• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I refuse to use a case on principle. The idea that you need a case to protect a phone from everyday use is so ass-backwards it hurts my brain. (and was not always the situation!)

    It would be so much more space, weight, and cost efficient to simply engineer in the durability provided by a case through the use of proper materials and construction. But apparently marketing thinks nobody would buy a phone that looks and feels out of the box the way a phone with a case feels. So we end up with these thin, elegant, glass and polished aluminum devices… that most of the population has to immediately hide inside a bulky plastic/rubber case to have a chance of surviving 6 months.

    Imagine if a carmaker sold a premium vehicle with a polished metal and glass exterior that you had to protect under a vinyl wrap to keep it from rusting and chipping under normal use… they’d be a laughing stock!




  • Honestly, I get it. If you have a relatively small stash of media, say a couple TB worth, you can pretty easily say "well I watched this movie, so I’ll delete it and make room for the next. When you get into the 10’s of TB range, the mindset has switched from it being a dynamic, temporary library to a repository. And it becomes easier just to plug in another 10-20TB drive occasionally, rather than trying to curate thousands of movies and shows.

    I can see both sides though. There’s certainly something to be said for being deliberate about the media you consume–and therefore only needing enough storage for your immediate viewing plans. I’m not quite into the 100TB range with my library, but I definitely have moments where I feel like having so many options makes any given option seem less appealing.







  • Problem is, by the time they’ve failed the test, the opportunity for them to learn the content is largely passed.

    The purpose of school is to educate and teach thinking skills. Tests are just a way to assess how effectively you and your students are achieving that goal. If something (in this case easy access to AI tools in the classroom) is disrupting that teaching/learning process, sure it’s useful to detect that through testing, but I’d doesn’t do anything really to solve the problem. Some fraction of kids are disciplined enough to recognize that skating by on classwork will lead to poor test results and possibly retaking classes, but generally those aren’t the kids you need to worry about anyway.


  • I’d ask the inverse. What definition of “inside” can you apply to a traditional bottle–so as to say that a ship is inside the bottle–that could not also be applied to a Klein bottle? Both of them have a single opening that leads to an enclosed, dead-ended volume.

    A Klein bottle may only have one surface, and therefore you can argue it has no topological inside. But a traditional bottle is topologically equivalent to a flat disc, so the same logic would say you can’t put a ship inside one of those either.


  • I also thought I’d miss Hulu and Netflix a lot more than I do. What used to irk me so badly was how utterly shit Netflix is when you just want to sit down and find something new to watch. Their front page would be list after list of things like “Hot New Comedies” “Best Independent Films of 2025”, “Classic Action Flicks” and somehow it always felt like the same 30 or 40 movies randomly shuffled together. So I’d spend 15 minutes scrolling through the same slop in different orders, get frustrated and search for a movie that I remembered wanting to watch, only to find that it was on none of the services I was subscribed to, and cost $8.99 for a single watch of a 20 year old movie.

    We had been Netflix subscribers since the very start when they delivered discs through the mail. Kinda sad how they went from having virtually anything you could think of to watch (and having a halfway decent recommendation algorithm to boot!) to where they are today.



  • You will actually get some hardcore libertarians unironically making the argument that regulations are completely unnecessary as long as you have a strong court system to award damages in the event that harm is actually done to an individual.

    Which, sure, in a frictionless, spherical universe full of perfectly rational actors that exists only in a textbook, maybe that argument has some merit.

    In the real world it means arguing that disfiguring people or giving them horrific terminal cancer should just be a line item on your ledger, next to rent and breakroom coffee.


  • If people don’t want these things in their air, why don’t they just vote with their wallets and NOT BUY products that create these byproducts, or move to a place that better suits their snowflake-lungs?

    Worst case, if you develop cancer after 5 years of exposure, you can exercise your right to sue the company for damages and be made whole again.

    We don’t need government hamstringing industry when the free market can sort these things out!

    /s (because who the fuck knows these days)



  • Beginner here (to Linux and networking anyways), running Unraid for about 18 months now. Fully agree, it’s been great for actually getting up and doing useful things quickly and relatively pain free.

    Eventually I would like to try working backwards and getting things running on a more “traditional” server environment, but Unraid has been a great learning tool for me personally.

    It’s like… Maybe some folks learned to overhaul an engine before they got their driver’s license, but lots of people just need to a car to get to work and back today, and they can learn to change their oil and do a brake job when the time comes.



  • Honestly, as long as it’s easily DIY upgradable (accessible speaker mounting locations, standard DIN panels, etc) I am all for this. Most OEM audio systems are stupidly overpriced and suck complete donkey balls compared to what you can get for a few hundred bucks at Crutchfield and install in an afternoon.

    For the last 20 years or so, most factory audio systems are so integrated into the rest of the electronics that they can be an absolute nightmare to upgrade unless you are a pro, which means you get the worst of both worlds: garbage audio, AND a steep upgrade path.