They were specifically created for cleaning ears. First line of the wikipedia history.. The reason Q-Tip says not to use them in ears is plausible deniability. They know they mostly get used to cleaning ears. But it's incredibly easy to puncture your eardrum doing that. In order to stop people from suing them for using their product in its main use case and hurting themselves, they simply specifically instruct against using it that way. While that is a wholly ridiculous falsehood, without it they'd have probably been sued so much that no one would make them. And then I wouldn't be able to clean my ears.

The spreadsheet of verified info on iptv providers would be far more useful than a lemmy community where random providers can post.

Maybe instead of trying to train an AI powered car to deal with the insane chaos that is the road system, what if we designed something to remove that chaos? Maybe like a path that's just for these self driving cars. There's a network of paths to get you to your final destination.

But if we did that, there'd still be our current problems of running out of fuel, or battery power. Which could be solved by electrifying those paths.

But it'd be very difficult to have each of those individual cars switch between paths. Maybe it would be easier if instead of the cars switching paths, the people switched paths. Maybe we just make really long cars, and numerous people can get in them, and then switch cars as needed. People would need to know where to switch between these long cars. So we'd want to set schedules of when they're running to where, and then have an app or something that just told you where to get on and off.

And if they're really long, maybe we could kickstart this before we have self-driving abilities anyway. We could just have one person in the front driving it.

And maybe to reduce the need for rubber, instead of regular wheels on a road, they could just be metal wheels on metal tracks.

Just throwing some ideas out there.

To an extent. But whenever there is a political discussion on Hacker News, the lib right response is very, very loud, and I try to remind myself I appreciate Hacker News for its tech news.

I think the culture is just different. Lemmy was started and run by Tankies. Hacker News was started by Y Combinator, which incubates silicon valley startups. They're going to attract different audiences, or at least different groups of people who will put up with different politics. I can't claim to be particularly upset about the .ml domains being pulled and the center mass of Lemmy moving away from those instances.

When I was 19 I tried an IRC Vampire the Requiem game. I got banned after arguing with the admins about the rules (in retrospect I was right about how things worked but they'd already house ruled it and I should've just gone with it). In response I wrote a whole website for managing character sheets, and a connected IRC bot to handle dice rolls, and pull things from character sheets.

I did all of that, and then proceeded to run a terrible vampire game on IRC for a couple months. The code was all in PHPNuke so it's useless now. But it taught me a lot about coding for the web. During that time I showed my work at a job interview as a software dev, and I got a job while still in college. But as part of the coding questions, I learned that you can use sql to join tables. I went home and started rewriting a lot of stuff, but the game died before I was finished.

Obama was a huge problem, but not because of being half black. Because he ran on a progressive platform, and then was decidedly Centrist once he actually got into office. The entire financial bailout could've gone way better, and moved the country in a far better direction, if he wasn't busy placating his wall street friends. His drone program made every civilian in Afghanistan and Iraq despise us to the core, and made children afraid of the sky. He pushed through Obamacare/Affordable Care Act, which was the Republican plan, as a compromise. None of them voted for it anyway, he could've gotten through a much better plan instead. Hillary's loss in 2016 was as much a denunciation of Obama's centrism as it was about Hilary or right wing populism. And his interference in 2020 to get all the centrists to back Biden and shut down Bernie may have doomed us in 2024.

It's hard to overstate the psychology behind the github profile. As a developer, your github profile shows that you're actively developing, whether it's for open source projects or for work projects. My previously company used a private gitlab install, which meant only my open source work showed up on github. My current company uses github, which means my profile shows green all the time.

We're a small company, but the github costs are a drop in the bucket. As others have said, it'd take something truly federated, or a crazy price jump from Github, for me to consider moving. It's free for my open source projects, it's a small amount for my company, and I have a public profile I can point to whenever I'm discussing my development.

Spoiler: it fits very few company's business models. Some companies can avoid it, if their owners/board want to. But once they take venture capital, or go public, they lose that choice. And that "don't be evil" promise, and most any other, is void.

When was the last time there was a conservative president in the US who didn't cause tremendous lasting damage to the country?

We think people in older pictures look older, partly because people used to age faster, but also because we associate the clothes they're wearing with what older people wear now. Their fashion stayed mostly the same, they're old now, so when we see pictures of them in the same fashion, we think they look older.

