Andrew Dupont

_The Athletic_’s blurb about why the F1 race in Austin is fascinating… I agree that, _if this sounds interesting to you_, you should probably be at the race, you weirdo

I have gripes about the design of the universe: 12½ years isn’t enough time to spend with a dog. We lost ours yesterday morning and this one might take a while to walk off. barbara-and-andrews-personal-updates.ghost.io/saying-goodb...

The tragedy of it is that utilitarianism is liberating in its simplicity (just try to reduce the net amount of suffering in the world!) and deserves a framework that _doesn’t_ serve to launder practically any selfish act into being moral

TEAMS: Look, I get it. You don’t want to be using Teams; you wish you were using Slack. Here’s a preset to make all my keyboard shortcuts match Slack’s. ME: Thanks! A pleasant surprise. But… how do I move up and down the channel list via the keyboard, like in Slack? TEAMS: I don’t know what that is

RETAILER: Your thing shipped and here’s the tracking number COURIER (when given tracking number): I don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. This “tracking number” is no more meaningful to me than if you had simply mashed on the keyboard COURIER (24–36 hours later): Yeah, this is a package

The meanest thing anyone was willing to do to Dolly Parton was cast James Woods as her love interest in a movie. Don’t know whose call that was, but I hope they apologize to her as part of a daily ritual

OK, let's see what the Nextdoor folks are talking about tod—

“Always more taxes, yet nobody ever talks about cutting waste.” — someone who posts a lot on Nextdoor but apparently never reads anything from the 500 neighbors who also talk about cutting waste

Is this a “normal” thing to post on Nextdoor? Sure; I’ve read far stranger. Is this a “normal” thing to post on Nextdoor in response to someone else’s lament that a beloved local restaurant is closing? A harder question to answer.

In no other community have I ever encountered such a sizable tranche of users that seem to have a baseline opposition to everything — as if they’re being made to use the site against their will.

As AI inserts itself into how humans produce things with computers, at what point do we ensure that nobody misuses “its”/”it’s” again? I would’ve guessed that’d be way closer to the beginning than “brainrot deepfake TikTok engagement bait,” but maybe that’s why I’m not a “thought leader”

Years ago, if someone had said “come up with a startup idea and I’ll fund it,” I would’ve come up with this and nothing else. “Like Grammarly, but hyper-focused and automatic.” The business model would’ve been that I, Andrew Dupont, would be willing to pay not to be irritated at seeing “its” misused

You’re right. You’re absolutely right. I feel silly for bringing it up. I’ll just accept _the mother of all coincidences_ and we can restart this whole news cycle. You can proceed with your plan to _further_ monetize the World Cup and let’s please never speak of my faux pas again

I have an involuntary reaction to text formatted with seemingly RANDOM capitalization like this. I know it's because Nextdoor (like most sites) doesn't offer richer formatting options than this — but my brain is trained to believe that this is simply how NIMBYs type.

I was not thorough with my redactions but it’s fine because you can’t find a damn thing on Nextdoor. I have to bookmark posts I comment on or else I’ll never be able to get back to them ever again

I have an involuntary reaction to text formatted with seemingly RANDOM capitalization like this. I know it's because Nextdoor (like most sites) doesn't offer richer formatting options than this — but my brain is trained to believe that this is simply how NIMBYs type.

I’m tired of letting that stuff go unchallenged. I push back on it not because I think I’ll change a NIMBY’s mind but just in case a third party reads the exchange and is persuaded.

I have an involuntary reaction to text formatted with seemingly RANDOM capitalization like this. I know it's because Nextdoor (like most sites) doesn't offer richer formatting options than this — but my brain is trained to believe that this is simply how NIMBYs type.

(Maybe it's for the best; they'd probably ruin italics for me if that option were available to them.)

Discord’s business model is aimed at making money from people who use it for reasons other than I do (open-source work). It’s as if I were able to use Pinboard for free because it had decided its only revenue would come from charging a small fee every time someone bookmarked erotic fan fiction.

I am not English; but I have followed the New Orleans Saints for most of my life, so I get it

In other news, the phrase I never want to hear again after this World Cup is “I've seen it given before.” I bet you have! An individual referee has about 500% more leeway than they deserve to have; if anything, VAR is showing the seams in the rulebook

Association football's laws are like common law: oversimplified, impossible to administer without interpretation, relies on the accumulation of years of precedent, not easily geographically transferable, hinges on how much you think one situation resembles another from the past

In other news, the phrase I never want to hear again after this World Cup is “I've seen it given before.” I bet you have! An individual referee has about 500% more leeway than they deserve to have; if anything, VAR is showing the seams in the rulebook

Today we all get to enjoy these distinctly American ideas: * Seeing Trump fuck up something you like and being powerless to stop it * Watching other authority figures play along rather than tell him “no” * Expecting other people to be adults when Trump acts like a child