Platypus

It tests whether your mouse movement looks human--we're really bad at things like moving in straight lines, so it's pretty evident from a mouse movement log whether you're a human or a simple bot. It also takes a bunch of auxiliary browser/environment data into account. It's not perfect, but it's complicated enough to defeat to provide fine protection against cheap spam.

Also balding

It depends which calendar you use! Every calendar picks a basically arbitrary system to uniquely identify each year, and in some of them "year 0" doesn't refer to any year.

The Gregorian, for example, goes directly from 1 BC to 1 AD, since 1 BC is "the first year before Christ" and 1 AD is "the first in the years of our lord." This doesn't make much mathematical sense, but it's not like there was a year that didn't happen--they just called one year 1 BC, and the next year 1 AD.

ISO 8601 is based on the Gregorian calendar, but it includes a year 0. 1 BC is the same year as +0000; thus 2 BC is -0001, and all earlier years are likewise offset by 1 between the two calendars.

I got suspended once because someone "punched" me as a joke. By the letter of the regulation it counted as a fist fight even though (a) we weren't fighting and (b) I didn't do the punching. Good times.

That looks fairly tightly bonded to me--you'd probably be better off trying to cover it than remove it. There's maybe a solvent, but without knowing which compounds are used for the lettering and the case, it's a shot in the dark--always worth trying isopropyl alcohol for this sort of thing imo, but it also might damage the case.

Unrelated, but the random blue "AI" slapped haphazardly on top is a beautiful piece of accidental comedy given That Company's rollout of AI

This little bronze orc:

It was a gift from my father, who in turn received it from its sculptor, Sterling Lanier. Lanier was a family friend and an editor at Chilton Books, where he insisted that a book he had read in Analog Magazine be published despite it having been turned down by a score of other publishing companies. The book was initially such a commercial failure that Lanier was ousted from Chilton--a grievous injustice, as the book in question is Frank Herbert's Dune.

I had absolutely no luck trying. I went on dates, swiped apps, talked to every girl I thought was cute, and none of it went anywhere beyond some weird halfhearted relationships. About two weeks after I gave up altogether, I met a girl on my way to the water fountain and we just clicked. Six years down the line and we couldn't be happier.

I guess my best advice is just don't sweat it. Be yourself, do what makes you happy, put yourself in situations where you'll meet new people, and sooner or later somebody will come along.

Is this a common problem? I've almost never had a burrito fall apart on me unless it outright rips--I once made the mistake of ordering a burrito in Scotland, and that was pretty formless, but it was also less a burrito and more an embarrassment hiding under an ill-fitting tortilla.

I've been using it a little to automate really stupid simple programming tasks. I've found it's really bad at producing feasible code for anything beyond the grasp of a first-year CS student, but there's an awful lot of dumb code that needs to be written and it's certainly easier than doing it by hand.

As long as you're very precise about what you want, you don't expect too much, and you check its work, it's a pretty useful tool.

Mlem. There isn't really a main reason. I like it because:

• It's native SwiftUI, so it feels super snappy and "Apple-y" the same way Apollo used to
• It's FOSS (though that's sort of table stakes around here)
• The widget customizer thingy on the beta build is absolutely fantastic
• It's not ugly. There are a bunch of apps that just sorta aped the Apollo UI without any of the attention to detail
• I have a ton of faith in the stability of the dev team. There was a bunch of drama early in its development and I was pretty sure the project was going to die, but it didn't and it's been (as far as I can tell) smooth ever since

My only gripes are that the scrolling is still sometimes funky on the beta build and development isn't the fastest, but once all the apps are in their fully-built stable state I think Mlem is absolutely going to stand out among the crowd.

It's been steadily overrun by bots, and I guess the community hit a breaking point

I've been migrating one of my company's apps from microservices back to monolithic Java. It's wonderful. I haven't touched a line of yaml in weeks.

