i_stole_ur_taco @ i_stole_ur_taco @lemmy.ca

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2 yr. ago

I still have my toddler books with the graphic Struwwelpeter running in with shears and cutting the thumbs off the boy who wouldn’t stop sucking them.

It’s a… “nostalgic” childhood trauma?

I don’t pirate software anymore. If I do the math on how much enjoyment I get even from a mediocre AAA game title, it is dwarfed by what I’d spend on a night out, so the value is there for me. On top of that the risk of malware (or the effort in mitigating it) isn’t really worth it.

Tv and movies? Pirate it. The streaming services are garbage and the content has too much crap for me to want to pay a corporation for it. If it became too hard to pirate I just wouldn’t watch it anymore.

Books kind of fall in the middle. Happy to pay for ebooks if the author makes it practical, but I’m not keen on buying through Amazon.

It’s a little worrisome, actually. Professionally written software still needs a human to verify things are correct, consistent, and safe, but the tasks we used to foist off on more junior developers are being increasingly done by AI.

Part of that is fine - offloading minor documentation updates and “trivial” tasks to AI is easy to do and review while remaining productive. But it comes at the expense of the next generation of junior developers being deprived of tasks that are valuable for them to gain experience to work towards a more senior level.

If companies lean too hard into that, we’re going to have serious problems when this generation of developers starts retiring and the next generation is understaffed, underpopulated, and probably underpaid.

I left Apple when I got rid of my iPhone 3 and didn’t look back until last year. In the mean time, iOS has grown up nicely, the services are really well integrated, and it’s pretty low on bugs.

Contrast to Google where every OS update to Android makes the UI more and more similar to iOS, but a shittier version of it. Their home assistant has been losing features and the overall recognition has gotten demonstrably worse as time goes on. It annoys me to no end that Android doesn’t have any native ability to resize a photo before emailing it, so you either send a 7MB photo or go through too many ridiculous steps to resize it first. That’s not even counting the services that Google kills all the time, making any investment into their ecosystem unreliable in the long term.

I’m not using Apple now because I’m loyal and like them. It’s because Google has put so much effort into making their own phone a shitty knockoff. If I’m paying premium prices for a flagship phone, might as well go with the one that works better.

It’s worth pointing out that this only works if your plan is sufficiently evil.

I absolutely adored a low budget game called Firewatch. It’s first person and your only contact with another human is through a radio. You’re running away from your life and work for a summer in a fire watch tower in a national park.

The story is nice and the characters are interesting and flawed and relatable.

Buy it on sale and have a fun evening or two with it.

Glow in the dark filament is shit for glowing more than a minute. It’s like the cheapest toys you had as a kid.

But they illuminate constantly if you shine a UV (or IR?) LED on them, and you generally don’t see the LED light nearly as much.

So my vote is a bigger project with an LED in the base that keeps whatever you print lit up and looking spooky green for hours.

I’ve written long comments and regretted it. I’ve never once regretted deleting a long winded pile of shit before hitting Submit.

It must be exhausting to be an unpleasant asshole 100% of the time. This guy’s brain rotted.

It’s simple, but it ain’t easy.

It really depends on the context. What was the first encounter? If it was a first date, then yeah, that’s brutal and you suck. If it was a quick intro at a busy event, it’s almost expected.

There’s a bit of a difference between names and faces. Forgetting a name is like forgetting a piece of trivia, but if you meet and speak to somebody and can’t recognize them in a different context (and they look basically the same), it can send a signal that you didn’t find them memorable (and you didn’t lol).

The only time in my life when I found it irritating was my best friend’s roommate who, after hanging out with them in small groups dozens of times for hours each time, still kept introducing herself to me on subsequent visits. I could never figure out if it was drugs, a method of humour or flirting I didn’t understand, or she was really that oblivious to other people.

You can’t even see what brand the fridge is! What a stupid captcha.

If it’s a Samsung it’s definitely the one with the shortest lifespan.

There’s a small panel in the ceiling of a small closet in an upstairs bedroom. Open and squeeze through it and I’m in the attic space. Need to use my cell phone flashlight because it’s pitch black up here.

Walk across the joists to the far end and carefully lift away the insulation between the joists.

Use my phone and order a bunch of shit from a bunch of apps to be delivered to my house. Turn off the phone in case the agents can track me with it. Carefully lay on the drywall, distributing my weight across as much of the panel as possible to reduce the risk of breaking through into the room below. Cover myself with the insulation I pulled away earlier.

Now these foreign agents are going to have to find that ceiling panel, climb up in there, search under insulation to find me, wrestle me through that tiny access hole and whisk me away. All the while there are Uber drivers and pizza delivery guys showing up. And that’s all suspicious as fuck, so someone’s going to call the cops before long. If these are foreign agents, they probably don’t want to deal with law enforcement.

So I figure I need to hide under that insulation for maybe twenty minutes before shit starts getting crazy.

Police? They help exactly the people they’re paid to help.

This sounds like another version of the “definition of freedom”.

Is freedom being unrestricted from doing whatever you want? Or is it protection from people doing whatever they want that would otherwise injure you?

I guess I’d argue that banning slavery in the middle of a culture that embraces it is, in fact, authoritarian. Similarly, enabling slavery in the middle of a culture that rejects it is also authoritarian.

It gets more interesting when the population is split on what they want policy to be. I think Prohibition is a better comparison since it’s less emotionally charged.

Was enacting Prohibition authoritarian? Sure seems that way, even though it had a lot of support. Was rolling it back also authoritarian? The people who originally supported it and now see it taken away probably feel it’s authoritarian.

IMO as long as people are happy to argue with each other about basic definition of words, the answer to the original question is “it doesn’t matter”.

nudibranchs

Never thought I’d be able to use that bit of pedantry.

Child actors in an elevator.

Rude. That looks like a perfectly good post to me. Maybe a lil dirty. Shitty, even.

Ok, fine, it’s a shitpost.

Support cheques (direct deposit is optional for practically everything).

Sending official, original documents (anything related to passport applications).

Physical copies where required by contract (things like Strata AGM packages, some loan/investment documents).

The days of regularly sending your mom a handwritten letter are surely gone, but there’s still enough need for a postal service to exist.

I think where they really fucked up was with the junk mail. They got drunk off making money delivering pounds of paper advertising every day, and as people grew to hate it and opted out, and as businesses saw it wasn’t worth it, all of a sudden the junk mail side hustle no longer subsidized the cheap postal fees.