For me it oozes cringey 2010-era hype about this newfangled buzzword “app”, which also doesn’t even rhyme with “up” except to the obviously non-native developers who clearly thought it did. Etc. We will agree to disagree!

And yet the dumbest name of all, the gold medalist of low-IQ nomenclature itself (Whatsapp) is literally more popular than telephones.

Interesting point and actually quite hard to refute!

Ha. Dumbest name ever but too late to change now.

That’s an original take. But it feels a bit forced. We’re already halfway thru Earth’s allotted quota of 9 billion years of habitability. Life has been here most of that time so it seems odd that nature would suddenly think up such an extreme version of life insurance. Not least because humans look likely to do a better destructive job than at least a couple of the previous mass extinctions.

They’ll collapse their own civilization well before all that becomes possible. Personally, just the idea of Mars colonization strikes me as just cringingly deluded. Forget the hard limits imposed by relativity, even to get something as tiny as a satellite into space requires the full stack of today’s civilization to be up and running - i.e. everything from the food and energy system required to keep 8 billion people alive to the advanced microchip factories. All of this depends on a climate that humans are currently turning upside down and on an ecological substrate (soils, oceans, freshwater, biodiversity) that we’re pounding into oblivion. To anyone who can see in front of them, some kind of collapse is literally inevitable. Forget Mars colonies, we’ll be lucky if we’re eating. A few decades at most.

PS: This comes across as a bit depressing but I don’t mean to spread hopelessness. Personally I’m not a cynic or even really a pessimist. After all, there’s always some way that we can make things better than they might otherwise be. It’s important to be realistic but nothing about the future is inevitable.

Yeah I could eat guinea pig. At a pinch.

I read once that all mammal flesh is roughly indistinguishable in texture and taste. Yes, including humans. Chimps think nothing of chowing on monkeys. The reality is that we’re all extremely close cousins.

It’s basically all just culture, as you say. Enjoy your guinea-pig stew.

Fascinating subject. I seem to be out of the ordinary here. To me it is completely unignorable that crustaceans are arthropods, i.e., close cousins of insects and spiders, which I would never be able to eat. Ergo, I find the idea of eating crabs and lobsters and shrimps just as gross as the idea of eating tarantulas and would never touch any of them.

Similarly, it is completely obvious to me that rats and mice are close cousins of hamsters and squirrels. Hence I find them all equally cute and cuddly.

My guess is that my mind is abnormally literal. In other words I’m probably a bit autistic. Most people are just more socially conditioned than me. Waiting to see what their fellow apes do first, as you put it.

Mostly “showerbadtakes”, yeah.

At last. A showerthought that is actually a showerthought.

Guys - this what a showerthought is, please take note. Thanks.

Good point.

Which raises another paradox: attractive does not seem to be a proxy for appetizing.

At least for most people. Personally I find lobsters creepy as hell and would never even touch one much less eat it.

Yep, that’s the self-domestication thesis. Humans have selected themselves to look young and inoffensive, a bit like how they transformed wild ox into cows and wolves into, uh, poodles.

It definitely explains the ape paradox.

Agreed. I find rodents cute. Rats absolutely included.

Then there’s the dog question. My position:

• huskies, collies, spitzes - cute
• labradors, dachshunds - moderately cute
• poodles, pugs, bloodhounds - not cute (at all)

Ha. Except, jokes aside, I’m not sure it’s true. Obviously this is getting into dangerous territory but, as I understand it, people do tend to go for their own ethnic group disproportionately.

Then again, sexual attraction does seem to be qualitatively different. After all, that snow leopard would go straight to the friend zone if you know what I mean.

Excellent question! I was pondering exactly this conundrum just the other day while watching a snow leopard on BBC Earth. That thing would rip your face off but wow, what a gorgeous beast! I almost ache to pet it.

Actually my pondering went even further. Not only are cats and owls and bears cute, they are much cuter than than our cousins the primates. And it get worse! I for one find that monkeys are cuter than apes, and that our closest cousins the chimpanzees are really pretty fugly indeed. Even the babies. Maybe especially the babies.

What a weird world.

Interesting insight, thx.

I think often people find it easier to write their own code than to make changes to other people’s projects

A rarely mentioned weakness of open source, and it can only be getting worse given the narcissism of younger generations.

I regularly see cases of multiple projects with exactly the same goals. All that duplication of effort just to serve the vanity of the respective project leaders. The wasted potential for good software has to be huge.

What a world to live in where being against first-degree murder is a “terrible take”! But I agree about opinions. Personally I don’t even touch the downvote button.

Suggesting that the cold-blooded murder of an unarmed man is morally indefensible. We all know what I’m talking about.

The underlying system, if you mean the IP layer, is controlled by non-governmental organizations like ICANN. It’s already as open as any system can be in a world of nation states. If someone is censoring you then you can host in another more liberal jurisdiction, or even with a geopolitical enemy like Russia. Sure, your home jurisdiction could still block your site. But this is a problem of laws, it’s not something that has an easy technical fix. Same goes for net neutrality, which is a legal concept not a technical one.

The way to get a better internet is above all to vote for it and lobby for it. Boring but true.