MrMember

I used to read the games site Rock Paper Shotgun. At some point they decided they were going to block everyone who blocked ads. There were ways around it but the writing had gone downhill so I chose to stop reading it entirely. A few months later I saw they had issued an apology for serving malware through their ads.

I will never, ever, under any circumstances stop using an adblocker.

Yep, I use a soda can and have never had any issues.

I spent a lot of time playing Eve and it's without a doubt the greatest MMO I've ever played but I would never play it again. It will happily eat up as much time as you want to give it. I wouldn't be happy if I wasn't playing it for 8+ hours a day and I can't do that anymore.

I remember seeing a house for sale in Detroit that basically said you were on your own. No power, no water, and emergency services would not respond to your calls.

I watched a YouTube video about four women who rowed across the Atlantic, it's really good. I couldn't imagine doing it solo.

https://youtu.be/6SYHamnHqU8

They train for it. When people who have ejected talk about it they basically say it's automatic. Things go south they pull the handle on instinct.

The Oscars are 100% vibes based. It was only very recently made a requirement that the judges actually watch the movies that are nominated.

It was insane how powerful the debugger was. Very intuitive to use too.

The Garmin Instinct 2 is around $200 and will last several weeks on a charge even using the GPS regularly. Without GPS use I wouldn't be surprised if it lasted a month.

Github hijacks '/' and it's really annoying, it gets me all the time.

Ten years ago the FAA was disqualifying candidates because the didn't say their worst subject in high school was science and today they're struggling with recruitment. Seems like a catastrophe of their own making.

https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/

Office is now the "Microsoft 365 Copilot App." It's ridiculous.

We will always need some form of baseline power. Solar, wind, and other renewables are an important component of overall power generation but we still need something capable of generating power 24/7/365, in all weather conditions.

The training is also not run particularly well. There's a single facility in Oklahoma that every prospective air traffic controller has to go through. I had a friend in college who graduated in the early 2010s with a four year degree in air traffic control. He waited several years for the FAA to tell him he could start training, a spot never opened up, and he moved on with his life and did something different. It's broken on a pretty fundamental level if we have a shortage of air traffic controllers but also people who want to do it can't get in.

I loved the design of the original Droid. Slide out horizontal keyboard, built like a tank, easily accessible removable and replaceable battery. The specs on modern phones are light years better but design wise they're way behind what we used to have.

Authoritarians, as always.

It's very easy to watch. When I wanted to watch it a few years ago it took only a few minutes to find a torrent of the full series and less than an hour to download.

That seems likely. Someone got a directive to "increase Copilot adoption" so they rebranded Office to Copilot and now they can show their boss a graph for Copilot adoption that goes to the right and up and get a promotion for it and everyone's happy.

From the government? Absolutely not.

I do most of my grocery shopping at Target. In my large Midwestern city 12 large eggs are $2. A 3 lb bag of apples is $4. A 3 lb bag of oranges is $4.29.

When people talk about these cheap meals, I wonder if they just expect everyone to eat the same thing every day at the lowest quality.

Eating cheap doesn't have to mean eating the same shit meal every day. I like to have a framework to work from where I have some structure but can vary it a lot based on what I want to eat. Rice+vegetable(s)+protein has endless variations. One week I might do a taco style rice bowl. The next maybe I do an Asian bowl. Stews are also great for this. By varying the ingredients a bit and using different spices I can get stews with very different flavor profiles that taste great.

I don't see this at all. Staple foods are cheap and abundant. Fruits and vegetables don't cost much at all. Some animal proteins can get a bit pricy (beef mostly) but chicken and pork aren't that expensive. Eggs are like $2 a dozen.

I love my meat but if I switched to a vegetarian diet it would be trivial to make varied, delicious meals at $1.50-$2 a portion.

Find a role at a large "non-tech" comapny in a large department on a mid sized team. I had several jobs like that and the amount of effort required in the average day was minimal. Probably less than an hour a day of actual meaningful work. You'll hate your job but it's extremely easy and pays decent.

I'm a big fan of Garmin watches, it's really impressive what they've built. They're responsive, they have the smart features I want without the bloat I don't want, the battery lasts forever (if I don't use GPS at all it lasts something ridiculous like three weeks, with GPS it's still around a week). And they're so good I don't feel any urge to upgrade to a newer model even though the one I currently have came out in 2019. I bought it "renewed" 2.5 years ago at a significant discount and I could see myself happily using it for at least another 4-5 years.

I have firstinitiallastname and I get A LOT of emails sent to firstinitial.lastname. Someone even used it for their bank account.

It's a positive for a nameless middle manager somewhere who can show their boss a graph with a line moving to the right and up with a title like "AI Adoption Across Platforms" and hit their bonus target.

Thanks for the recommendation! I'll check them out.

Smart TVs are so user hostile now that this doesn't work for me personally anymore. Every TV I've seen recently always tries to get back to the "home" screen so they can funnel you into more ads and/or content that makes them money. If I have the TV set to the HDMI source for my connected HTPC, turn off the TV, and turn it back on again, it will be back on the TV's home screen. If I switch to an HDMI source that isn't currently outputting video it will switch back to the home screen in five seconds. I was at a friend's house over Thanksgiving and when he tried to navigate away from the home screen on his Vizio TV to a different HDMI input he got a confirmation dialog box with an ad embedded in it asking him "are you SURE you want to change inputs?" It's ridiculous.

For now I spend the extra money for "digital display" TVs that are just dumb input for HDMI devices but I fear that someday that option will either disappear or fall significantly behind regular TVs in display technology.

They are not independent. Rent control discourages housing development.

I used Walmart delivery for groceries a fair amount last year and didn't have a single issue. I used it maybe six times this year and there was an issue with the order five of those times. Several times it was delivered to the wrong address. The other times I was missing around half of my order. I was able to get refunds without any issue every time but the experience was so awful I canceled and haven't used it at all the second half of this year.

YouTube search will also only show you maybe 10 videos relevant to your search terms and then just give you random videos it wants you to watch that have little or nothing to do with your original search.