Librarians Finally Caught an Elusive Book Thief 📚 The Librarian at the Nexus of the Harlem Renaissance 📚 The Radical Reference Librarians Who Use Info to Challenge Authority 📚 The Women Who Rode Miles on Horseback to Deliver Library Books 📚 A Day in the Life of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Librarian 📚 The Librarian Who Guarded the Manhattan Project’s Secrets
posted by Rhaomi to MetaFilter on Apr 16 at 12:39 PM
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Amazon Go, "a new kind of corner store," that company's futuristic storefront where you installed an app on your phone, and could shop for things just by picking them up off of shelves and walking out the door with them, is being shut down. Some random internet person called "Matt Haughey" described his experience with the store, and how it wasn't nearly as magical as it seemed: as it turned out it was a kind of technological sleight-of-hand, instead of using RFIDs and weight-sensing shelves and other techno-devices, they just had a whole lot of people watching cameras. Another random person on Mastodon points out the whole-lot-of-people part was probably a bunch of subsistence contractors in other countries. A third random person notes, even doing that, the store concept couldn't be made to work. Meanwhile the important gigantic hovering electronic head of Jeff Bezos floats above us all, unmoving but watching, silently.
posted by JHarris to MetaFilter on Apr 17 at 1:24 PM
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[more posts]

The thing is, when we say "science", there are several distinct, though interrelated, things we may mean. There's science as a method of inquiry, which is something anyone can do, though the types of questions that individuals can ask may be limited compared to what large teams with access to specialized training and resources... [more]
posted by biogeo to MetaFilter on Apr 13 at 8:41 PM
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I've said this about "effective altruism" before elsewhere, but: There's a particular strain of technically-competent, ideologically-adrift cryptointellectual who somehow just stops asking questions the moment they've got a mental model that "makes sense" to them. You've met them on the hellbird and they've got a prominent... [more]
posted by mhoye to MetaFilter on Apr 18 at 9:02 AM
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I mean, this isn't exactly a new phenomenon; the wealthy stayed pale when the working class was out in the fields getting sunburnt and started tanning on the beach when workers moved indoors. Wealthy homes were stuffed with decorative tchotchkes and fine china when such goods were expensive; now that everything's cheap, giant empty minimalist homes... [more]
posted by nanny's striped stocking to MetaFilter on Apr 17 at 2:11 AM
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I regularly listen to NPR. I have a shitty commute, and it's the main way I keep up with news. I am a sustaining member of the awesome WABE which gives us great local news coverage as well--one of the only Atlanta news sources to actually cover Cop City from the public perspective instead of the cop perspective. I also used to listen to Tell Me... [more]
posted by hydropsyche to MetaFilter on Apr 17 at 4:21 AM
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You need to tell the pool manager because there’s a good chance this lady will escalate to management with further written or verbal complaints. [view]
posted by bq to Ask MetaFilter on Apr 15 at 7:58 AM
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I'm reading a book on longtermism (involuntarily) and it reminded me of my thoughts on abortion. It's easy to advocate for future humans, as a class, because they don't exist yet and so they can never disagree with you, they always exist exactly as you imagine them. Maybe longtermism is an escape from reality for the EA folks the way that abortion... [more]
posted by fleacircus to MetaFilter on Apr 18 at 10:04 AM
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Please note that this wasn't just Meta blocking a story on climate change, it was Meta blocking a story about their apparent systematic suppression of stories about climate change. [view]
posted by MrVisible to MetaFilter on Apr 13 at 6:04 PM
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Now that law enforcement isn’t going after them, they began to support things like robust police budgets, harsher sentencing laws, and “tough-on-crime” politicians. Translation: Got mine. Fuck you. [view]
posted by Thorzdad to MetaFilter on Apr 15 at 10:34 AM
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One of the main problems with NPR, and the so-called "liberal media" in general, is that under pressure by bad-faith conservative criticism -- but I repeat myself -- they traded the former standard of "objectivity" for the phony standard of "balance," which inherently favors falsity over truth by giving it an equal... [more]
posted by Gelatin to MetaFilter on Apr 17 at 5:24 AM
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Counterpoint, "thank you for your patience" is presumptuous and passive-aggressive American corporate bullshit. I didn't choose to be patient. You were late and forced me to wait. A polite person in that situation would apologise. I like the "want to give you the right answer" spiel tho. [view]
posted by Klipspringer to Ask MetaFilter on Apr 16 at 6:16 AM
64 users marked this as a favorite

I want to add, too, that the entire world tells 60-something women that their lives don't matter, that they should be invisible, and that they don't deserve to take up the space that younger people (especially young men) do. Her exercise needs to be treated as equal to the kid's. The fact that he is on a high school swim team does not give him... [more]
posted by rainy day girl to Ask MetaFilter on Apr 15 at 9:41 AM
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⛧ [view]
posted by majick to MetaFilter on Apr 13 at 11:32 AM
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Oh my god this makes me hate effective altruism even more, something I thought wasn't possible. Where is the fucking guillotine when you need one? Like me a dozen years earlier, Ord was excited by Peter Singer’s “shallow pond” argument. What he added to it, he said, was a way of measuring how many people’s lives he could save. The simple... [more]
posted by Frowner to MetaFilter on Apr 18 at 9:46 AM
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In my home town the youth have a long tradition of vandalizing any public bathrooms to the point of being unusable. The city (of only 13,000 people) spends up to $25,000 a year just to repair the bathrooms. I think there's a lot of things that go into Why Americans Can't Have Anything Nice, but fundamentally someone has to make the first... [more]
posted by Frowner to MetaFilter on Apr 15 at 10:07 AM
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Kiwibots food delivery robots were also just remote controlled by low wage workers. Also, all the people tagging and training AI in Kenya and the Philippines (who also get PTSD from doing it), weirdly left out of many conversations about the topic. Their jobs are basically Winston Smith's job but for capitalism. The AI "George Carlin"... [more]
posted by picklenickle to MetaFilter on Apr 17 at 1:57 PM
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Movie listings were a big earner too, also lost to the internet (remember fandango.com?). Also plain old advertising space on the news pages. People still buy ads in the print editions of newspapers, but print circulation has declined so much that that space is no longer as valuable. While the revenue is still important, it doesn't sell for... [more]
posted by Pallas Athena to MetaFilter on Apr 15 at 2:50 PM
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I'm sorry, but why are we treating an essay published by Bari Weiss as credible? We've seen this play before - person facing repercussions for their actions (in this case, Berliner was facing disciplinary action in the form of an unpaid suspension for breaking NPR rules on outside work) runs to the right wing to feed the grievance mill as petty... [more]
posted by NoxAeternum to MetaFilter on Apr 17 at 12:41 AM
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Uh huh. I can't even get my local supermarket to believe there's nothing in the bagging area. [view]
posted by Melismata to MetaFilter on Apr 17 at 2:14 PM
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You really, really have to admire people who are willing to put their livelihood on the line in this way, especially when tech hiring seems to be in a bad place. There are a lot of connections between the George Floyd uprisings and the present situation, but one of them is that lots of people are mobilizing purely because they hate... [more]
posted by Frowner to MetaFilter on Apr 19 at 7:53 AM
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Housed people: no public toilets, that will just invite homeless people and undesirables! Also housed people: why are homeless people shitting outdoors? [view]
posted by splitpeasoup to MetaFilter on Apr 15 at 10:01 AM
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[more comments]