Phantom_Engineer

@Phantom_Engineer@lemmy.ml
0 Post – 71 Comments
Joined 3 years ago

Bullshit. Nobody, or at least very few people, expected Reddit to revert the changes. A protest can be successful even if it doesn't lead to immediate change. I was here on Lemmy long before the API nonsense happened over at Reddit, and the difference over here is night and day. Lemmy has been around for awhile, but until these last few months it couldn't hold a candle to Reddit in terms of content or activity. Maybe it still can't, but now it has enough users to be viable. Reddit might go on like nothing happened, but in the background a competitor has been born.

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Glanced over it. Complete word salad. Corporate nonsense: baffle them with bullshit.

You get points from communities. These points are stored on the block chain, because why not? The points themselves come from reddit, but the communities distribute them. Since they're on the block chain, reddit can't take back your magic bean points or whatever once you get them. Nevermind that they're worthless and that reddit controls the only platform that they're even remotely useful on.

For now, Reddit will cover gas costs for distributing Points to users and allowing them to spend Points on features such as Special Memberships.

Emphasis mine. Someone has to pay for it, because that's how the block chain works. For now it's Reddit. In the future? Who knows!

How does this benefit the consumer? It doesn't, really. Potentially it gives posters more control over a subreddit, but looks like mods will still hold essentially all the power when it comes to a subreddit, which is how it works now.

How does this benefit reddit as a business? It doesn't, really. They're handing out magic beans with the selling point being that they can't take them away from you once you get them. It costs them money to do this, because it's on the block chain as opposed to some in-house database. This replaced coins, right? They killed an income stream and replaced it with an expense.

They get to tell investors that they're into the block chain when they launch their IPO, I guess. All I can say is buyer beware. Chances are high the powers that be unload their stock options in the IPO hype and then get the hell out of dodge. They might have waited too long, though. The tech bubble deflated, and I don't know if the books are impressive enough to draw in the big bucks from investors.

If you want genuine control over your community, start one on the Fediverse and self-host an instance. No admins will kick you off since you're your own admin and head mod rolled into one.

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Pedophile (stands for Minor Attracted Person)

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Never let a good crisis go to waste. The Dems should seek concessions in exchange for propping up the McCarthy speakership. Unfortunately, if you can count on one thing it's that the Dems will find a way to fuck it up.

While there is some bad, overall it had genuinely changed for the better. There's a lot more diversity in the kind of people here and the kind of content posted. It used to be a lot more dominated by Tankie nonsense.

E-bikes are great. I've got one I built from a kit. That said, you don't want kids riding more powerful e-bikes than they can handle. If you wouldn't let your kid loose with a gas-powered dirt bike that can go 30+ mph, you shouldn't let them loose with an equivalent e-bike.

I'm against licensing e-bikes or requiring insurance. While they can potentially be dangerous to the rider if misused, danger to other people or property is pretty minimal. The risk isn't enough to justify requiring liability insurance, like with cars. Licensing will only discourage ridership.

That said, there should be an age requirement for certain classes. In lieu of that, parents are just going to have to exercise common sense. The kids will do what they want, rules be damned.

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But at the same time, this meant companies didn’t have to be profitable, because they could pay out investors from money that other investors gave them???

Few, if any, of the big tech companies were playing out any kind of dividend to investors. It was more that they were content for companies to maybe someday make money as opposed to actually making money,

I've heard this before, but more in the context of a proverb than a proper joke. As far as meaning, I think it's along the lines of "correlation doesn't equal causation," but not exactly.

Tap plus reusable water bottle. It's free.

Pretty sure this would make things worse. The dome would block out the jet stream making any rain minimal, and, even if tinted, the dome might actually focus the sun's energy on the city.

I don't know, how do you feel about pandering for upvotes on a website that doesn't have karma?

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Atheist, if you consider that a religion. I view it more as a lack of religion or belief, but that's just pedantry. I was raised a Jehovah's Witness, but eventually became disillusioned with their teachings as I grew older and realized that they were out of touch with the Bible and (more importantly) reality. After a period of self-reflection, I examined what I believe and came to the conclusion that I didn't really believe in much of anything anymore.

I don't believe in the Bible. It's a great work of literature, in an academic sense, but it's not something to model your life on. You can tie yourselves up in knots trying to come up with a coherent interpretation or you can take everything so figuratively that you might as well ignore the source material all together. I didn't see much point in either and just view it as a product of the wide range of people over the millennia that contributed to it.

I don't believe in God either. For me, I don't see a reason to think that there is a God. It's essentially impossible to prove that God doesn't exist. If you disproved one, people would just come up with either excuses or another God entirely. Some might argue that Earth's existence implies the existence of a creator. Assuming that was true, wouldn't the existence of this creator imply the existence of a second creator for the first? Why should we accept that God had no creator but that the universe had to have a creator?

There are other arguments, sure, but my lived experience has shown me no reason to think that there's a God or specific meaning, plan, scheme, or rhyme and reason to life on Earth. That doesn't mean we can't find meaning in our own lives, but it does mean we have to work to make it.

Nobody is coming to save us. Nobody is going to hand us an answer or salvation. We have to save ourselves.

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Occupy and commit war crimes in the name of "nation building." Do this until political winds change at home and force us to pull out.

What was the question, again?

Isn't this what all you lemmy-worlders got mad at Beehaw for doing? I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for a small statement from people as an anti-spam measure (a sort of advanced captcha), though of course the big problem there is reviewing all the applications in a timely manner. Still, I think there's room for more and less exclusive instances. The tools are there for instance owners to protect their instances however they choose.

