BubbleMonkey

That’s so meta I’d actually be interested to see how they pull it off…

Poorly, that’s a given, but beyond that.

They don’t come around anymore, but I used to say that I was disfellowshipped/excommunicated, whichever was fitting for whatever religion they were selling. If they ask why, which they basically never do, just say “I’d really rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind…”

They don’t actually want to waste time talking to people who were kicked out of the church for “bad behavior”, and in many cases aren’t even allowed to, so they blacklist your address.

No soliciting signs typically do the job, too, though.

This is really catchy and upbeat :)

Are you also upset when they do a donation drive and have a pre-article header literally asking for money?

I have a collection of over 80k ebooks. I got most of them in huge download packs decades ago, and removed duplicates. it’s a surprisingly small folder.

I did the math on it long ago and it would take more than 200 years, reading an average of one full book a day, every day, to get through them all.

So I’m happy just knowing that if I get through some of them, it’s better than none of them. Time is limited, make the most of it by doing what sparks joy, and not worrying about what you didn’t get to.

Oh, yeah no it’s not the cable, it’s the receiving port on the device itself. Sorry for the confusion :)

TIL my external hard drives use micro 3b. I didn’t realize that was a standard… figured it was a proprietary to prevent using the wrong cable…

I’ve had it with shoddy c ports on various devices, including a phone (thankfully had wireless charging also). The connection pin thingy breaks off pretty easily, and causes the same issue you described for several weeks/months ahead of the actual breakoff, where it has to be in exactly the right position (and wiggling it to hit the right position obviously exacerbates the problem).

I’ve actually bought some magnetic chargers for the more fragile electronics, so I never have to put strain on the port…

What I don’t get is how anyone can sleep with anything other than blackout curtains. Even the ambient light from street lights and stuff is too bright for me.

I mean I know people do it, I just don’t understand how.

Iirc part of the reason for sterile releases is to shift the populations. So for example they release them for malaria-carrying sub-populations but leave intact clean populations to fill in the niche.

There’s also some experimentation with releasing fully fertile specimens that have a specific gut bacteria which makes them unable to carry some of the diseases impacting humans, and is passed down to the young.

I got a full set of silverware for backpacking that collapses down to about the size of those folding reader glasses (plus a little hard storage case just like the glasses). It’s a spoon, fork, knife, and chopsticks. I think I paid $6 for the set. Not super high quality, since the focus was on weight and utility, but definitely does the job.

I don’t use it much anymore, but it was great for lunch at work, and is good when traveling (staying at hotels and getting takeout - no plastic trash!). I mostly keep it in my overnight backpack so it’s available whenever I’m not home and I can’t forget it.

Keep in mind that all of these could be more or less stopped if there was any real desire to do so.

But there isn’t.

https://www.consumerreports.org/consumerist/phone-companies-can-filter-out-robocalls-they-just-arent-doing-it/

Oh… umm… well have a good time with that, I guess… 👍

I mean… No offense or anything but I really don’t care if I mis-spell a brand name. It’s super unimportant in the grand scheme of things. It’s… all just stupid marketing anyway, and if they cared, they would have used a smarter spelling.

What I am concerned about is calling oneself stupid and a nazi (of any sort at this point) while actually being neither. Even as a hyperbolic thing, it’s something I greatly dislike.

Please be kinder to yourself. It’s ok to be pedantic, but just say that instead :)

I also have things that make me unreasonably annoyed. It’s ok to have those things :)

It suggests that art and literature are worthless, and if you have such a degree you’ll be working fast food, known as among the worst jobs (low paid and nobody has a lot of respect for fast food workers).

This is basically the reason we have artificial sweeteners, too.

Some dude was trying to make/do something, and labs were sort of “lol everything is safe” back then so he like… had a sandwich… and noticed it was sweet… so he just sort of tasted all the stuff he was working with and found aspartame. (I believe it was aspartame)

I believe the same is true for fabreeze, the underlying chemical mechanism was an accidental discovery because the researcher’s wife noticed he didn’t smell of cigarettes. It never caught on tho because it, naturally, has no smell, and you become blind to smells you are constantly exposed to, so until they added perfumes (fabreeze as we know it today), even tho it worked, nobody cared to use it. I wish I could actually find it unscented… the scented shit stinks and gives me headaches.

Honestly I wouldn’t even call doctor who science fantasy. It’s just pure fantasy set around space travel and aliens. There’s absolutely nothing science about it, and they really don’t even try to make it seem that way. Anything that should have some sort of science explanation is just hand waved away, and thus internally inconsistent. The dr who universe is basically full of magic. Magic potions, magic wands, magic enemies, magic travel boxes, magic immortality, etc.

I think the sonic screwdriver is about as close as they have ever come to trying to explain any of it, and they basically only did that to point out the (rather absurd, story-necessary) limitations of the thing. One still has no actual idea what it can do or how it can work, just what it usually does and what it can’t do (sometimes and/or probably).

I find this wholly unsurprising.

All ai projects should be forced to show the entirety of their training data. I don’t give a flying fuck if they want to call it proprietary, they don’t own most of the data in the first place. Even if they bought it, it doesn’t belong to them, just like we don’t own digital movies we buy.

And if even a single piece of that training data doesn’t have proper licensing for that specific use for that specific model, or they are ever found to have withheld any of the data, the model as a whole should be immediately scrapped, along with everything even tangentially derived from it, and the company should be fined fully double whatever amount of money that model generated or one years revenue for the company as a whole, whichever is more (no I don’t care if this leads to bankruptcy, should have thought about that before you stole data), and like use if for affordable housing programs or public schools or something, whatever.

They can try again with clean data, also subject to review. One time. Second time they do the same shady shit, permanently banned from the entire sector.

But regardless, we need to stop rewarding them for this behavior. And we need the consequences to actually hurt or we can expect it to get worse, not better.

Considering the super shady practices involved with plasma “donation”, and the fact that it’s used to make very expensive cancer drugs, take your text and good vibes. That’s literally the better outcome.

Most of the world won’t even buy US plasma because of the really lax collection regulations and super sus conditions of most of the plasma centers (basically the fact that it’s paid and on such short turnaround causes a lot of people to game the system, it’s dangerous, and potentially unsanitary/risky.)

Yeah, I know. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, I just roll with it. But I do regret not taking up a lot of the opportunities that I didn’t realize were worthwhile opportunities. I have a tendency to screw myself over, it is what it is. :)