Both Mr. Beast and Mark Rober. They got too loud and shrill over time.

Edit: Oh and Guga Food / Sousvide Everything. They just do the same thing all over, with weirder ingredients every day, and then make shocked pickachu faces when stuff tastes shit. Ribeye dry aged for 180 days in engine oil? No shit it's bad.

Without the buyout, the company would have failed even earlier. Doesn't help the employees either.

My employer. Who owns the laptop. And forbids me to fuck around with it...

Contacting the hospital is way more effective than asking random strangers online for a best guess based on vague details. Just sayin'

I tried and it doesn't update, even after a clean reboot with no browser open whatsoever. However I did find another entry in the Firewall that comes up right on boot, which is a service called MS.Edge.Webview2, which seems to be triggered through the Teams App. I've now completely uninstalled Teams, and after a fresh boot the ad (or "media control") seems to be gone now. Guess I'll be using Teams from my phone or via browser in the future.

I haven't heard of either, let me check if I can run those with my user profile and not break anything I need to log on to our corporate network in the process.

It's sufficient to mention it in a wechat group with >10 people, which already qualified as instigating "the masses".

My cats never cared about toilet paper, so over all the way.

Not that I'm aware of, but I'll double check.

Thought of that as well, but all ads are blocked and I get this popup even with the browser closed and after a full reboot (not just suspend and reactivate), so it must happen on system level, I assume. Checked my run on startup applications and services, and they appear to be clean as well.

Sure, though quite a few of those things are not explicitly written down, and court transcripts are only published in high profile cases, so you won't find any official reference to the group size. So it's mostly from second hand experience and hearsay. You pick up one or the other thing if you live in China for nearly a decade.

But here's some official reading - I hope the sites are accessible from outside China, that's something I can't validate right now.

You should be good to go with google translate; though specifically for Chinese legalese, I suggest yandex translate (assuming you don't speak Chinese):

https://m.66law.cn/laws/1470356.aspx

https://www.spp.gov.cn/spp/llyj/202111/t20211130_537133.shtml

http://legal.people.com.cn/n1/2021/0416/c205462-32079979.html

https://m.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_20925867

I have disabled and uninstalled it, but office 365 still enforces it as the default save as location, so now when I use the dialogue, the system hangs for 30 seconds. Even disabled it in the policy management, but no dice.

I can't wait to see the site formerly known as Twitter to go out of business.

Aren't they regulated in some way or other? I had problems with them in Europe (travel a lot for work, including some African and Central Asian countries) and they blocked me when I tried to buy something while in Nigeria. Fair play, common scam hotspot.

But no matter what I did to prove my identity after returning, they wouldn't unblock my account. So instead I sent a complaint to the CSSF (the FED of Luxembourg, where they got their European banking license) and within days I had the head of compliance from their HQ in Ireland on the phone telling me that my account was open again and practically begging me to drop the complaint.

You really don't, humans are by and large social animals, so while you might be able to suppress that feeling, there's little chance to get rid of it entirely.

I agree with the other comment though that you need to build general social circles first and foremost. That's how most relationships start anyway, through mutual hobbies and interests.

Just don't go waltzing into any hobby gardener meetup with the only thought in mind to find a partner, but rather get involved with something you care about and then see what happens. Be that a book club, board game session, arts & craft stuff, sports, or whatever, just make sure it's an actual interest of yours.

And if it's the no sex part that contributes to your insecurity, then seriously, find a paid companion. If that's illegal where you're at, find a place you could go without repercussions. I've seen people transform over such encounters, no matter how frowned upon it might seem in society.

Oh nice, thanks! Will give it a shot.

Time to ban Twitter and call it a day.

Lawyer time. At will, maybe. But you've been assaulted on the job, are now suffering from severe anxiety (right???), and got fired on top of it? They'll eat your boss for breakfast and get a nice severance package out of it.

Mark Rober.