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The technology has potential but right now it's mainly being used either to buy illicit goods or separate fools from money.

Lemmy is free to use. If you give money to an instance owner, at least you know it's a donation and that you'll never get it back.

It's gonna take more than a tweet for me to believe it. Still, it would be a welcome development if it brings about an end to the Ukraine War.

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Haha jk.... unless

My only advice would be to have a back up plan. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail, and there's no guarantee you won't get an unpleasant surprise. You say you'll use the toilet if you're about to shit yourself, but what if you can't make it and do end up shitting yourself because you put it off so long?

It might not seem like it, but you do need 5k to match the color of daylight. You'll also want bulbs that are 90 CRI like the other commenter mentioned. Lower CRIs can make the colors seem "washed out" which might be the difference you're seeing between your bulbs and true daylight. Multiple lamps would help as well, because otherwise the shadows will seem harsh.

Yeah, I had missed the $5 per month per community part, which does basically boil down to that.

The whole operation does have an air of incompetence around it. Either coup or don't coup, don't half-ass it. The guy seems like a loose cannon, and I'm surprised that they're essentially going to let him go. Maybe they're just happy to have him out of the way.

I'd argue that's how you know the CIA wasn't involved. They're better at coups than this.

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US. The tap water is safe to drink. Occasionally a metro area will have problems and issue a boil order, telling people to boil tap water before drinking, but this is rare. Some areas have problems with lead contamination due to aging infrastructure, but this too is uncommon in the modern day.

It matters very little. It's performative, trying to justify the conflict by framing it one way or another. The reality on the ground will remain the same no matter what the media calls it. Ultimately, it will be historians that name the war.

The combatants are Israel and Hamas. The location is Gaza. Conclude from that what you will as far the "proper" name for the conflict.

It depends on what you're trying to buy. For CDs and Vinyl I go with Discogs, usually. There's also Mllusicstack, though I haven't gotten around to trying it yet.

At the end of the day, all our three-letter and military agencies should be accountable to the civilian government, even if we do have some crackpots running around. They should say what they know, whether it's what we want to hear or not.

It should exist, but be far shorter. The original copyright law in the US was for 14 years, and I'd say that's about right. We can argue about the exact length, but that's a good starting point. In the modern age, that's ample time to profit off of a work, and apparently it was back then, too.

If your movie, for example, hasn't made you any money in the first fourteen years, it's not going to make you anything. The vast majority of people aren't going to see a new movie come out and think "Cool, I'm going to wait fourteen years and watch it for free." A few might, but not a significant amount.

So the downside, lost revenue for creators (or more realistically, the companies employing the creators) is minimal. The upside? Huge amounts of content becomes available for use. From an economic perspective, this will boost productivity far beyond the lost revenue, leading to a net gain. Those clinging to immortal copyrights will hurt, but the economy on the whole will benefit.

There's also the moral argument. Free Mickey, man!

Paradox Plaza. I haven't posted there in ages, though.

Damn, I should have known

Ah yes, this outside I've heard so much about

Yeah, but with RedReader. There's a few niche subs I like that aren't well-established here yet.

I dunno, the Biblical story around Nimrod doesn't paint him in a good light either.

Find the cheapest MP3 player possible, maybe one of those built like a USB stick that can plug into a computer.

Here's one. There might be better options out there. The idea here is no wifi, no Bluetooth, etc. You could presumably load MP3s onto it just like you could a flash drive. Unlike the flash drive, it can play it back.

As far as ripping CDs, I use EAC. It supports ripping compressed to MP3, among other things. The linked player can play FLAC as well. I imagine most can, but the larger files size of FLAC might become an issue. Other programs exist, of course. It can be done!

As an investment, a home is risky. For one, you're only going to have one most likely, so you're not diversified. While property values do trend up, there's a myriad of things that could potentially happen to reduce your property value as well. Not to mention, while the land underneath the home increases in value, the value of the home itself (on top of the land) decreases as the house ages.

On top of that, you're paying maintenance, insurance, and property tax. While yes, it's better than renting, it's not necessarily a good investment compared to other investments you can make. On average, you're going to have a better return on the stock market than a home. True, that's also risky, but it's easier to diversify and there's more money to be made.

Finally, you're usually leveraged pretty deep on a home. If you default for whatever reason, you'll be left with nothing. If the bank somehow fails to recover its investment after selling the home (say, because you owed more than it was worth), they can sue you for the difference.

That said, it's not a bad idea to buy a home. You can always live in it, if nothing else. You might want to buy one just because you want it, which is valid. Lots of people do well on homes. You just need to realize that it's not as safe or good of an investment as it might seem.

Dr West is already running independent, so I doubt it makes much of a difference. How many potential RFK voters would have voted for Biden over Trump or West?

It's closure

Ideally lower than median: closer to Q1. Still, you have to start somewhere.

The fear mongering is pretty ridiculous.

"AI could DESTROY HUMANITY. It's like the ATOMIC BOMB! Look at it's RAW POWER!"

AI generates an image of cats playing canasta.

"By God...."

I think it's a valid answer. Money isn't everything.

Imma buy a big house, tho, then a Rivian or something. Or maybe a share in a New Zealand bunker.

Every other day, but sometimes more often depending on what I've been up to

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Black king comes out as trans. (We support her fully)