I used to and still do, but I see it as an investment. In the past, I used to donate to various environmental organizations. Lack of money and disillusionment with the progress in environmental protection stopped this. Nowadays, I have a small monthly direct deposit to the armed forces of Ukraine. Living in Europe, I see this as investing into a peaceful retirement.
Without hard data it's difficult to tell to what extent this is accurate, but there seems to be a substantial portion of Linux gamers (including Steam Deck users) who are pissed off that due to the anti-cheat they can't play the game on their platform of choice anymore. Some of them may have joined the DDoS campaign, so there is a genuine venn diagram.
As a Dubliner (Ireland, not one of the many Dublins across the pond), I must say that Americans are really weird about Paddy's Day. We have a large parade in Dublin and smaller ones in smaller cities, and then those of us who have kids ho to family fairs, and the rest for a pint at the local. We leave the city centre to the tourists who get shitfaced on overpriced, prepoured Guinness for no good reason. And even though we did some weird things with our river (the time in the slime), we never dyed the Liffey green.
Just another byproduct of enshittification. Novadays, a top-end Garmin watch lasts about as long as a Chinese watch of a brand with random characters you buy off Amazon. Google is introducing planned obsolesence in Fitbit. Banking apps are beginning to require phones that are no more than 4 years old. TVs get bricked with firmware upgrades. So, consumers are trained to buy cheapest, least reliable electronics, because over time they'll provide more value than top-end items which used to last much longer. (This was written on a 13 years old phone. I may not have access to my banking app anymore, but otherwise it works for everything I need, and I haven't contributed to e-waste in this regard. Not that the pollution angle was my reason to keep the phone, but it's a nice extra bonus.)
I have tthe benefit of a smart watch, so I know my stats quite well. Over the long term, I average 13 breaths per minute, or 18,720 breaths per day. That translates into $936 per day. When not injured, I average 22,000 steps per day, which would get me $5500 per day (currently injured, so no running, so I'm down to 12,000 steps or $3000 per day). Breathing would win only if I averaged fewer than 3744 steps per day. I think I get more just walking to my corner newsagent and back.
I'm inclined to believe it. I worked for a Wall Street firm when the stock market switched from fractional quotations to decimal. Lots of my coworkers printed out a conversion table from fractions to decimals, and even so often had problems figuring out which of two quotations was greater than the other one (in decimals). Those were smart people, but if you work with one system for so long, your brain gets hardwired and difficult to change.
There is currently a tiny bit of uproar over at r/irelandshittydrivers. A user took a photo of a work van that blocked two disabled spots. He sent the photo via Whatsapp to the company, which responded in a batshit crazy manner (for some reason, escalated it to praising Osama for 9/11). Naturally, the user posted the photo and the conversation to Reddit. Within a few hours, the company contacted Reddit and had the post removed. If a company with perhaps three customers per week can do it, what do you think large companies can do? Censoring user posts would be only the tip of the iceberg.
Radio Garden - Listen to hundreds of radios around the globe (with a pretty interface to find your favorite radio station). Having lived in several countries, I have a list of radio stations I grew to like, and now I can have easy access to all of them.
You know how many bike stands could be built for that money? Dozens!
"No pain, no gain. "
As someone who's been running for over 30 years and working ou for 20, if there is pain, there is injury. When there is injury, you take a break and regress. People may say that muscle pain or stiff muscles are a sign of a good workout, not an injury. However, even with those your risk of injury is much higher, and you'll eventually hurt yourself. "No pain" should be one of the outcomes of smart exercise, not an admonishment for not working hard enough.
Whose Line Is It Anyway?
Tapiooooca!
To be the devil's advocate (or GRRM's attorney), I see the merit of his and other authors' concerns. Chat GPT makes it feasible to generate short stories in their world and with their characters, which can easily replace their licensed products. This is not just their main work, but also other products that generates them some revenue stream.