Because the point was never to monetize the APIs. The point was to get rid of the third party apps. A minority of users are still using the not monetized versions of reddit. old.reddit.com, and the third party apps. The people using new reddit, and the reddit app, have a totally different, heavily monetized, modern social media experience full of ads and suggested posts. They want everyone to either have that experience, or leave.

But they can't come out and say that, because it's a huge fuck you. A fuck you to their original members, a fuck you to the apps they used to fuel their growth for a decade. Now they want a controlled ecosystem like Facebook, but they can't say it directly. So instead it's surprise API costs, refusing to talk to app developers, lying about conversations with Apollo devs.

But just like everything else they do, reddit can't plan for shit. So they didn't at all consider the fallout for accessibility tools, mod tools, etc. Which is why all their messaging since then has essentially been "No, we weren't trying to kill accessibility and mod tools, just the third party apps for normal users!" But they can't say the second part directly.

This. I was a redditor for 14 years. I was a moderator, I ran reddit meetups in Philly and Jersey. I have a badge on my profile for working with one of the admins 13 years ago to add /r/friends/comments, for use in a 3rd party app for Ubuntu (the kind that will now be dying). I was there for the Digg migration, Secret Santa, Global Reddit Meetup Days, Reddit Gold, Reddit Mold, Team Periwinkle, I was Snapped. I run a subreddit, different_sob_story, that was literally a meta subreddit about bad reddit posts.

Did I have a reddit addiction? Yeah, probably. But it was a large background in my life, for 14 years. If there's a famous reddit moment, I was probably there for it. I had 2 real life relationships, because of reddit. I made a good chunk of my real life friends through reddit. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

So yeah, it's a lot. And some redditors will get over it quicker than others. Bear with me; My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, And I must pause till it come back to me.

This. After my first Android phone I had only gotten Nexus phones. I had a Nexus 6p when the Pixel was announced, and it wasn't going to have a headphone jack. I tried multiple dongles with my Nexus 6p, and none of them both reliably worked with my headphones and fast charged my phone. My wife ordered a Pixel, I ordered a Note 9.

I've gone Note 9, then a One Plus Nord v10, and now an Asus ZenFone 9. Every time a manufacturer ditched the headphone jack (or made it only available at ludicrous price), I just switched manufacturers. I don't even use a headphone jack that often, but when I need it I want it to be there and just work.

My solution is more complicated but doesn't require switching browsers

1. I run a tor client on my home server in docker, the same place I keep my vpn access, torrenting, etc
2. I run a socks proxy on my home server, that sends all requests through the tor network (and a different socks proxy for when I want to use the VPN)
3. On my desktop and laptop, I use the FoxyProxy firefox extension (SwitchyOmega on Chrome). I setup the socks proxy (proxies) on it, using URL patterns.
4. When I go to a .onion link, FoxyProxy uses the pattern, and sends the traffic over my tor socks proxy

Right. I have boxes full of software I bought once, and I have the license to use it forever. But it's for Windows XP or older. I'd need emulators or WINE to run it now, and it's not really worth it. For some of it I even paid for a "lifetime" of updates, but that stops working out when they stop updating it. I apparently live a lot longer than 90s and 2000s software companies. Just let me pay for major versions again with a guarantee of updates for X years, and price it according to those expectations.

37Signals is the company that made Basecamp, and they talk about hosting the software yourself, so presumably they are writing web software that would often be SaaS and letting you host it. So it's great that you'll be able to get it for one time purchase. But it definitely needs updates, as libraries change versions, new security flaws are uncovered, obviously for bugs, etc. Buying web application software is only as useful as the length of the updates included. Them providing the source is better, but since that's not open source exactly a community couldn't really work together to continue updates themselves.

Given this update I don't think the mods have a real choice on that. The original top mods have been removed, the new ones opened it back up.

Thanks for noticing my fear of abandonment. It's from being abandoned so many times.

There just isn't. It was great in the same way the British Empire, the French Empire, the Spanish Empire, the American Empire, were "great". Big? Yes. Powerful? Yes. Forces of mass oppression and murder? Also yes. Praising Imperialists is going to win no favors.

The Bolshevik revolution was a blood bath of royals, but that was because Russia was the only major power to make it out of the revolutions of 1848 without losing their absolute monarchy. Russia still had friggin peasants prior to the Bolsheviks.

