I can’t think of a multinational corporation that deserves your loyalty in that way. It’s up to you and me to determine if the markup is a brand name premium or a actual measurable quality improvement and direct our spending accordingly. I have had both good and bad luck and sometimes you don’t even get a choice because there’s only one battery option available.

I’m sure the companies would like it to be seen as unethical or even illegal, but most people I know (even older non-internet-savvy people) like having more options than just a greedy OEM for parts and service.

I think you can let your conscious rest easy knowing corporate would feed you headfirst into a meat grinder on Easter Sunday live on national television before they have your best interests at heart.

Software like Firefox is designed in a modular way for humans to be able to reason about its correctness. It is complex, but not arbitrarily complex.

So take out the free VPN and Pocket and it’ll be less complex! ¯\(ツ)/¯

I look for lane positioning to see if the person in front of me is doing a u-turn. We have mostly 2+2 and 3+3 roads and almost everyone drives these big clunky SUVs and massive trucks. They’ll turn from the furthest right part of the left turn lane and still need the whole road and the merge lane to spin around. Conversely, people turning left tend to sit in the middle or on the left of the lane. The bigger problem is many don’t realize that a u-turn must yield to all other movements.

I’ve only ever had to block spammers on any Lemmy-like platform. Users tend to be cool and I try to give people grace for being awkward and weird because… I’m awkward and weird.

I need to sit down and have a serious thought about redundancy and what I want to keep long term. I want to leave little portable drives with an encrypted backup of my family photos with all my relatives so I can restore them in the case of a catastrophic failure that includes all local backups (like a huge fire, an earthquake, war, famine, see etc.). Essentially like sending duplicate or triplicate physical photos to relatives in the old days so they can send a copy back if needed. This is addition to a normal backup. Essentially in case the US falls apart.

Like you, I’ve also been collecting other media of interest to me. I would have plenty of space for Atari games, but I can’t imagine spending the drive space to archive every game in my Steam and GoG libraries or every GameCube game. If you have a generous 60 TB of space, that becomes 30TB really quick with redundancy. With a single offsite backup, that becomes 20TB and with 2 backups and redundancy that’s only 15TB or usable space. Granted I’m not factoring in compression, but at today’s prices buying 3 extra gigs for every usable gig practically requires a mortgage. If we could have $14-15/TB again I would probably buy another 2-6 drives right off the bat just to complete my build and be somewhat future proofed.

I’m also concerned about things that need updated. I need working images and copies of my systems and programs that I can restore to if the internet goes down or gets locked away.

Almost certainly some of them. I enjoyed hearing that insults and trash talk are still the norm for corporate passwords you have to remember! :D

At a job I hated, they made us change passwords often. It was quite irritating. I also think it was counterproductive because something like fuckcorporate!666 is likely more susceptible to a dictionary attack than a carefully chosen password rotated less frequently.

There’s a lot of people on the Mozilla hate train, and they do deserve a bit of ire for some of their more puzzling decisions. All I wanted from Firefox was a configurable browser with sane defaults, that lets me block ads and does all the normal browser things without being a total black box of corporate telemetry and profiling. To a large degree Firefox has been the best mainstream browser for people who can’t dance with the devil and use Chrome. In many aspects, it has made better decisions than Chrome.

With that said, I didn’t want Pocket, I didn’t want AI, and I’m mildly annoyed that this sort of thing is in the default build. It feels like a windows installer asking you to install 10 additional programs, but the ticked boxes are greyed out. I just want a browser, no crypto wallets, no ai assistants, no built-in mail client, no biometric scanning.

Firefox has been around long enough to have been both god tier and trash tier at different points. I don’t think the AI focus is going to go well for Mozilla. I’d like them to focus on browser stuff.

I knew someone who did this kind of work. They don’t wait until the weather improves. They climb poles in 70mph winds with sideways blowing hail and lightning if that’s what needs to happen. That’s crazy hardcore!

I remember watching a documentary about someone who was welding under the ocean, and simultaneously inside of a empty undersea pipeline that they had to swim a ways down to reach the problem area. That’s too damn extreme for me. I would sign up to be a doordash driver who only delivers to the worst Karens before I put on a single flipper. :D. Crazy hardcore.

We need a “right of retrieval” where,once encoded, it must be free to decode and play back. If we’re going to allow proprietary media, all the prices should be clear and up front. No charging on the back end after everyone has already encoded their baby vids to avc; no changing prices after the fact.

I like the way you phrased that. I had a similar experience making peace with my mortality when I left religion. The self I “am” is just an illusion. It’s the link in a metaphorical chain that’s being forged. There were a lot of links before me and there will be many after me and every new link is shaped by the experience and skills the blacksmith developed from the previous links. I am not the link, but rather, I am the chain. Every action I take was made possible by the past and will echo into the future through the people I impact, the physical artifacts I create, and those will someday leave behind. One day the chain will have many links. Looking back from the newly forged links my link will become distant and less detailed, and yet, I am still the chain. Even if I am no longer known by name and everyone I ever knew has been dead for centuries, my actions will continue to echo until the end of time itself. That’s the only way I was able to make sense of it without resorting to woowoo metaphysics, deities, and such. It’s also why I feel it’s so important to be nice to people.