He got louder, flashier, less techy and more talky and is doing a gazillion reruns of the same general idea over and over. Can't really enjoy it anymore.

We learned swimming in primary school in Germany, no opting out.

But having lived in several African countries and now in China, it's surprising how many people not only can't swim, but are deathly afraid of water.

LOL, some of the comments in the source are gold.

https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/main/v4.0/src/DOS/ABORT.ASM

Note:  We do need to explicitly close FCBs.  Reasons are as follows:  If we
; are running in the no-sharing no-network environment, we are simulating the
; 2.0 world and thus if the user doesn't close the file, that is his problem
; BUT...  the cache remains in a state with garbage that may be reused by the
; next process.  We scan the set and blast the ref counts of the FCBs we own.
;
; If sharing is loaded, then the following call to close process will
; correctly close all FCBs.  We will then need to walk the list AFTER here.
;
; Finally, the following call to NET_Abort will cause an EOP to be sent to all
; known network resources.  These resources are then responsible for cleaning
; up after this process.
;
; Sleazy, eh?~

Fuck apple with a cactus.

Are you just trying to make actual sense out of fashion? Good luck.

When I played Superhot. It's a slow motion shooter where enemies and bullets only move in real time when the player is moving.

I only played it a few minutes at a time, but each time I looked up from my desktop I was surprised that stuff was in motion even though I wasn't.

Very weird effect and it set in each time I played.

No. Typically you only rent a plot in a graveyard for 10-30 years, and unless you or your heir(s) extend the lease, the graves will be dug up and used again. By that time most of the old casket and body have disintegrated to a pile of crumbling bones. Those will either be taken out and fully incinerated, or if the decay is progressed to a point where not much is left to begin with, a thin layer of soil covers the remnants and the new casket will simply be put on top.

It's also getting more and more "fashionable" to get incinerated right away, so that's really a non-issue.

I live in China. Trust me, you don't want to have those homes in the US. The house I live in has been completed in 2016 and I'm the first tenant, moved in in 2018, and it's got more issues than my dad's house from 1965. Houses here are built as cheaply as possible, skimping on building materials, safety, plumbing, insulation, wiring, etc.

The pricing bubble is just a joke on top. The actual value of the real estate here should be about 20-25% of what it is in reality - for example if I were to buy the house I'm renting right now, I'd break even after 114 years. Not taking any repairs or interest into account.

I had 3M karma over 4 accounts, and spent about 3-5h a day there. Been a daily user for 12 years, moderating some 1M+ user communities for 7+ years.

Left reddit for good, never been back. Not once.

I wasted so much time there that I took on a part time PhD to fill the gap, and I'm excelling at it.

Thanks, u/spez... I guess?

I swear by SumatraPDF. The most lightweight reader I ever used. Opens in seconds, is tiny in size, comes with zero bloat.

Yep, cancelled the subscription we shared among my dad, brother and I. Most outrageous fact was that I actually have two residential addresses (private and an apartment provided by my company near the office), and even as account owner I was being inconvenienced with the "are you travelling" bullshit.

A court in Germany has recently decided that reading the code of a software you legally purchased and finding plain text passwords there is illegal hacking.

The person was hired to do a security audit (by a third party) and disclosed the finding to the software developer, not even to his own employer.

The developer decided to sue him instead of fixing the problem.

At this point I have lost all trust in the technological capacities of judges out there.

Most of them were automatically defederated for not having adequate protection against bot signups, that got nothing to do with sketchy content.

Many US based websites are no longer displaying content to Europeans, since they can't legally harvest data. Youtube, Instagram and other websites/apps playing licensed content are also increasingly disregarding countries where licenses are expensive and/or revenue is low.

I'd really look into getting a good VPN. Mullvad ($5/month) is awesome, or else Proton in the free tier (can't pick the server but get one assigned at random, might need to restart to get one in a useful location).

