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Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Love those windows when travelling, but I have yet to see windows that open to the inside here in Ireland. Not sure whether it's one of those crazy building regulations like no power switch or outlet inside the bathroom or auto-closing inner doors to each room.

  • Just something I'm used to. I have windows tabs on the bottom, so I'd like to have everything in the same place, rather than move the cursor all over the screen. I guess it's a holdover back from Netscape days when I had several separate windows open, and they all had their own tab on the Windows task bar.

  • I used Opera because you could place tabs at the bottom of the window. When Opera became just a Chrome skin, I switched to Firefox because through the Tab Mix Plus extension I could place the tabs to the bottom. When Firefox killed the extension (and many more), I switched to Vivaldi (made by the former Opera team) because it offered tabs on the bottom. Very recently I switched to Waterfox, because @jh34@lemmy.world told me the browser also allows for tabs to be placed at the bottom. What can I say... I'm a bottom kind of guy...

  • This chart is the very first thing they show you at The Landmark Forum. They even tried to copyright it...

  • Agreed. I used to be the tech support for my family members. Everyone I switched to Mint Cinnamon stopped calling me. (That's also when I realised my relatives never call me to share good news or to ask about me.)

  • I'm getting these messages occasionally, but usually they make sense, such as when I go to online gaming sites or torrenting portals. Didn't try porn - don't want a call from HR. In general, our IT policies are fairly sensible; this is one of the very few outliers.

  • All other MSM, even some more questionable like The Sun or Fox News, works fine. CNN is the only one blocked.

  • I found out that the best way to force Google Maps to update is to make the correct edit in Open Street Maps. Google seems to source its local information from there.

    Just an anecdotal example: I live at the end of a cul-de-sac, and I've seen loads of cars drive up to my house, and then gingerly do a 15-point turn (the road is very narrow), and drive back. I checked Google Maps and found that it lists my street as open. I've filled reports with Google several times, and nothing happened. Then, I updated OSM to indicate that at the end of my street there's just a pedestrian footpath to the next street. Within two weeks, the number of cars turning around decreased drastically. I checked Google Maps, and found that they fixed their map. A few years later, there's still the odd car making the mistake, but the only map service I could identify that still didn't update was Apple Maps.

    Since then, I've done several edits in OSM (I live in a young estate, with loads of construction still going on, so maps are not very reliable), and Google always picked up these edits.

  • Funny... My company (over 100k employees worldwide) is blocking CNN as a security risk...

  • Got a couple of e-mails from them on one of my mail accounts, even though I never subscribed to them (in fact, at that time I didn't even know who they were). Marked them as spam, and Gmail never showed me more of their e-mails. If enough people did the same, e-mails from the hellofresh domain may now be is some of the biggest spam filters. Way to shoot themselves in the foot.

  • Blue pill. I'd miss my wife and kids, and even if I were transported back in time, I doubt I'd do all the required steps to get to them again.

  • Excellent points. I'd just add one more: user friendliness. The average user prefers to click on an icon on their screen, rather than open a Web browser and either type in the URL or access bookmarks, which tends to be rather clunky on a phone.

  • Dungeon Master. I refuse to use a guide, so even though I've been playing it for almost 25 years, I still haven't finished it. Always run out of food...

  • My only symptom during Covid was that I slept very poorly for 2 days. I only took a test because I'm an avid runner, and after a run on the second day, my watch dropped my VO2 max by 10%, which was highly unusual.

    Since then, however, I noticed a certain aversion to alcohol. I can't get a buzz from drinking anymore, but I get a headache a few hours after even a single drink. I've been already down to a drink per week, thanks to no social life during Covid lockdowns, so this is not a big loss.

  • Unless you are expected to engage with others on social media, you can circumvent them by creating a blog under your name. Tailor your essays to the crowd you want to appeal to - family, friends, potential employers - and publish a few articles every year.

    That's essentially what I've been doing. I used to be on Facebook (left a while ago), and I'm still on LinkedIn (due to its toxic positivity, I'm not engaging there, just keeping my CV up to date). But if you googled my name, the first few pages of results would be my blog articles, my Flickr profile and a few other things not related to social media. This also gives me far more control over what I want people to know about me, and how that information is presented.

  • Wrong question. If they picked me, you ought to ask how screwed the aliens are...

  • Fluffy. Ever since I was a kid, I wanted a killer robot and name it Fluffy. My parents never got me one, so once I hit midlife crisis I got myself a cleaning robot and named it Fluffy. At my age, I appreciate clean floors more than seeing the blood of my enemies.

  • I keep wishing everyone a very boring 2024. Makes me happy when they reply in kind.

  • I used to work as a financial analyst on Wall Street, and even after I changed careers I invested on my own, roughly following Buffet's strategy. My annual returns averaged 22%, but given the little starting capital ($2000), I cashed out with just enough for a large downpayment on my house.

    Anyway, just a very short primer on how Buffet is investing. He's a student of Benjamin Graham who wrote the highly influential The Intelligent Investor. There, Graham outlined the most basic fundamental strategy: buy stock in companies where market cap is below book value and hold long-term, until stock catches up. Obviously, that's hardly feasible in today's markets, but there are still stocks that you won't realize they are undervalued until you research the shit out of the companies. Not stocks, but companies. The former, technical investing, has been in vogue since at least the 90s, while the latter is the old school fundamental approach of actually calculating the stock's underlying value and its growth potential.

    Where it all comes together is portfolio building. The conventional theory is to have around 30 stocks to minimize volatility. Buffet's approach is to maximize upward potential by having fewer stocks (around 10), while minimizing risks by researching and fully understanding companies he invests in. This ranges from understanding financials and operations to analizing the company's management. Buffet is known for keeping the management of an acquired company in place and not interfering with their decisions because he wouldn't invest into a company where he wouldn't trust the management in the first place.

    Of course, I didn't have the means for investing enough to have any influence on the company or market, so I had to really dig into the fundamentals and hope the market would eventually realize the value of the company. It worked for me, as long as I stuck to companies whose business model I could understand. So, I missed loads of winners from the tech sector, but I've had a steady above-market return, and that was good enough for me. I followed the advice from the book On Investing by John Neff, which I can fully recommend, if it's still in print.

  • That's what I've been using when flying and when running on a treadmill in a busy gym. But as you said, it does defeat the purpose of hearing your surroundings, so otherwise I keep to headphones where I can regulate the volume to hear better without completely blocking the external sound.