• Cross-device integration/the Apple ecosystem. I use a Mac for my userland computing, and the ease with which it works together with my phone is a killer feature. Also in this category is integration with my family's Apple devices.
• The software ecosystem. Apple's first party apps and services are really nice across the board, and once again the ecosystem integration is the single biggest reason I use an iPhone. (the user facing apps, at least--Xcode and everything related to it are hot trash).
• Purely subjective, but Android is ugly to me. The hardware, the OS(es), and the apps just look bad to my eye. The iPhone looks and feels nice in a way that I haven't experienced in an Android product.
• I don't trust Google and I can't be bothered to spend any time configuring my phone. I spend too much of my life installing shit and tinkering with config already; I want a phone that just works out of the box.

does adding the copyright/license information do anything?

Not a lawyer, but I'd be sore amazed if "your honor, he copy/pasted my Lemmy comment" flies in court, regardless of your copyright status. The same goes for those AI use notices--they're a nice feel-good statement, but the scrapers won't care, and good luck (a) proving they scraped your comment, (b) proving they made money on it, and (c) getting a single red dime for your troubles.

This isn't a coin and doesn't appear to be an attempt at fraud, though

Yet another thing the lord of the rings movies absolutely nail. The evolution of the Rohirrim theme from a single lonely violin when Gandalf and co. arrive in Edoras to a grand orchestral arrangement over the assembled host gets me every time.

Where tf do you live that a banana is $10?

Almost certainly, and even if it doesn't, it'll probably give you like eight types of cancer

"Never use a knife as anything but a knife or you'll end up disappointed and with a broken knife."

Not sure where I heard that first, but it's stuck with me.

doesn't understand that this is a useful first step in debugging

reacts with anger when devs don't magically have an instant fix to a vague bug

Yep, that's a manager

Quality follows where consistency leads

I have a friend who was a classic Catholic libertarian in college--he held some views on trans rights, abortion, and economic justice that I find deeply disagreeable. It made conversations a little tricky because there were a whole set of topics I couldn't bring up unless I wanted to wade into a debate immediately; sometimes I did, but often I just wanted to hang out and chill and that was hampered.

It took him exactly one year of being out of college and working a real job to realize that his economic views were fucked, and the whole rest of it unraveled from there. He's now a staunch leftist, and it's way, way easier to hang out with him.

That's not, however, to say it's not worth having friends you disagree with. We remained friends because we were able to disagree productively, and I feel I understand my own political views far better for all those long nights discussing them. Still, it was a friendship that took unusual effort to maintain.

I really appreciate how FromSoft does achievements--theirs are the only games I ever really go for the 100%, since that usually entails simply playing and mastering all the content that they have prepared. Achievements like "beat the whole game under x arbitrary condition" or "get this super specific scenario to happen" just aren't that interesting to me, but "beat every boss, collect every important item, visit every area" I find very satisfying.

It's not a matter of what people can use, but what people do use. Like it or not, Discord is the de facto standard, and it's a lot easier to install workarounds that make Discord usable on Linux than it is to convince all your friends to switch platforms.

I've been perusing their website for a little while now, and there is a rough pattern:

At least for acoustics:

• The first two letters are the series. This is the most variable component, but follows some loose guidelines:
  • The initial letter is often indicative of what what onboard electronics that series of guitar comes with, even if the particular guitar doesn't have them (C guitars come with Fishman CD-1, F come with Fender, P come with Fender/Fishman sonitone plus). This letter is sometimes omitted (see the simple D10 dreadnought)
  • The second (or first, if there is only one) letter generally indicates the body style. D is dreadnought, C is concert, B is bass (or banjo!), O is orchestra (?)
• The number generally indicates quality. Bigger number more expensive within a series.
• S after the number indicates a solid top (no S indicates laminate)
• C after the number indicates a single cutaway body
• E at the end indicates that the guitar has onboard electronics

I'd add the caveat "badly designed for solo matchmaking." Dota with friends--especially a five stack you get along with and play well with--is sublime. Dota with four randos is a complete and total crapshoot, though if your behavior score is good and you're not in the total shit tier ranks it's usually pretty fun.