If the USSR hadn't gone the route of "permanent revolution" (ie permanent authoritarian government), there could have been a past to look bad fondly on. But instead the boot changed color, and they decided to make their neighbors learn of their peaceful ways, by force.

Yeah, it's been a slow boiling pot of water, but the problem has been the same basically the entire time.

1. Community: reddit, we do not like this thing you are doing. Insert thing here. All of ViolentAkrez's messed up porn subreddit stuff, r/jailbait, r/thedonald, firing the woman in charge of AMAs, Ellen Pao's drastic attempts at monetization (which was just her being the scapegoat for Huffman and crew) and now these API changes. Stop doing this thing that is hurting your community.
2. reddit: Here are a lot of words to say that we don't care about what any of you think, and we believe we are making the right decisions. While we understand you are all upset, we do not care and do not plan on changing.
3. Community: OK, well we're going to continue protesting this and escalating until you change it.
4. reddit: that's all great but we still don't care.
5. repeat x5 escalations
6. The matter finally hits mainstream media. Gawker, or a major online news site, if we get really lucky, there's a CNN segment on it.
7. Within 30 seconds of mainstream media coverage, reddit caves and does the thing the community asked for the entire time.

This is why the protests for this escalated so quickly. We've done those steps over and over again, for over a decade. The point of protests at this point is never to get the reddit admin's attention or change their minds. The point is to cause a big enough stink to get major media attention. The protests ramped up so quickly because there were only 30 days to change reddit's mind, they showed no indication they wanted to change, and we needed the media attention. We got plenty of media attention this time. Unfortunately, media attention isn't going to be enough to change their minds now, because this is all for an IPO and the execs want their bag of money. Even if reddit folds entirely, they'll get to walk with the bag.

But in reality, we should've ditched years ago. Because, does any of that cycle sound healthy? It's not that reddit's admins don't care. It's that they haven't cared in a long time. Huffman doesn't care. I don't think Alex Ohanian did by the end either. Aaron Schwartz cared, but too much. But if a community can only get a site's staff to stop actively harming them by putting a gun to their head every time there's a problem, there's no future for that relationship. This was just the exclamation point. Even if reddit staff totally caves, we should not go back.

So the premise of the Dune series is the Butlerian Jihad, where humans destroyed all "thinking machines" and declared that no machine would ever be made in the likeness of a human mind again. That's why everything's analogue, humans that can do computing in their head, etc.

But unlike what one might think, they didn't destroy thinking machines because AI robots had taken over (though his son Brian Herbert missed that memo). They destroyed thinking machines because, after humans had created AI, they were happy to offload any and all responsibilities and decisions. Humans turned to AI to make any decision, and at a certain point AI ran the galaxy, not because it had taken over, but because humans couldn't be bothered. They stopped learning, they stopped innovating, they stopped doing the things core to being humans.

So as I watch humans hand over more and more tasks and control to AI, apparently including teaching their children, I expect we're heading to the same crossroads at some point.

That was the entire point of mortgages. You're paying interest, and could end up paying well over the original house value, but over a long enough time period, via inflation and property values increasing, you're still making out ahead of renting. Depending on the mortgage interest rate, you could be better off not paying it off early.

For example, I refinanced my house at 2.6%. Afterwards I started paying extra principal payments. My mother the accountant told me to stop. The interest rate is lower than inflation, I'm better off using the money for other things or putting it into higher yield savings accounts instead of paying it off earlier than schedule.

I had a Hacker News discussion where in separate comments, a guy said:

• all the moderators should go away because they're not needed, and he doesn't agree with their decisions
• but there should still be moderation
• but he's not going to do it because he's not here to do unpaid labor
• but of course he wouldn't pay for there to be moderators

Internet discourse in a nutshell

Also because the mainstream manufacturers don't want to have to support Linux.

There is less hardware support for Linux than Windows on laptops -- largely because very cheaply made components just have their firmware loaded into them by the OS when it starts, and since they're largely proprietary firmware they conflict with open source licenses.

Linux laptops are just flat out more expensive to make, because you have to use more expensive components that don't do that, confirm compatibility, and have everything setup before you ship it. Also manufacturers don't preinstall bloatware because they feel like it. It's because they get paid. The kickbacks for preinstalling bloatwave well exceeds the cost of the Windows license.

