In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

— Terry Pratchett

— Michael Scott

Pretty much any movie franchise on or after the 3rd film (Transformers, Fast and the Furious, etc). If it’s based on a book series, then the first one after the source material runs out (e.g. Jurassic Park III and later).

I had to google “Ozempic face” because I’ve apparently been living under a rock.

In case anyone else was under a rock…

From Cleveland Clinic:

Generally stick with H264 codec in mp4 container and you’ll be fine. Those are supported by pretty much every browser and most apps.

Uploading to your instance is hit or miss depending on how it’s configured or whether it will accept anything other than images. Most people just upload them to catbox and use the link from there in the posts.

The loneliest number

Eh, gotta break at least one egg to make an omelette (or break the seal on the packaging if you’re using egg substitutes) lol.

Sounds like my idea of curating a social platform devoid of “-ist’s and -ism’s” is doomed to failure then lol

Patrick’s Law: If a comment thread on the internet is more than 7 replies deep, it’s a slap-fight that’s best avoided.

So what if Lemmy, Piefed, Mbin, and NodeBB made it so that only the first matching community gets the post?

Not sure about the others, but doesn’t Lemmy do that already (only applies the first matching community)? I’ve been out of the loop for several months, so maybe it changed, but I thought it already did that?

Probably power banks. I pretty much only buy Anker these days because I’ve had too many cheap/no-name ones just fail, turn into spicy pillows, flat-out lie about the capacity, and/or, in one case, actually catch on fire.

One of my Anker power banks was recalled, and they notified me as well as had the replacement to me within 2 days. And the replacement model was actually nicer than the one I had.

I guess anything, really, that is part of my everyday carry and has a potential to burst into flames is grounds for paying the “premium” price where there’s good quality control and product support.

$150 is about normal these days. The pumps will usually have a little sticker somewhere that list the authorization hold amounts.

Fun fact: The auth holds used to be $1 way back in the day. But when prepaid debit cards came around, people could have a balance of $1 on them, get $50 worth of gas, and the station wouldn’t be able to charge the actual amount (it would decline for NSF with no way to recover it as with a regular debit/credit card). That’s why the hold amounts are between $75 and $150.

If you want to avoid the authorization hold, you can either pay cash or pre-pay with a cashier; the latter case will charge only what you pay.

Does digital payments made cash wallets obsolete?

Nope.

Phones crash, apps screw up, Google arbitrarily decides your phone isn’t “secure”, batteries go dead, cell networks are sometimes unavailable (wallet app requires internet), merchant payment networks occasionally go down, etc.

I don’t use digital wallets since the only options are Apple and their walled garden or Google who uses every transaction to profile you for targeted ads and deems your phone insecure should you do anything that might keep their eyes out of your life. But even using my “old school” debit card, I still feel much more secure always having some cash on hand for emergencies.

It’s strange how we’ve moved from mall shopping to online shopping to now AI shopping for us

Well, “we” only did the first move because it was more convenient. The latter is being forced on us.

Any silicon vendors (NVidia, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Realtek, etc) should have open source drivers / firmware. I can’t imagine what, if any, benefits there are to keeping that secret, and it seems logical that sales could/would increase if people were easily able to adapt them for their use cases.

And also the huge reduction in ewaste by being able to keep smartphones up to date or repurpose them without having to spend years painstakingly reverse-engineering binary blobs that only work with ancient kernels.

One particular spite house in Boston: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinny_House_(Boston)#History

According to local legend, the structure was built as a “spite house” shortly after the Civil War:

… two brothers inherited land from their deceased father. While one brother was away serving in the military, the other built a large home, leaving the soldier only a shred of property that he felt certain was too tiny to build on. When the soldier returned, he found his inheritance depleted and built the narrow house to spite his brother by blocking the sunlight and ruining his view.

Another source states:

Not much is known about the city’s narrowest house. Legend has it that … its unnamed builder erected it to shut off air and light from the home of a hostile neighbor (also nameless) with whom he had a dispute. … Believed to have been built after 1874

Sadly never came up.

I generally dislike editorialized headlines (when used as post titles) but this is the exception. Nicely played.

I used to work with a guy who was a dead ringer for Bill Bailey both in appearance and personality.

Weird. Other than how it used to choke when there were conflicts (and all uploads stopped until that was fixed) I haven’t had any issues like that. Guess I’m just lucky.