Serious answer:

If the internet didn’t exist, I’d be peer pressured into following whatever norms are followed by all the people in my physical surrounding. I’d take my cues from what my parents and family and classmates told me were “right” and I wouldn’t question outside it.

I’d probably spend more time “socializing”, which as an introvert would exhaust me. But I wouldn’t know any different, so it would just be The Way It Is.

But you asked if my social life would be “better”, and better is hard to define. Better for… general community compliance? Probably. Better for my general mental health? Probably not.

I like spending 15 minutes catching up on my Lenny communities and reading what you degenerate fucks are up to. I am less excited about “going out with friends” every night and “doing something”.

A Way Out was the weakest of the bunch but it was also their first. That studio is absolutely rocking couch coop.

“I use Facebook Messenger. If you care about our friendship, you’ll install it too.”

Now what?

Yeah but the Steam Box comes with steam already inside. If you build a PC you need to get your own steam and then someone put it all inside yourself.

I dunno, that sounds like like Sisyphean task to me.

I do backups with a Raspberry Pi with a 1TB SD card and leave it on all the time. The power draw is very small and I think reasonable for the value of offsite backups.

My personal experience with WOL (or anything related to power state of computers) is that it’s not reliable enough for something offsite. If you can set something up that’s stable, awesome, but if your backup server is down and you need to travel to it, that suuuucks.

The thing that’s helped pull people back from AI dependency at work has been to frequently ask “how much time did AI save on the whole thing?”

I mean, ChatGPT is amazing at writing bash scripts. But if you spend 40 minutes iterating over a solution before the clanker gives a usable solution, didn’t AI just cost time?

People refuse to accept they aren’t gaining anything from AI until they repeatedly look at the big picture.

I found code that calculated a single column in an HTML table. It was “last record created on”.

The algorithm was basically:

foreach account group
  foreach account in each account group
    foreach record in account.records
      if record.date > maxdate
        max = maxdate

It basically loaded every database record (the basic unit of record in this DATA COLLECTION SYSTEM) to find the newest one.

Customers couldn’t understand why the page took a minute to load.

It was easily replaced with a SQL query to get the max and it dropped down to a few ms.

The code was so hilariously stupid I left it commented out in the code so future developers could understand who built what they are maintaining.

“So what was the problem in the end?”

“Man, I don’t fucking know.”

• me, every goddamn time

I wonder what they spent paying people to implement and communicate this change.

At 600k for a company that size this cost them more money than just paying the extra 4 cents.

I’m a huge fan of Drysol. You apply it once every few months and it prevents you from sweating. It’s a little itchy while drying but after that you’re sweat free for weeks! Then you can go without a daily product, or just a light wipe of deodorant if you like the smell.

Also shout out to bathroom spray. Sometimes I want to smell shit and potpourri together!

It’s like when they say “we have apps for your phone” when they mean “we have an app on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store”.

I’m sitting here clutching my Nokia Lumia 640 yelling at them.

I’m not sure if it automatically does the metadata lookup or if it just reads embedded metadata from the epubs I’ve downloaded. It for sure does a poor job of setting up the series name and book number fields if you read a lot of series.

I use a combination of calibre-web-automated for metadata management and calibre-web-automated-book-downloader for downloading from Anna’s Archive. Book read progress and status is synced from my Kobo.

It works really well but you need to manually request books one at a time. The readarr feature I miss was the ability to subscribe to a GoodReads list.

Then how can you even tell if your toilet is online?!

Polite: “Thanks.”

Less polite: “Thank you for your feedback.”

My fave: “UNSUBSCRIBE”

There’s a few free vpn providers out there. You could do a little homework and see if they are a good option. I tend to mistrust free services like that (if I’m not paying, who is, and what are they paying for?), but if you’re in a pinch it’s something to research.

Another option is to look for deals. Sometimes VPN providers will have a super sale a few times a year. I think once I got a NordVPN subscription for THREE YEARS for like $60. It’s more expensive than a single month of anything, yes, but if you can afford a onetime expense it’s nice not to have to worry about a recurring monthly cost.

Your other option is to not use torrents. Usenet is still the grand daddy of file sharing and is pretty much anonymous. Most Usenet hosts are paid, but back in the day even ISPs ran their own servers. It could be worth looking and seeing if there’s any free or low cost providers there.

Wandering the desert?

Nay, vibe travelling.

They didn’t release their methods, so I can’t be sure that most of those aren’t just frustrated users telling the LLM to go kill itself.

Replaced by AI, ironically.