So preinstalling Linux is more expensive component wise, support wise, and bloatware wise. There's little reason for companies to do it, unless they're trying to court software developers. Dell and Lenovo and others court software developers quite well. But there's little incentive for them to try to increase Linux's market share.

Arduino in the same vein. There's a great "30 Days Lost in Space" tutorial set, but even to play around with by yourself for cheap, you can get an off brand (the hardware is open source!) Arduino Mega for 20 bucks. All sorts of cool programming and electronics fun.

It's specifically the Psychic Sports Picks Trick. And the answer is that it would be illegal at the point OP actually asks for money at the end.

• Large files I don't care if I lose (perhaps videos of popular things): NAS. Hard drives are cheap, not worry about losing it, I can download it again if needed
• Storage with frequent access and security compliance: Wasabi. $6.99 per TB per month, free egress. Compatible with S3. SOC2 and PCI compliance. I use this for work as a backup to S3 for website images.
• Files I need to store cheaply, redundantly, and access often: Backblaze B2. $6 per TB per month for storage. You can download 3x the amount of storage you have per month for free, or connect Backblaze to a CDN partner like Cloudflare for free egress through them. It's also AWS S3 compatible, so you can just the AWS SDK/CLI or tools that work with AWS S3. I use this for hosting image files for my Mastodon server. Note that Backblaze B2 also has SOC2 compliance and US region available now, so it should be as secure as Wasabi at slightly lower cost if you don't have a ton of egress.
• Cheap long term backup storage: AWS S3 Glacier. $0.0036 per GB per month (so $3.6 per TB). Upload your files to S3, and add a lifecycle rule to migrate them to glacier. Glacier is cold storage, extremely cheap and great for a redundant backup. I use this for backing up photos and other files I'm going to want to store forever.

For anything I'm hosting, multiple backups. Home NAS is usually the first backup, followed by cloud storage. So if I need something now, I can get it from my NAS. If there's a problem with my NAS, I can get it from cloud (though with a delay for Glacier)

Problem with Intel cards is that they're a relatively recent release, and not very popular yet. It's going to be a while before games optimize for them.

For example, the ARC cards aren't supported for Starfield. Like they might run but not as well as they could if Starfield had optimized for them too. But the card's only been out a year.

Facebook being used as a way to keep up with friends has been fading for a while. It's mostly only older people left on it, Elder Millennial and older (I'm an Elder Millennial fwiw).

Facebook's real social media power is in its groups and pages. There's usually local town groups, like you'd have with NextDoor. But there's also giant meme groups. New Urbanist Memes for Transit Oriented Teens (NUMTOTs) is huge, and is basically posts about trains and hating landlords, but it was big enough to the notable when the group endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2016. Another huge one is Wild Green Memes for Ecological Fiends, which is memes about nature and wild animals. Facebook has become a lot like reddit, in that it's what you make of it in terms of weird friends and niche groups.

The current go to joke about facebook goes like this:
"Facebook is lame, there's no one on it anymore and it's no fun."
"Facebook is still fun if all your friends are gay communists."

I've only really seen it in two contexts. Mainly "don't scare the normies", which was largely the advice given to my larp communities to not freak out people in real life with their hobby stuff, and probably also applies to subcultures like furries and such. And secondarily as self-deprecating. I'm a Facebook meme group "Normie Has-Beens" tied to the page "Stale Memes for Normie Has-Beens", and it's certainly not people who consider themselves normal.

I have a VPN that I pay less than 100 a year for. Here's some examples of what I use it for:

