• 1 Post
  • 17 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 25th, 2024

help-circle
  • I think the polls are close because only a certain subset of voters are in them.

    Did you participate in the poll?

    I ask because I didn’t. I’m not even sure how I could but can’t be bothered to figure it out, and it doesn’t seem like it means much.

    I also asked my coworkers if they were in any of these polls. Out of the whole lunchroom, one old guy said he used to do them, years ago when they would call him and ask questions. But they haven’t in a long while.

    So that’s a whole lunchroom not represented in the polls, and I doubt we’re the exception. But we will all be voting come November.


  • I mean, given my work schedule it was late for me too. But it was an OK time for the other coast I suppose. Good thing I have a DVR.

    Old age aside, that’s the curse of campaigning while actively President I think. Biden’s been up since god knows when hearing reports, making tactical decisions, worrying about multiple wars, working the reporters, navigating security concerns and doing his job, while also having to rehearse what he can anticipate, get to the studio and get all made up and go on TV. I’d be fried at the tail end of such a day too.

    Trump probably threw a party, napped, popped some strong pills, printed another copy of his same old rally speech and came out of a hotel across the street ready to blame some immigrants for the sun going down.

    Maybe we should get the VP to run the country on important days like debates so the active president can get the same treatment as the guy with nothing better to do?


  • On the one hand, it’s a tradition at this point to always run the incumbent. In most cases, it’s a slam dunk win unless things went really wrong. (say a pandemic)

    The difference now is that I don’t think we’ve ever had presidents get this old. I think Reagan ended this old but no one has ever run for office this old. And I can’t blame a guy for getting old like I can blame a guy for spouting lies and vitriol. I do think it’s time for an upper age limit for office though. If people can be too young, they can be too old. And it seems like people are living long enough to get to test it.

    But on the other hand, there just aren’t any democrats that came close to winning the primary, wether because of the first hand tradition or because they just didn’t have anything good to bring to the table I’m not sure.

    And when the opposition is as sturdy as Trump, it’s not the time to play games with untested newbies, you know? So you try to bring up your battle hardened best, even if he might be getting up there in years.

    That said, before the debate, I felt like he had the ability. He’s been strong at previous public appearances. I truly hope this is a fluke, and he wipes the floor with Trump at the next debate. Because otherwise we are screwed, either because Biden fades out on us or Trump gets to try for his racist autocracy.


  • Plug it into a monitor or TV and keep an eye on the console.

    I have an older NUC that will not cooperate with certain brands of NVMe drive under PVE…the issue sounds like yours where it would work for an arbitrary amount of time before crashing the file system, attempting to remount read-only and rendering the system inert and unable to handle changes like plugging a monitor in later, yet it would still be “on”.






  • Absolutely. You can even throw the telephone in there. At the start it was a great way to reach Grandma across the country or the doctor across town. Now most of the traffic on it is robots and extortionists trying to fool Grammy into giving her money for some lie or another.

    I don’t even answer my phone for numbers anymore…be on a short named contact list, leave a voicemail reminding me you are someone I should put on that list, or nothing doing. Sucks for anyone putting me down as an emergency contact though…

    And I feel TV being 25% ads is being pretty conservative…oh, but streaming! Swap the ads and channels you don’t want for a higher per-channel price and no ads…oh, wait, now you get a higher price and the ads!


  • There’s a whole lot going towards ending the web as we know it.

    Censorship, consolidation, AI, greed, to name a few.

    Why, I couldn’t even get into the article before it faded into a paywall.

    I get people want to be paid but splashing cash on every page is not the internet as I knew it.

    Getting to this article from a social site(Lemmy) was also not how I knew it, that’s the consolidation part. After MySpace, in the era of Facebook pages it started. Less personal websites, less websites in general, just get everything from Facebook and Reddit.

    And sure, AI is also going to water down content, with prompts written by cheap corporate lackeys that we will still have to pay subs for after a social site sends us there.