Example: A friend of mine is using Chat GPT to generate short bedtime stories for his daughters. A typical request is something like this: "Please write a five paragraph story where Elsa from Frozen meets Santa Claus. Together, they fly in Santa's sleigh over the world, and Elsa is magicking snow on all Christmas trees." Normally, you'd buy a Disney-licensed book of short Christmas stories (I have one for my kids), but Chat GPT is more flexible and free.
Same goes for GRRM. He doesn't write Children stories, but one can still prompt Chat GPT to produce stories from the universe, which scratch the ASOIAF itch. This substitutes the officially licensed products and deprives the author of additional revenue stream. Just for the fun of it, I prompted Chat GPT: "Hello GPT-3.5. Please write a four paragraph story set in the Game of Thrones universe. In this story, Jon Snow and Tyrion Lannister go fishing and catch a monster alligator, which then attacks them." It produces a surprisingly readable story, and if I were a fan of this universe, I can imagine myself spending a lot of time with different prompts and then reading the results.
(On a side note,AI-generated content already has at least one group of victims: the authors of short fiction. Magazines like Clarkesworld were forced to close submissions of new stories, as they became overwhelmed with AI-generated content.)
Middle manager in an IT company here. My job description is saying "no" to requests outside the official pipeline, in order to shield my team from outside interference and burnout. I need a manager to fight for me whenever I pick a fight with one of the VPs who think we need to drop everything and refocus on their pet project.
This physically hurt. I hope you're happy, op.
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.
I'm close to 50, been running for decades, and still pull over 2k miles annually. Almost all that on asphalt. Haven't experienced any joint problems yet. I credit three things for that. First, modern running shoes are designed to soften the impact, and recently they have gotten ridiculously soft. The extreme cases give you 50mm (about 2 inches) of soft foam under your feet, but even more normal running shoes have advanced foam and bouncy elements in the outsole to soften the impact. Second, proper running form is not rocket science, and most people fall into a decent running form naturally. This form is the most gentle on the joints. And finally, if you are serious enough about running to go the distance where hard surfaces could be a problem, you are already likely to supplement your running with strength training, which further helps to protect your joints.
I'm still using Winamp 2.91. I'm just too used to it to change. Now, if someone added Flac support to the same interface, I'd be happy. And if someone ported it to Linux and Android, I'd pay big bucks for it.
Earlier this year, I made a small experiment: I stopped checking my Facebook for three months. During that time, I received about 250 notifications of new posts by my friends. When I logged back in, out of the first 100 posts on my feed, 24 were from my friends and another 7 from groups I subscribed to. The rest were ads or "suggested" content. Checking my feed every day after that, I averaged 2 posts from my friends and 2 from my groups in the top 20 posts. I have since stopped checking Facebook altogether, and by this time I don't think even anonymized ads will get me back.
Ironing is the only time of the week where I have the time to watch TV or movies. Not that I don't have free time, but I usually spend it in other ways. During ironing, I'm a captive audience. That said, I don't iron all that much. I remember the last season of The Boys took me four months to finish...
This tuling was passed due to a contract obligation to open a sandwich store. These cases are ueually related to regulations. Kind of like when an Irish court ruled that Subway subs are cakes, so higher VAT and sugar tax would apply to them. (In all fairness, the sugar content in the Subway "bread" is several times higher than the max allowed for bread.)
Posted on r/KotakuInAction by any chance? I usually run into this kind of complaints because of that sub.
My personal take is that subs that ban people just for posting on other subs are actively perpetuating their little opinion bubbles. They are essentially creating little virtual prisons for their members, and most of them are actually happy about that, which in turn tells all I need to know about those members' intellectual laziness. To twist around Groucho Marx' quote, I would refuse to join a sub that rejected me for posting elsewhere.
Geocities. That's how I lerned HTML. Used their WYSIWYG editor and then tinkered with the code. Built several pages close to my interest, and even scored some free stuff from marketing early online retailers like CDNow.
