No Sunlight - Death Cab for Cutie

When I was young
Lying in the grass
I felt so safe
In a warming bath
Of sunlight, of sunlight
The vast open sky
Could do no harm
Like an embrace
Of a mother's arms
In sunlight, in sunlight
In sunlight, in sunlight
With every year
That came to pass
More clouds appeared
'Til the sky went black
And there was no sunlight, no sunlight
And there was no sunlight, no sunlight anymore
And it disappeared at the same speed
As the idealistic things I believed
When the optimist died inside of me
No sunlight, no sunlight
No sunlight, no sunlight
It disappeared at the same speed
As the idealistic things I believed
When the optimist died inside of me
No sunlight, no sunlight
No sunlight, no sunlight
No sunlight, no sunlight
No sunlight, no sunlight
No sunlight anymore

and it’s a multi-billion dollar corporation, that already makes more money than you or I will ever see in our lifetimes, that actively strives to make the user experience worse for people who don’t pay, when they’ve got a practical monopoly in the “free video sharing platform” market. And you’re whiteknighting for them. 🤡

“If you just give them your wallet right away, the mugging isn’t so bad, really. They didn’t even kick my teeth in!” 🤓

The universe thinks correctly.

golly gee whiz it sure looks like I’m finally getting around to getting off the stock android on my Pixel, I’ve been lazy and dragging my feet for some time. Thanks, Google, this is just the kick in the pants I needed!

if say, Spotify or YouTube complain about them.

… who owns YouTube?

Yeah, they’re going to block ReVanced.

It’s gambling all the way down.

And it sure would be a shame if such cameras got vandalized somehow. Spray painted over, shot at, knocked off the proper viewing angle… So many terrible fates that could befall a camera near you!

I’m not saying you can’t do that, but booking.com or Expedia could just as easily be hacked. They might invest more in security, but they also have a much larger attack surface. Furthermore, when you use a third party site, your credit card details usually won’t be passed on to the hotel directly, that’s true – but then, when you arrive, third party reservations (which only have a virtual card on file from the third party site) usually need you to provide a credit card for incidentals. So one way or another your card details will end up in the hotels system.

Travel credit cards are always a good idea, or pay in cash, just be prepared to have to leave a deposit with the front desk for damages (that you’ll get back if you don’t trash the place) if you choose to pay with cash. Dealing with the hotel directly, though, will almost always drastically reduce your headaches. Need a refund? Just talk to the front desk or management. Need to change your stay dates? Call the front desk directly. No waiting in a queue for an available operator in a call center in India, no “well the hotel has to approve of it before we can […]”, no bullshit.

I am legitimately trying to save you the headaches I watched probably hundreds of different people go through for five years on night audit, and almost every time it was a problem I couldn’t solve, it was because it was a problem created by a third party site.

okay I don’t know who needs to hear this but as someone who has actually worked at hotels:

Stop. Using. Third. Party. Sites.

They do not care. Booking.com, Expedia, Trivago, Travelocity, whatever fucking stupid ass third party site out there – they only cause more problems than they solve. You want a good deal? Hell – you want a straight-up better experience? Call the hotel directly, explain the price that the third party site is showing you, and ask them to match it. 99 times out of 100, they will, because when you book directly with the hotel, the hotel doesn’t have to pay the third party site jack shit. The way third party sites make their money in the first place is by telling hotels charging a rack rate of $200/night “we’ll promote your hotel to guests in the area for $175/night, but you’ll only be charging us $150”. The guest pays Expedia or whoever $175, Expedia pockets $25 as a fee for promoting the hotel and passes on $150 to the hotel. In other words, they can either lose out on $25 by price matching, or lose $50.

Every hotel would prefer you book directly, and will happily price match, so they don’t lose any money to a third party site. More than that, if there are any problems with your booking – wrong days, wrong room type, want to cancel, whatever – you would have to go through the third party site again to do any of that. And waiting on or talking to customer support staff with thick accents at 3AM while your kids are wailing and you just want to go to sleep to fix a problem with your booking that, had you not gone through a third party site, the front desk agent standing in front of you could fix right now, is not fun.

Please stop using third party sites. For the love of God and all that is holy, use them to get discounts but do not book with them.

Like, yes, this wouldn’t have done anything about the bedbug problem this hostel had, but the point remains that any issue is much easier to deal with when you don’t have to play a game of telephone with a middleman corporation that does not give a shit about you as a guest.

Sounds to me like you need to update your blu-ray collection to 4K during your stay.

>wait 17 years
>wake up
>scream for 4 weeks and fuck like rabbits
>refuse to elaborate
>die

fixed.

I got accused of being an LLM for the first time just a few days ago. Was pretty funny.

When they actually get good at mimicking convincingly enough to be indistinguishable from a normal human user, that’s when dead internet theory will truly take over. This could’ve already happened, but I’ve seen enough stupid shit vomited by LLMs to know it probably hasn’t happened yet. Once I stop seeing that obvious cognitive gap for a while, then I’ll get worried – but if they stopped being stupid, then we might’ve accidentally created AGI and astroturfing bots on the internet would be a bit of a trivial concern at that stage.

Hello, my name is Dr. Glenn Pierce, and by now you may have realized that all of this has happened exactly the way it was supposed to. You see, everyone who comes to the institute does so because they feel they are no longer in control of something important to them. But, more often than not, the problem is not that the problems we face can’t be solved; the problem is that we become so afraid of failure that we refuse to see our problems from a new perspective – and so we do the same things again, and again, and again. And therein of course, we find exactly the failure we were looking for.

Your life will always be a struggle, and you will always have problems. But today, you had the chance to see things differently. Even though it meant facing obstacles that seemed impossible at first, you thought outside the box - and you overcame them. Because you saw things from every angle, you understood them for what they really were. Because you kept moving forward, no matter how far off the path you were told you were headed, or how unexpected it became…you found your way.

In a few minutes, you’ll be back in the real world, and some part of you will say that none of this was real: So how could it have meant anything? But – just like the power of perspective itself – it will have been as real as you believed it to be. All you’ve got to do is… wake… up.

Fully. Cooked.

perhaps they got inspired somewhere.

Sure, they could pull a Nintendo and do that; but then you’ve got a handheld running Linux. Linux that’s trying to tell the user how they should use it/how they’re not allowed to use it. And thus if they do it is guaranteed that there will be a dedicated, pissed-off Linux nerd somewhere who spends hours a day doing everything in their power to revert or circumvent whatever bullshit they pull.

In fact, if they did a “Nintendo move”, a workaround would probably be integrated into Bazzite within days or weeks.

remember, if you had fun while wasting time, it wasn’t a waste of time at all.

you’re entitled to your own opinion, but I’ve never had anything but good experiences with my own Brother laser printer. I was the one who picked it out and bought it since my family needed to print a lot of stuff and I didn’t want to deal with troubleshooting it for them, and it has been by far the most reliable, easy to use printer any of us have ever dealt with. We used to have shitty HP inkjets, and those can all die in a fire along with HP.

And uses that peroxide to crap explosions at things. Extremely hardcore.