My big dumb orange boy loves to sit right in front of the subwoofer. I guess he's a metalhead at heart.

Finally got around to starting Sekiro a month ago and 100+ hours and five runs later I'm wondering why I waited so long

I've slept on futons (thick, dedicated bed futons, not the couch/bed combo) basically all my life, I personally think they're fantastic. Reading these comments it seems like the sort of thing that either really works for you or really doesn't--I am fairly tall and have a back that loves to complain, but it gets along swimmingly with my futon.

Cheap, thin futons are a nightmare though. Even nice futons tend to be cheaper than most traditional mattresses, so it's never worth cheaping out if you don't need to.

There are a few factors that I think make this year a standout for quantity of great games released:

1. Tons of games that were delayed due to the pandemic released this year, giving us several years' worth of ideas and work all at once.
2. The games industry saw massive layoffs this year--that's a ton of talent cut loose that now isn't going towards future games, and another step towards the inevitable reckoning over the abusive labor environment that games are made in. Whether that's a collapse or labor organization and the establishment of a long-overdue union, it's going to create a churn period that isn't going to produce a lot of games.
3. The glut of great games has saturated the market, meaning that games are returning less per investment dollar. This makes investors less eager to put their money towards new games, which leads to fewer games being made.

Even if they didn't steal assets, a copyright suit is a massive pita to defend against

Not a huge beach guy, but I live for the summer. 80F is the ideal temperature; anything up to 100 is great too, as long as I don't need to perform prolonged manual labor outside. Long sunny days make my lizard soul happy, and all of my best clothes are summer clothes.

In my experience refactoring lots and lots of crappy code left by devs long gone, a dev who can write useful comments is by and large a dev who can write code clean and simple enough not to need them. If the code doesn't have informative names and clear separation of concern, chances are a comment won't help because the dev didn't really know what they did that worked in the first place.

I'm curious what uses you have in mind--anything that's an online competitive (i.e., you compete against other players--doesn't need to be esports sweaty) game I don't think there's a strong case for allowing injected code, since that's an avenue for gaining an unfair advantage and thereby worsening other players' enjoyment, and anything offline I can't see it being worth a company's time and money to prosecute.

Because cross-platform apps inevitably feel out of step with the OS they run on. Native apps can use system components and behaviors and will almost always run better because they don't need to be wrapped in a cross-platform framework. Admittedly a platform-locked app isn't going to be a universally perfect Lemmy app, but it can certainly be a platform-specific perfect Lemmy app.

With no disrespect to Voyager, its devs, or its users, this is why I can't use that app despite its impressive feature set and high level of polish--the ui feels fundamentally wrong on iOS, and the fact that it's a very direct Apollo clone but not written in native swift makes it feel like a knockoff.

If you're on iOS, Mlem for Lemmy is afaik the only one written in Apple's native SwiftUI. Its IMO the one that integrates most smoothly with the feel of the platform and has the most potential, since it's written natively instead of in a cross-platform framework.

For many people, socialization is a core part of gaming, and Discord is far and away the most common platform for that socialization.

My job involves a lot of shimming code in between systems that are archaic, in-house, or very specific to my industry (usually some combination of the three), so the problems I'm usually solving don't have much representation in gpt's training data. Sometimes I get to do more rapid prototyping/sandbox kind of work, and it's definitely much more effective there where I'm (a) using technologies that might pop up on stack overflow and (b) don't have a set of arcane constraints the length of my arm to contend with.

I'm absolutely certain that it's going to be a core part of my workflow in the future, either when the tech improves or I switch jobs, but for right now the most value I get out of it is as effectively a SO search tool.

Just gonna leave this here

I think it is fair to say that having skin in the game suggests that they are making these ethical judgments in good faith; that is, that they genuinely believe that they are making the ethically correct choice in propagating their brutal war. I do not, however, think that level of personal liability inclines them any more strongly towards making genuinely ethical decisions, only ones that they genuinely believe to be ethical.