I’ve only ever been out of the country one time.

My boss and I wrote a paper that got us invited to an international conference, that took place in Palermo, Sicily.

It wasn’t high on my list of places I want to visit, but free overseas work trip to Sicily!

It was pretty disappointing in many ways. The whole time I was there I constantly felt like I was about to be robbed or scammed.

The taxi drivers are nuts, we were sure we were going to die multiple times just on the ride from the airport to the hotel.

The accommodation in the city was pretty cheap but most places had awful reviews, so we splurged and chose a 5 star hotel near the conference venue. It ended up being the equivalent of a 2 star back home. Mold in the bathroom, paint peeling off walls in the bedroom, exposed wires poking out of every electrical outlet. The hot water didn’t work in the shower for 2 of the 4 nights we were there. At the buffet breakfast they served cold toast, warm yoghurt, and spoiled milk. You couldn’t make it up. And that was the best accommodation in the city.

When we walked from the hotel to the conference centre, we were walking past piles of garbage that people just dump on the streets. Apparently that’s a normal thing. There’s nowhere else for garbage to go. Sometimes it gets picked up by the city collectors, usually it doesn’t.

There were no pedestrian crossings, and cars don’t stop at red lights. So the traffic is constantly flowing at full speed on all the roads. Often the only way to get to where you need to go is to walk out in front of traffic, don’t make eye contact with any driver, look straight ahead, clench hard, walk sure, and change your underpants when you get to the other side.

It wasn’t all bad. The food at the restaurants was amazing. I had some very good authentic Sicilian pizza. They serve cheap pints of Heineken at every restaurant and bar. If you like oily fish such as sardines, pilchards and anchovies, you’re in heaven because it’s their staple, they serve them on everything. The locals love cannolis and eat them like crack. They were served for desert at the conference, at the gala dinner, and at every restaurant we went to. I wasn’t a fan of them.

I liked the novelty of being in a different country for the first time, but I wouldn’t go back to Sicily again.

Lots of things. The main one is dust mites. Any clothes that I have in my closet or drawers that I haven’t worn for a while will make me sneeze uncontrollably for an hour if I pick them up. Same if I get a spare sheet from the linen closet, if it’s been in there for months, it will set me off. When I vacuum the house, I need to use one of those hypoallergenic HEPA vacuum filters. Dust mites are everywhere all the time, no matter how well you clean your house. Technically it is the shedded and disintegrated shells of dead dust mites that people are allergic to, it accumulates over time in places the mites live.

Other than that, I’m also quite badly allergic to black mold, and have a reaction to pollen and grass seeds.

I’ve never taken a proper allergy test, I’ve probably got others I don’t even know about.

The concept of “inclusive or” in language is a bit different than that used in boolean logic.

The simple case is: “would you like chips or salad?” “Yes.” Vs “Would you like chips or salad?” “chips”.

In this case, it’s unclear whether the question is: “should a video card or monitor come with a cable?” “Yes” Vs “Should a video card or monitor come with a cable?” “Monitor”.

The two examples I wrote were attempts to reframe the question in two different ways to avoid that ambiguity.

As you pointed out however, OP wrote the question backwards, in a way that could be interpreted in a third manner, where buying a cable includes a video card or a monitor.

Printers are one of those things that has never come with a cable. I remember even back in the 90s, you’d buy a new printer, and they’d ask “do you need a printer cable too?”. Back then they were parallel port cables, but the trend continued when printers adopted USB.

I always thought it was a blatant upsell conduit. Of course I need the cable. Can’t use the printer without it!

These days however, I’ve got so many printer cables including parallel port, USB-B, and ethernet, but I mostly print via wifi. Now I’m glad they don’t come with cables, and same with graphics cards, and even mobile phones.

Are you asking inclusive OR, or exclusive OR?

EG, should your question be interpreted as “Which of these should the cable come with?” Or “Should these even come with a cable?”.

Unnamed space idle

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“The female orgasm isn’t real” - Antiorgasmism.

Different thing. Google it.

