Calling it a thirst trap is too innocent. These dating app companies are scum-sucking vampires designed to make most people feel lonely and desperate enough to give them money in perpetuity. People just handed one of the most important and intimate aspects of their lives over to US tech bros, pressured everyone else to do the same, and two whole generations are not just having less sex than their parents, but half of them have never had a long-term relationship as they're approaching 30.

Reddit once voted the end of an ep of Archer as the greatest moment in TV history or some such.

The moment in question was a shot-for-shot homage to an episode of Magnum PI. No one seemed to acknowledge this.

I needed a new saucepan.

I've now replaced half my kitchen.

This isn't just an issue in terms of romantic relationships, or gender-specific.

We used to all be exposed to the same media and had common points of reference and interest. It was called water cooler discussion. Unless you're into sports, this doesn't really exist any more.

We used to share a more common set of customs. Schools used to have etiquette/finishing classes. Was a lot of it ultimately arbitrary and made up? Of course, but we were all taught the same things, and they became a common language. You knew to take off your hat/glasses when talking to me to show a level of courtesy and respect, and I knew you were showing respect when you did that. This also worked in terms of things like knowing when to adopt a formal tone with others... many people don't have a formal tone any more, let alone know how to use it.

Everyday life thrust us into more social interaction, too. You used to have to go to stores, talk to people. Even public transport and public spaces used to be a social experience before everyone buried themselves in their mobile phones and headphones. Now the majority of people left trying to interact with you in public are weirdos or trying to sell you something, so people assume anyone approaching you in public is a weirdo or trying to sell you something, suddenly it is taboo to even try to strike up a conversation with a stranger.

And modern outlets like social media encourage some of our worst tendencies. Everything escalates into outrage, tribal warfare, makes us really bad at self-moderation and letting things go.

The-way-things-were was never ideal for a minority of people, but the way things are is ideal for no one. I strongly believe even the innovations that are supposed to help a lot of minorities are hurting them to a degree, too. I fit into a couple of those minority categories myself, and have to force myself to go outside, to use manned checkouts, to put away my phone when outside, as while the alternatives may be easier in the short-term, in the long-term they are making me both physically and mentally less-resiliant.

It's hard to avoid the US politics. Worse than reddit in that regard, it is giving me flashbacks to 2008 Digg where every second thing on the front page was about Obama and Ron Paul.

Sentencing has never made much sense. Depends upon jurisdiction, how many charges prosecutors can tack on, how many you end up going to trial over, how many you get convicted over, and who is responsible for sentencing (in some places the jury sentence, in some the trial judge, in others sentencing is a separate proceeding with a separate judge).

One of the big factors here is that Masterson and his lawyers still deny everything. He didn't cut a deal, hasn't shown remorse since he hasn't admitted to any wrong-doing, and the judge chose to sentence consecutively. First trial was a mistrial, second trial got 2/3 convictions, and apparently they intend to appeal. So depending upon appeal, he is currently facing somewhere between being acquitted on appeal to facing life in prison. In a lot of cases like this, some sort of deal is cut on lesser charges or lesser sentencing in exchange for admitting guilt and not dragging this on through appeal, hence typically shorter sentences. Masterson/his lawyers are instead rolling d20s and the current outcome is a 1.

You can also middle-click the bookmark folder itself.

Or you can open a second window, open all your work sites, then pin the tabs. If you have at least one pinned tab in the first window as well, even if that pinned tab is just about:blank, both windows will re-open when reopening firefox.

Take beverages with you from home.

You can fill an entire wardrobe with kmart clothes for $100, it's cheaper and more practical than even op shops most of the time. Maybe just don't buy your shoes from there.

Bottle sauces and seasonings can last a long time, and can dramatically improve the diversity and quality of your home cooking. Basic chicken, rice, and greens can be turned into a dozen different dishes depending upon the sauces.

Avoid subscription services like the plague.

There's always a few exceptions, but name brands are rarely worth it.

Most of those staff are going to have no trouble finding new jobs. It's a highly technical and specialised crew, many would already be in demand elsewhere, and a void left by LTT would be quickly filled by other groups producing similar content, who suddenly find themselves in need of more staff. Hell, a lot of former LTT staff would be gobbled up by LTT's own sponsors.