• Free movies. Each of those movies would be at least $5 to rent and more to buy. If I could even find them.
• Pirating TV shows for streaming services I don't have. For a long while, almost everything was on Netflix, so I didn't need to pirate shows. Now with everyone making their own streaming service, it'd cost me $50+ a month just to get access to all the different shows I want to watch. I have Netflix, and Amazon Prime, and I have access to HBO and Disney. But I don't have: CBS All Access, Apple TV, etc etc. There are a ton of platforms where there's only 1 or 2 shows I want to watch. I can pirate them instead.
• Pirating TV shows for streaming services I do have. There are streaming services I have that my friends and family can't access, especially because of Netflix's new location restrictions. So often I'm subscribed to torrent RSS feeds for shows to put on Plex for my friends, even though I'll end up watching them through the actual streaming service.
• Breaking through geo-restrictions on streaming sites. I'm a pro wrestling fan, but I don't have cable. In the US it's very hard to watch AEW without cable, because they have an exclusive deal with Warner Brothers. Eventually they might go on HBO Max, but in the mean time the only way to stream them is over Fite.TV, which is restricted to outside the US. I can VPN to England, then pay $9 for all the AEW weekly shows, with no commercials. I can also access a bunch of wrestling pay per views for half the price as in the US.
• Pirating audiobooks. Often the only place to get an audiobook is Audible. I don't want to pay a subscription, the books are expensive, and I don't want to deal with DRM. Instead I can just download them.
• Pirating retro game ROMs. I have a raspberry pi with RetroPie on it, a handheld abernic retro console, and a ROM cartridge for my N64. Instead of having to buy the same retro games over and over for new consoles, I can just download the ROMs and use them on very cheap retro consoles. Many of the games I wouldn't be able to buy at all, outside a flea market for 80 bucks

For sure, they'll make some spec that isn't very compatible with lots of cables, chargers, devices, etc. But, it will charge. A normal usb c cable might not Super Ultra Mega Charge your iPhone like an apple cable and adapter would, but it will charge, and vice-versa. That's basically what we have with usb-c standards currently, though.

Right, the copyright is specifically for random essays added to the book, so that they could release it and say it wasn't entirely public domain, so you shouldn't copy it. A weird place to say "copyright fuels creativity" when it's clearly not the reason for the copyright here.

Doctors will not perform lethal injection. It goes against the Hippocratic Oath:"First do no harm"

It's important to note who benefited from it and how, because it explains why there was such a fight to stop an obviously cruel and barbaric practice. Even the Founding Fathers knew it was wrong, but most of them still did it. They kicked the problem down the road because tobacco wasn't profitable to grow in America anymore, so they thought the "problem" would solve itself in a generation or two. Then the Cotton Gin made slavery profitable, so it boomed.

We need to be able to talk how it was beneficial, and who benefited from it, so we can see why it was so hard to end. Because we have a very similar problem with fossil fuels, and capitalism. They're both destroying the world and causing us to do barbaric things to people. But there's resistance to ending dependence on both, because they have benefits, even though most of those benefits go to an elite few.

sure, but not having POPCNT means way older than not having TPM

Not a lot of products have to do that. The one people bandy about is McDonalds adding "Caution: Coffee Is Hot" to their stuff, but the actual coffee spill lawsuit was over coffee hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns. Few things need cautions against their intended use.

Q-Tips / cotton swabs are an almost uniquely bad tool. It's incredibly easy to rupture your ear drums. There's no actual health benefit to swabbing your ears -- it just feels good your ears get itchy. A safer tool could be made, but it'd be more expensive, more involved to use, and there's probably several but I can't be bothered to find out, and neither can you. They make a product that they know is inherently dangerous to use and has no specific benefit. So it has a warning against doing it. Same as cigarette packs have a warning that they cause cancer, even though everyone buying them knows that and smokes them anyway.

Yeah even with the PWA shortcut you can still use extensions and stuff on it. I had to go back to regular firefox and turn off dark reader for kbin, since it's already a dark theme and it was removing the green color from upvotes

Correct. Green hydrogen is expensive and energy intensive, and is not as cost effective as getting it from natural gas. So currently most hydrogen comes from natural gas.

But, unless we find ways to make batteries without rare earth metals, we will be better suited to moving towards fuel cell, once we have the excess electricity from renewables needed to split hydrogen from water. For now, batteries are the better option.

Even thinking of it in terms of non-fediverse platforms. reddit often had multiple subreddits about the same exact topic. But the communities were different, often even splinters from each other because of disagreements on content and moderation. You end up with the original sub, Foo, followed by FooMemes, and TrueFoo, TrollFoo, FooJerk, etc.

If communities start getting merged together automatically, it's going to end up causing problems. Most likely the culture of someplace like lemmy.ml will end up being marketedly different than some other instances (and already is). I would not want posts from a memes group there mixed with a memes group from elsewhere. Grouping the same post client side, sure. But there's a reason for separate groups about the same topic.

If there are 5 different instances with the same community, to subscribe to all of them you have to go find them all.

If kbin had a feature to combine them in groups like this, when you went to subscribe to one version of the community, it could let you subscribe to all of them at once. Without having to hunt them down.