Squiddlioni

My kid used to sit in my lap and press ‘w’ in Goat Simulator to move us forwards while I ensured the chaos happened. Eventually they added the jump button to their repertoire. Then they learned to use controller so we could play Goat Simulator 3 together in split screen. Eventually they moved out of my lap and they have their own computer now.

We used to play an hour together every day. We 100%'ed Terraria, played through PalWorld, Bluey, A Hat in Time, Vampire Survivors, and a few others. They play through single player games on their own after school nowadays, so that hour each night has been repurposed for reading together. We still play together on the weekends.

They’ll occasionally ask if I remember the silly games we played in Goat Simulator 3, like where we’d both equip brooms, one of us would steal the other’s broom and fly away, leaving the broomless goat to dramatically monologue about how their broom was stolen. Those moments gaming together are precious, and I hope you and your kid enjoy them.

It’s still true that food in the US is, by and large, safer than many other countries as far as foodborne illness. A lot of the perceived lack of safety is a lack of trust in the agencies that are supposed to handle regulation, testing, recalls, etc. It’s also a question of severity; both how severe the issue is, and how many people are affected. We’ve had multiple unusually-severe and unusually-widespread outbreaks in 2026, and that led to a lot more public awareness. The Taylor Farms Cyclospora outbreak, for example, was easily one of the most severe food safety events in US history.

Due to massive government staffing cuts and mass resignations, the inspectors responsible for testing for safety are hugely understaffed and overworked. They were already understaffed, but recent cuts made things much worse. A fairly average number of issues are being reported officially, but it’s almost certain that many issues simply aren’t found, or they’re found but not properly investigated. Susan Mayne, the former director of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (the branch of the FDA that tests and reports on food safety issues) found that the FDA is posting incorrect data to make it appear as though food safety issues are less severe this year. (edit note: I originally wrote that Mayne endorsed the interpretation that 2026 numbers are being underreported because of staffing issues, but on closer read that interpretation was from the public health advocate Sarah Despres, not former director Mayne).

The next paragraph in the article is:

The institute said those figures support the possibility that CBA3656 reacted with nanoplastics in the intestine and promoted their excretion from the body, thus exhibiting high nanoplastic biosorption efficiency.

Essentially “we see a lot more nanoplastics freely moving around instead of embedded where they’re hard to measure.”

Normal scientific asterisks are in play: this was bacteria isolated from kimchi, not kimchi itself. For all I know, kimchi could introduce more nanoplastics than the bacteria remove. The bacteria could also not have the same behavior when they’re on kimchi and have other things to eat. There isn’t much information on the process used, so it could be that the samples they used were contaminated with nanoplastic and that’s why they saw more. This was also published by “The World Institute of Kimchi”. Not that they couldn’t find a real effect, just that this isn’t remotely unbiased.

It’s the only piece of consumer software I’ve ever used that I straight-up thought should be illegal after I tried it. If you’re a parent, and you’re wondering if you should let your child explore Roblox: DON’T. Ban any videos that mention Roblox from their apps, do not install the game, and do not ever give that company a single cent. The entire structure is designed to torment children and yank on their psychological levers until they beg their parents to buy them in-game currency to turn their low-low into a high-high for a couple of minutes, then restart the cycle.

There are VIP areas that you have to have a subscription (pay) to go into, and devs are incentivized to add them by kickbacks, so they show up in just about every game. In competitive games where you chase other players to catch them, if you don’t have VIP the other players can literally just go through a wall you can’t pass to get away. Then they can get boosts in the VIP area to get an unfair advantage.

There’s the “revenge” buttons, where if someone in a competitive game wins against you, it gives you a button you can click to to punish the other player in various ways. Naturally, it costs real money.

Obstacle courses start out decent, but once you’re far enough in that the sunk cost fallacy is in effect, it ramps the difficulty up massively and frustrates you over and over. And each time you respawn it makes you walk past the item you can buy that will make this frustrating part disappear and get you back to the nice dopamine hits like you had earlier in the map.

And of course, every game tries to make people who buy the pay-to-win items as visible as possible, and make it look as spectacular as possible. It’s masterful psychological manipulation, and while the games with these exploitative systems are made by devs external to Roblox itself, the economy and reward systems that shaped those games is defined by Roblox. It’s actually worse that you have external devs, because it insulates Roblox from the responsibility for these exploitative mechanics, while Roblox acts as the bank you use to buy currency for the games. Roblox only cares about money, and they don’t care how many abusive things their games have to do to kids to get it.

I’m about as far from a pearl-clutcher as you can get while still being a responsible parent, but even before considering that the social features are repeatedly being used to groom children, Roblox simply should not be allowed to exist. Play Goat Simulator 3 with your kid instead. Or Minecraft. Or Terraria. A Lego game. Bayonetta. I don’t care–anything but Roblox.

It’s essentially a guarantee that certain tools and system APIs will be available, accept certain arguments, and accept/return data formatted in a specific way. It’s important for general purpose software and portability. Basically, if you want your software to run on anything and everything, you target POSIX. Except Windows, obviously, but pretty much everything else is POSIX compatible, or close enough that you’re probably fine.

An example: I write medical applications that are distributed to many hospitals, so well outside of my direct control. One program in particular is run on Windows, Linux, or AIX. I have to write separate handling for Windows obviously, but all I need to do to support both Linux and AIX is stick to POSIX APIs and test on Linux. Which is great, because I don’t have access to an AIX system. I still have to do final testing on AIX, but with one minor exception in the last five years, it all just works.