This is a terrible argument whenever there's any public controversies within the private sector. It's not worth thinking about 'the jobs' because that's not how the economy works. If there's fire behind this smoke, and LTT did fold, those left long-term unemployed are probably fewer in number than those who are currently being exploited and mistreated. It's almost always a zero-sum game.

A lot of bullshit work is administrative, jobs that exist to meet regulatory requirements (compliance jobs).

Or contract requirements (eg. sometimes one company will be contracted by another company to produce X amount of Y, then the other company will go bust and have no real need of Y, but the first company still needs to produce a minimum amount of Y for several more years to avoid being in breach of the other company's creditors and get sued, or a specialised worker will be given a 4-year contract on a project that gets cancelled, and it's cheaper to pay him to do nothing than it is to pay him out of his contract early).

Or as a result of a freak accident or screw-up that the company over-corrected on, at which point you're basically being paid out of the marketing budget to perform security- or QA-theatre, or being paid by another company or govt department to confirm that the security/QA-theatre is taking place whilst taking really long lunches.

A lot of the time a business or govt department will be too organisationally complex for anyone to figure out where the bullshit jobs are. You could have 5 departments under you, all of which justify their existence with a bunch of dense jargon, and any one of them could be operationally useless. And if enough time passes without you figuring it out, the personal cost to your career in just playing along will be less than if you admit that you had your bosses pay 12 people for 5 years to push and rubber-stamp papers that could've just been handled by two other departments knowing how to email each other.

Do yourself a favour and don't read the possible side effects on the back of the box of paracetamol you bought from the supermarket.

I get the impression not a lot of people were reading, writing, or wiping there even when it was legal.

So many dead franchises. The videogame industry really went in an unexpected direction...

Prior to D-Day, The Allies had inflatable tanks and trucks to disguise where the real buildup was. Pretty classical tactic.

More than once I had someone being an arse to me on reddit, I took a gander at their profile to see what kind of fucko I was dealing with... and it was full of their nudes.

One time it was someone who lived in the same town as me.

Yeah... your insults and comebacks don't hit quite as hard now that I know you're desperate for people to see your vagina.

Is it that hard to read the post? OP is right, almost every TV on the market has the same cheap, shitty plastic feet, and they're spaced as far apart as possible so you're unnecessarily size-limited when trying to buy something like a bedroom TV to sit on top of bookshelves or a tallboy.

I'd like something more than 32" for my bedroom too, but I can find one new 40-42" TV on the market with a central stand now, and it is some obscenely expensive 4K OLED thing from Sony. I am keeping an eye out for older, pre-owned TVs as a result, but am yet to find any good deals.

The whole trend is nothing new. Millennials and some GenXers were stealing all their slang from American rappers when they were young, too.

Forums worked really elegantly when you had an active userbase of maybe a couple of dozen people a day.

Megaforums... not so much.

Maybe I'm just weird but I think the tech focus is better.

Like that's where all this started. Kevin Rose wanted a better version of Slashdot, a tech news aggregator, so he created Digg.

And Digg was about tech news for several years before going to a general format, at which point it became trash.

And then Digg's redesign killed the site and everyone flocked to a Digg clone called reddit, even though reddit was a clone of post-shittification Digg, not pre-shittification Digg.

Being tech-focussed really does help. I'd sooner deal with Well Actually neckbeards than the average Facebook user, even if I'm not just interested in tech news.

I thought Threads was supposed to be a competitor to twitter? I don't understand how they'd even integrate with Lemmy instances. I'm here to see posts from boards/forums/subs, not from specific people. Would posts from random Threads user profiles start showing up on the main page?

Anti-aliasing? Pop-in on textures and geometry? Shadows? Looked like some z-fighting there too.

There was a nice-looking model train, though.

That's almost precisely their business model.

Get users, retain users, turn users into recurring paying customers.

Dating apps don't exist to find you connections, they exist to keep you hooked. They'll give you the bare minimum of opportunities necessary to make you think they're viable, drag it out as long as possible, pressure you to pay for premium, and if they ever developed a matching system that worked well, they'd bury it to stop half their userbase from marrying each other and uninstalling the apps.