Now I’m wrestling with the nature of consciousness.

I hope you have a great day!

I have struggled with feeling lonely during different times in my life. I found I was attached to preconceived outcomes and some unhappiness I was feeling stemmed from that. When I stopped searching, I learned to find. I stopped trying to plug that hole and I sat uncomfortably in my loneliness. I’m definitely still a work in progress, but now I try to enjoy my time with people, to be more in the moment and less “10 steps ahead”. Now, most of the time, my loneliness doesn’t live on the surface, just in that occasional existential dread of knowing that one day I will have to die. I hope someone I love will be there to hold my hand, and I’m scared to be alone. That’s a heavy weight and I sometimes wish I was too stupid to recognize our mortality so I didn’t have to wrestle with it.

When I was young, I had my parents, grandparents, even great grandparents, and thought I always would. I was friends with a bunch of kids in the neighborhood and at school. I’m down to one parent and a super young and hip grandparent in-law in their 90s. When everyone was sick with Covid and my partner was feeling the stress too, there were times I felt very alone and I really felt the weight of having nobody to lean on in those moments because everyone was just as overwhelmed as me. It’s an uncomfortable part of the human experience. I try not to put all my eggs in one basket, but as an introvert it can be hard to maintain a large circle of support. Hopefully some of that answers the question. I’m curious how others see it.

I wonder how far one of these would fly if it wandered onto a road and got hammered by a semi doing 55mph.

Cool, thanks for the link. I’m gonna store this one away for the next person to joke about me being a cheater. :-)

That’s great! I used to think electric bikes were cheating. Then I also bought one. I still remember going for the test ride. The bike I picked had a torque sensor so it would adjust the electric assist based on how hard you pushed (some bike don’t match force, they just turn the motor on and off when the pedals rotate). I was riding along on the road near the bike shop and the assist was so smooth I thought I was under my own power until I looked down and saw I was riding at 27mph! Last summer I rode 24 miles to the city center once or twice a week. I don’t think I would have done that on a traditional bike. My fitness has benefitted significantly even with the bike doing some of the work.

Question for you: I used one of these in Istanbul airport. In a residential building that doesn’t have a meter or more between the floors, is the bathroom only on the ground floor? If I installed one of these on the upper floor in my house, the bowl would stick out of the ceiling of the room below.

The personification of AI is increasing. They’ll probably announce their holy grail of AGI prematurely and with all the robot personification the masses will just buy the lie. It’s too easy to view this tech as human and capable just because it mimics our language patterns. We want to assign intentionality and motivation to its actions. This thing will do what it was programmed to do.

If you ride the trails at night and follow the potent smell of skunk you will find either:

A. a skunk B. Some dudes named Jellyfish and Willy, parked a bit off the trail smoking a J on a park bench talking about metaphysics and fried food.

Hobbies. I struggled with this after college also because I left the church and my old social life had dried up. I was conditioned to just show up and my friends would be there and the nonreligious outside world doesn’t always work that way.

I would join a club or a group, preferably one with an even gender split or even a skew towards whoever you’re interested in dating. I found dancing in 2006. I never would have expected to get into it and probably spent most of the 90s calling it “gay”. I was tricked into going by a friend who said we were going bowling. I trusted her and she drove, so I had no escape. Many dances are “social” dances which means anyone can ask anyone to dance and you aren’t expected to bring a partner, most people don’t. I kept doing it and eventually started going without my friends. 20 years later, I have been in charge of running dances, I’ve been on the committee of large events, I’ve made some money teaching lessons, but most importantly of all, I’ve collected a circle of awesome supportive people, some acquaintances, some friends, and a handful that I’ve dated. Don’t go in with the intention of dating though because it counter intuitively guarantees you won’t find a date. Instead, just have fun. Ask the people who aren’t getting asked to dance, make friends, enjoy the music, etc. People notice when someone is capable of having fun on their own and they want to be a part of that. They appreciate someone who will dance with the sweet little old lady who shows up every week and not just the 10/10 blonde with the double D’s. My goal was always to dance with every woman in the room once, then go back for seconds with the people I most enjoyed dancing with. It can cost a few bucks to get in, but almost all of them will let you in free if you volunteer for a half hour to collect admissions or help set up/ tear down. It’s harder for guys (if you dance the lead role) to get started, but don’t be discouraged because we’re outnumbered and always in demand.

Biking is another good activity to meet people. You can join a club in many cities for a few bucks and they’ll basically send upcoming rides to your inbox all year round. If you’re not exercise inclined, there are also PEV (personal electric vehicle) rides in many cities that give you all of the fun and exploration with only a fraction of the workout.

Other good ideas: Frisbee golf league, ultimate Frisbee, hot springing (hot spring hippies are cool and very welcoming), poetry slams, board game parlours (these seem to be popping up everywhere) etc.