The thing is that gen.xyz is the registrar itself, i.e. the highest authority for this tld. If they blacklist domains, you're screwed.

It was absolutely called Mäusespeck when I was a kid, but that's 35+ years ago.

CNET lost my trust when they repacked software and drivers in their archive with a homebrew installer that bundled bloatware. Initially the bing search bar, then Opera, latest I remember was some antivirus solution. Sure, you can deselect them all, but I hate those business practices with a passion.

Reddit is dead and buried, what's left are bots and teenagers. Those yappy discordians now run the show, most of us 10+ reddit veterans either came to lemmy, or gave up on "the internet". I'm pretty sure you're not the only one who considered reddit to be the internet at that point.

Most power users, myself included, spent 5+ hours per day there, at times more so than at their paid careers. Especially the mods (I've been moderating 6 subs, two of which had over 1M and 5M users).

I do miss some of those communities. I don't miss modding. Leaving reddit showed me what ungodly amounts of time I sunk into that platform, now that I had to fill other means to close the gap. With Lemmy it's 20-30 min a day, often spread out over 5+ sessions since there's not much to say or see that takes me more than 5 min at a time.

I've stayed on some of the moderator discord channels since those are fine folks, and chat with them in the off-topic rooms. Which shows me that reddit has gone off the deep end once and for all. With many decent folks leaving, ads and bots exploding all over the place, only the die hard shitposters and radical opinion leaders stuck around. They might not have had a digg moment, but are going the way of tumblr, which is arguably worse.

What I'm trying to say is that while Lemmy isn't the arch we wanted it to be, going back isn't possible either since the harbor burned down.

Personally, I've started a PhD just about a year ago at the time I left, and it does plenty of filling the gap in my daily calendar...

Anything taken before 2023, yes. I had a former colleague who's boyfriend was a photographer, and he took a shitload of pictures of her in various random business suites and situations, close-ups of her holding pens, mugs, papers, glasses, etc. etc. and published them on some stock portals. They don't pay a whole lot of royalties for multiple use images, but every now and then someone buys an exclusive license, meaning the picture is afterwards removed from the stock archive, and that pays several hundred bucks.

So it's really a numbers game, the more photos you dump on the platform, the better.

Anything published since last year has at least a chance to be AI generated. Should be tagged as such, but well. Should.

That's correct, but most of those calculations were based on theoretical figures used by artificial aging methods and computed failure rates. Now we have real world data from panels that actually aged that long.

You're not forced to use smartphones. I happen to live in China, and there are people without them.

You can buy tickets at the counter or vending machines, you can text or call instead of sending wechat messages, you can pay bills by card or direct debit, and supermarkets all accept cards (Chinese ones, that is) or cash.

People use wechat or alipay out of convenience. Just like people in the West use whatsapp, signal, fb messenger, telegram or whatever else there is. And some of those are testing payment service integrations (whatsapp pay for example is live in India since a few months ago).

You don't like it - don't use it. Nobody will force you. But if it takes me 7 seconds on my phone to finish a task vs. 2h in person, guess which one I'm choosing.

Edit: Typo

We had something like that in Germany, if you opted out of military service, you had to do civil service instead, i.e. you had to work in an institution that provided some benefit to the general public.

Most of those jobs were healthcare related, such as working in a hospital, as ambulance driver, kindergarten teacher, assisted living helper etc., or working in a supervisory rule for a company that employed people with disabilities to make sure they don't get injured in the workplace.

Both my brother and I did it (they later scraped military service, and the civil service as a consequence), and it was really amazing. He went to work in a food factory where people with mental disabilities were employed to sort raw ingredients (think removing debris and washing fruit and vegetables for juice, yoghurt & pickling), I worked as a nurse in a hospital.

Gave both of us a good twist for our careers, he moved on to study education for people with disabilities and now works as a special ed teacher for an integrative school, I went on to work in the development aid sector all across Africa and Central Asia for years.