Earlier than that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlaHvnkvtbA

Thin toilet paper is one thing, just use more layers.

Narrow toilet paper is another. Fuck places that use non-standard width toilet paper.

They're still too much like reddit users.

Instructions unclear, drank corpse water.

At some point during his attempted coup, he realised it wasn’t going to work

When was that, exactly? Putin fled, reserve forces were standing by and not fighting Wagner, and he was a day out from an undefended Moscow. Worst case scenario was a protracted civil war, but he still would've lived longer than this.

Honestly, none of this makes sense. The fact that he aborted in the first place makes the idea that he was conspiring with Putin the whole time to flush out disloyal elements within the Russian armed forces seem credible... but then why kill him after? I'm not ruling out the possibility that either this was a genuine accident, or it was another false flag and he and his second in command just faked their own deaths.

I mean I agree that this is a new user nightmare, but we've been conditioning people for 30 years to download and run random .EXE files as admin too.

I don't agree with everything the guy above you said, but my circumstances are very similar to his.

I have friends, but they don't know anyone they can introduce me to.

Sports are off the table due to both health problems and a lack of interest (do you really want group activities to be full of disinterested guys just there to chat up chicks?), never mind that they're all heavily male-dominated around here.

Local councils put on events, but they are either for children, for mothers, or for seniors.

Everything has been turned into a product to be sold to you, almost every event costs money, and when you do pony up the events are somewhere between borderline scams and actual scams.

...

This is a recurring issue with this subject. Someone offers advice, someone points out why that advice isn't very applicable, and the first person makes no attempt to "adapt and overcome" themselves and either a) offer better advice, or b) admit that they don't have any better suggestions.

Leaving was easy.

Using the alternatives is hard.

I think the far-more realistic scenario is we create a colony of robots, first for experiments, then (if possible) to build out a colony that can eventually be inhabited by humans.

It's called lifestyle creep. It's never that you're in a better place today than you were yesterday, it's always that you could be in a better place tomorrow.

And it's both right and wrong. We make ourselves miserable by always wanting more, but also a lot of us have less than we deserve.

Reddit became too toxic for me around 2014. That's when they started replacing default subs with shit like r/sports, trying to court the most general audience possible, then forcing everyone to exist in the same space and expecting it to go well.

Same thing happened with Digg. Digg went from tech-news to general-news around 2007... 2008 we hit a US election year and the site became a cesspool. The Diggnation Podcast was hosted by the site's founders, they had to talk about the top 10 digg posts each week... they repeatedly had to feign interest in UFO and Ron Paul stories at that point.

Ars' quality dropped badly about 10 years ago, around the same time New Scientist went to shit. A lot of their articles are now uncritical regurgitations of press releases. Even the one guy they had doing really detailed investigative pieces on the videogame industry up and left probably 5 years ago.

Also they never followed through on their promise to give us an everything-but-apple RSS feed.

Very 'inspirational', but as useless as your previous reply.

I already am.

Oh, there's your mistake. If you close one window at a time, Firefox thinks you no longer want that window/pinned tabs, and only restores the last window still open when restarting. Close Firefox with Ctrl+Shift+Q or go to the hamburger menu and exit.

It's almost like modern anime exists to pander to teenage fantasies or something...

They cited their sources and included direct quotations from the bill.

And the direct quotations from the bill were less-than-damning without several paragraphs of editorial leading the reader down the garden path. This is on the same level as the 'death panel' hysteria from about 10 years ago.

At some point in the future cars will have to incl. some form of assistance technology as a standard feature, big whoop. It doesn't say it has to be enabled by default, or always turned on, and with all the assists and autonomous driving features already being added to cars, it's very likely most manufacturers will end up meeting the requirements of the bill without even trying.

...

If

driver behaving erratic and interfering with safe function of car

Then

pull safely to the side of the road and temporarily disable ignition

...

BuT mUh FrEeDoMs. Something something 'right to travel' = right to operate a car whilst intoxicated (sounds like some SovCit bullshit), as opposed to right to a functional public transport system or something...

8 windows, ~17 tabs.