I’m not sure when they added it and it might only be some phones (I have a pixel 9 pro), but you can just plug your phone in via USB and use the USB mode notification to switch it to webcam mode

see people […] spent $25…$45…$30 on gas

I spend $7 ~ $13 […] three times a month

3 x 13 = $39

it’s not nearly as close as what I’ve seen other people spend.

?

Oh no, don’t get me wrong, I work from home just fine.

If I’m working from a cafe, restaurant or bar, I’m spending the whole time there distracted

Which I guess is indeed a personal issue, so far play

Any time I’ve gone to “work” from home somewhere fun, no actual work is getting done, no matter how genuinely I try

Look at the list of creators on nebula and check their videos out, I think most of them should fit the bill.

If you find something you like, you can get a nebula sub (or lifetime pass) and cut out all the YouTube nonsense from the experience too!

I’m not sure if they’ve degraded, but I’ve got one of those CD-R spindles with a few disks left on it somewhere

I could burn a mix CD this afternoon if I felt like it?

Thing is if I gave half of the people I know a mix CD I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t actually have a means of listening to it

It’s still never been proven despite countless very smart people looking for this exact behaviour for well over a decade now. The first person to actually prove this whole mass spying via microphone to sell ads thing is actually happening, would be world-famous overnight.

For instance on an android phone, it’s not really possible for an app to do something that a determined enough security researcher couldn’t ultimately detect if they were looking for it. When you can build your own version of the operating system and decompile the application easily, there’s not really any other places to hide that won’t give something away.

If you feel like your phone is acting off of a conversation you had without interacting with it, it’s nearly always one of these three:

• The vast majority of people are super predictable most of the time.
• You are not accounting for other people in the conversation, who may well have just googled the thing. These companies know who you spend time with, they don’t need a microphone for that.
• Baader meinhof phenomenon

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve thought surely something fishy was going on plenty of times, but the reality is, until someone can actually prove it (which is entirely possible to do if it’s happening), it’s gotta just be the above. We’re being tracked a crazy amount, but it’s not passively by microphones in our pockets

Note: none of this applies if you’re actually being specifically individually targeted (i.e. by a hostile government). All bets are off in that instance

I feel like this one is relatively uncontroversial

URL pronounced as “earl” however? I’ll spend all of my remaining energy in life ensuring the person saying it is stapled to the bottom of the Mariana trench with rebar

I see you’re new here

Yes of course

But every single scrap of information in Wikipedia exists somewhere else

Its value is twofold and exclusively these two when you boil everything down:

• It is enough information to answer any question that has an empirically known answer
• It is available to anyone on the planet with ease and without cost

There’s very little else we’ve created that hits both of those, but the second is by far the most important.

There will be parties like when Thatcher died.

My main emotion would be relief on hearing

Already got a copy on my NAS, I update it every year or two when I remember to.

But you’ve missed the point, my personal access to a Wikipedia text snapshot is not equivalent to the free access of information to everyone. The information just existing somewhere isn’t enough.

And anyway a person can’t practically keep their own copy of the Internet Archive. It takes up something like a quarter of an exabyte

I often assume this kind of thing is part of an effort to filter for idiots

If you know that’s an invalid IP address, you’re probably less likely to fall for the scam after the scammer has put the setup work in. So if they filter you out before a scammer has to spend any actual effort on you, that means more time they can spend scamming people who might be more likely to fall for it

That’s why these things often have egregious spelling errors and other seemingly obvious red flags

I feel like this has been one of my soapbox things for a while now, but

Americans, the Internet Archive and Wikipedia stand as two of the biggest contributions to human knowledge preservation in all of history. To lose either would be a huge backslide for us as a civilization, and it never really seemed like a genuine threat until recent events over there.

I know there’s a lot of other shit going on right now, but you must do what you can to ensure both are able to continue their work.

Mid 30s, 3rd party Reddit app migration ~3y ago

Stuck around because it reminded me of a lot of the good parts of Reddit that increasingly seem to be gone from the actual site. Though not that I’d really know because I probably only go to Reddit once every few months now via a search for something, and every time I do, it seems even worse than the last time.

I’m just hoping the growth continues such that the less busy communities start to pick up a bit, we’re getting close to the point where there’s a community to cover most interests I’ve thought looked for, but many of them are ghost towns. But we’re making progress, month on month it does feel like there are more people knocking around

I literally cannot conceive of a more efficient arrangement of 17 monitors

Conclusive proof all species of geese are assholes

Hot glue gun

Yep to both

But much more in the former than the latter, life is for living plus many places have a return/refund policy

Maybe I’m not awake enough yet but I’m still not seeing anything other than tiny human in a pod