Yep. This is why I don’t touch alcohol anymore. I don’t have an addiction or dependency, but when I drink a beer it makes me want another, and that one makes we want another. Then I’m hungover and filled with regret the next day. No point to it, so I just don’t do that anymore.

For tracks I’m familiar with and play often, I can usually tell the difference between 128kbps and 192kbps on an MP3. In very rare cases, with the right song and the right earphones, I can discern 192kpbs MP3 from 256kbps. But I definitely can’t tell a 256kbps MP3 from FLAC. The Wikipedia article on audio transparency says that MP3 becomes transparent on average around 240kbps.

I’ve recently started using the Opus codec. It is higher quality at lower bitrates than MP3. Opus is considered transparent on average at around 160-192kbps.

Personally, I’ve been re-encoding all my FLACs to 192kbps OPUS for storing on my smartphone where space is limited.

I got the first Pokemon game (Pokemon Red) when I was 14 years old. I never watched the anime. Back then the game was revolutionary, I’d never played anything like it. The goal of collecting all Pokemon, gaining experience to level up, evolving to make new Pokemon, selecting and organising my squad, it really played into my young brain chemistry. I finished it multiple times. I got a game boy link cable to trade Pokemon with my friends and battle them at school. Thats exactly who the game is made for.

I also played and finished Pokemon Silver, and Crystal. But after that I stopped playing them. Too similar, too repetitive, too many different Pokemon to know and remember, mechanics got too complicated.

+1 for Gentoo

I agree with you, a simple minimal url-shortener does not need 2FA.

This would require configuration with a whitelist of which OIDC IdPs to trust. Otherwise anybody could self-authorise a OIDC token (using their own IdP) and use that to log in.

No. This makes no sense. Are you seriously saying if you saw an order for 18,000 waters pop up on your monitor you’d just say “that’s fine” then spend the next three days straight filling cups?

If I were the manager of the store, I’d hope my employees would have the bare minimum critical thinking skill to ask someone first.

At the store I worked in, everyone would be given at least 12 hours notice of a catering order. We’d have everything prepped ready to go, and expect the order when it arrives. If one popped up without notice it’s definitely a bug, and we’re definitely not making it.

People don’t like to be preached to, or converted to something they know nothing about, especially if they’re happy with what they already have.

Yes it would be nice if there were more members on Lemmy, but I prefer if people make their own choice to seek it out themselves.

Bruh… If I get less than 7.5 hours sleep, I’m tired all day. But if I get more than 8.5 hours sleep, I’m also tired all day. There’s the magic window of time in the middle where I wake up relatively refreshed.

Yeah, I grew up in the 90s where schools and offices had physical filing cabinets full of folders and files. And in the late 90s when learning computers at school those same concepts were reinforced in the computer file system. So files and folders within the context of using a computer is ingrained and seems obvious to me.

But kids these days are born with iPads in their hand, they use Chromebooks in primary school, and all their files are automatically saved to the cloud and immediately available on all their devices. How would they ever learn the concepts of filesystems? It’s not taught at school. It’s not relevant to anything they do.

It used to make me so frustrated (it’s a simple concept!) but now I get it. Maybe it’s not as obvious a paradigm as we thought. Maybe there are better ways of organising files (eg, tagging, keywords, filtering) that are more human. Or using namespacing (ns prefixes, curies). Or even using non-local universal identifiers (ipfs locators). It makes me wonder if we might eventually even move away from hierarchical-directory based filesystems at the system level too.

Came here to say this. My workplace used to offer a Linux workstation option (which I opted in for 9 years), but they had to remove that option to fulfill new security and management, compliance standards. They need to be able to manage exactly which applications are installed on a system, which binaries are allowed to run and when, the exact settings for every application, the exact version of the OS and the specific updates, and precisely when updates are installed. All of this needs to be applied based on the user, their organisational division, their security groups, clearance level, specific model of device, etc.

I know that using a combination of Selinux, Kerberos, and something like Puppet can get you close in the Linux world, but Microsoft group policy has been around for 30 years and is well understood and just works.