• 7 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 6th, 2023

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  • After narrowing down the “high velocity” tower fan options on Amazon two years ago to two options that seemed to have the best reviews, I ended up going with the “Dreo Pilot Pro”, ordering two and for some reason being sent three. Anecdotal experience of course, and their use has been largely limited to the summer, but they seem to work a bit better than the Lasko fans they replaced without being distinctly louder. Specific settings probably depend on the exact model one chooses, but the ones I got have nine speed options.



  • If you’re the one paying for internet access, you should also have the right to determine the content that you’re paying to have access to. While something like pi hole could be used to metaphorically take down most of the billboards without impacting the ground below it, even everyday users should be informed about the data advertisers are getting from them, whether it is anonymized or not. Hiding an important setting about data sharing near the bottom of a page in settings doesn’t help anyone but the advertisers.




  • Just because it’s the norm doesn’t mean it’s not excessive. In contrast, Apple’s implementation of a 30% cut is even worse, since with an iPhone you can’t just install an app from another source (and even when you can in the case of the EU, there are recurring costs for doing so). Since Steam accounts for the majority of PC video game sales, with AAA titles only not releasing on it when they have a clear financial motive not to, Valve’s use of a price parity clause effectively makes it the arbiter of what the industry standard markup on PC should be.




  • There isn’t a free alternative that works as well, unfortunately. Bing not only has many of the same issues, but has worse results. Since DuckDuckGo makes use of Bing’s API for its results, in addition to lacking features such as date range searches, it is still a step down in terms of the quality of one’s search results. Having switched to Firefox due to Google’s efforts to make unilateral, self-serving changes to Chromium, I’d be only too glad to switch search providers if an alternative provider had a similar number of accurate results.




  • A success does not include leaving a victim of failed experimental medicine with a non-functional implant. In contrast to how animal subjects are used as test subjects (often conducted with less oversight than there should be), using experimental medicine on volunteering patients should be done not just to collect better data than the chimps before them supplied, but with the genuine expectation that the product in question will benefit the patient beyond their usefulness as a test subject for continued product development.