Also spent a lot of time browsing other Geocities pages and contacting people with shared interest.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I absolutely adore the movie, but I'm actually content it didn't get all the recognition I think it deserves. The entire vibe of the movie is one of contentment; no need to force higher achievements.
Samsung Galaxy S2. With a replaceable battery and good external cover, that thing can last for a long time. I did contribute to e-waste by replacing the battery three times so far, but that's all.
Offended? I'll be really happy! It means that I'll get to meet all my family again, even though some of them were proper twats.
As long as it can play tapes, I'm okay. Still using a tape adapter to connect my mp3 player :)
Having worked in business incubation at a research university, helping researchers find angel investors, I'd like to throw in my two cents:
First of all, the article runs headlong into survivorship bias. For each Bezos or Gates, there are thousands of entrepreneurs with financial backing that went bust. And the vast majority of those who didn't were acquired by larger, established companies before they could even hit the news (in my area, the ideal exit strategy was said to be acquired by Cisco, rather than an IPO). Many of these startups had even more initial backing by the three f's (family, friends and fools).
Now, let's look at those who didn't have financial backing. For such people, there are angel investors. As others in this thread pointed out, one needs to have good connections to find such investors. Good connections are available in most, if not all, research universities, via their business incubators. Universities, however, will retain part ownership of the company (licensing any research or technology back to the entrepreneur), and they are still thinking in the medium term. They are not looking for unicorns, but a steady stream of revenue, so their preferred exit strategy is indeed the acquisition. I'm certain that the very few poorer entrepreneurs who'd strike it rich in IPO were pressured into selling their company. That's why you don't see any examples of a company truly being pulled out of nothing. And don't get me even started at the wasted opportunities where the professor didn't sign the research licensing papers because he'd make a comfortable living keeping the research at the university...
Point of this is that it will be statistically likely that we'll get a few super-rich entrepreneurs, and they'll come mainly from backgrounds where they could secure seed financing. That does not mean they didn't work very hard with the money they were given.
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.
If it was taken by a cell phone, chances are that the exif data would have the GPS location.
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.
The movie is based on the short story All You Zombies by Robert A. Heinlein, and it does a great job preserving the spirit and internal logic of the narrative. When you take that into account, you'll realize how impressive the filmmaking is here. It's hands down my favourite time travel movie.
I always respond that in that case, "jpeg" should be pronounced "jfeg".
Spoiler alert: it's already happened, and all the virtuous people already ascended to heaven.
A bit late to the game, but for what it's worth, my experience with the Shockz. I run about 6-7 hours per week, and listen exclusively to audiobooks. As a result, I can't comment on the sound quality, but I do have some other observations.
Pros:
Cons:
I didn't test them with music or calls yet (for the latter, I'd have to pair them to my phone), so can't comment on those features.
Slovak: "Boha ti jebem" literally translates into "I fuck your god". Unsurprisingly, it's a curse you tell someone who pisses you off.
The Slovak Prime Minister also likes to say "Do psej matere", which literally means "Into the dog's mom". The English equivalent would be along the lines of "For fuck's sake".
Forehead-slapping moment: After broswing this thread and trying to figure out the weird aspect ratios, I realised that you guys are using custom wallpapers on your mobile phones.
I used to use Ubuntu up to 12.04. By the time the support ended, the new versions had the Unity desktop, I didn't like it, so for a while I switched to Crunchbang (may it rest in peace), and now I'm using Mint Cinnamon. Some of my developers are using Ubuntu with Unity. Everyone is free to pick what suits them; I'm not one to judge them.
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.
Just to be pedantic: we've had a hell of a time implementing dynamic resizing of svg's in Firefox. Works fine with Chromium. We spent far too much development time to keep our 4% of users happy, but eventually we did it. Perhaps newer versions of Firefox changed this, but there are customer-facing oddities the bank's customers may experience.