    And then there’s also the censorship and laws coming out to restrict what’s available. First to protect the children while they are young, then more to “protect” them as they get older, and eventually they will know nothing but state approved media.

    To quote the article,

    It’s the End of the Web as We Know It.

    And I’m old and bitter about it. It had good promise, but enshittification took hold as was inevitable.


  • I wonder if it can be detected by the streaming apps. Some of them are really anal about ensuring you can’t record or whatever, and don’t work if it doesn’t get all the HDMI security stuff just right. I’ve had issues with bad cables and my portable projector(Anker) has to side load an alt version of Netflix because they couldn’t/wouldn’t get the device to pass Netflix “certification”.

    I’m guessing this means new partnerships and money changing hands, or nobody on a Roku can watch Netflix anymore, or they put these ads at a higher level that bypasses whatever security/DRM Netflix uses. Probably the last one, but if Netflix thinks they will lost money to this they’ll probably just pull their certification anyway.






  • Because “protecting the children” is an easier political fight than trying to save adults from their own freedom, and the internet is not as clearly a threat as guns or drugs. And even guns are hard to restrict…

    As an adult you have a right to make bad choices, as well as certain constitutional rights, and unless controlling your rights can be readily accepted as required for the public good(like keeping you from driving a 2 ton murder box without training), it will die politically very, very quickly as government overreach.

    And even then there are many who think driver’s licenses are a violation of their freedoms. You think we can control their social media/free speech outlets?


  • I didn’t really have words for it then like I might now with the benefit of hindsight and outside observation…back then I just eventually recognized that it wasn’t making me feel good to participate, more drained and yet I had the need to continue.

    Imagine a school social scene. Imagine those youthful desires to express yourself, the need to be recognized as a person and feel seen and maybe even appreciated by those around you. Maybe you decorated your notebooks or locker or dressed “weird” for expression, maybe you tried to enter different cliques and make friends, even shallow false ones for clout. Maybe you suffered under the school bully who always put you down. Maybe you were the bully, looking down on others to elevate yourself.

    Now scale that up to what might appear to be the countless billions connected to the web. Now the whole world could be your friend, but also your enemy. You are now a mere speck in a sea of others begging for that same recognition. You post something, and an artificial number goes up to declare your success, but you need it to go higher, reach farther. That same number is also a testament to your failure to matter to literally thousands or millions of people instead of at most a couple hundred you could meet in school and town. You could lose hope, fall into depression that you are worthless, or try ever harder, ever edgier, ever more extreme to try and matter. In addition to your own image, you can also try to put others down, bully them and attempt to decrease their visibility, their reach, so it doesn’t eclipse yours. Just like they’ve been doing to you.

    I was too meek to be the bully or the bitch, so my social media experience was trying to go beyond my means and post things that I thought would matter and get seen, while usually being beaten down by those who were not afraid to be assholes about my very existence. And always feeling that I hadn’t reached enough, accomplished enough. That I wasn’t “winning”. Made a whole MySpace page with all the cool widgets just to see a visitor counter(barely) go up. Tried to post my thoughts to a young Facebook and Twitter just to be told I should kill myself, if it reached anyone.

    Kids and teens have enough trouble keeping stable in an environment where they have to work with 50-100 people a day at worst…and now they feel the need to catch the eye of millions. The struggle and burden on their mental state scales with it.

    And this is before we start a discussion on today’s prevalence of malicious intent, pedophiles and abusers you can’t just walk away from and ignore, if you even recognize the threat. And before we weigh in on the corporations with their own nefarious exploitation of whatever makes more engagement and therefore money.

    I’m older now and I can see this all for what it is and navigate around it to meet my needs without falling for it anymore, I don’t care at my age about the likes or upvotes aside from maintaining enough to get into the communities that set a bar to prevent spam. That’s all I need it for, so there’s an achievable goal now instead of an enduring need for ever more that kids have.


  • TBH I really do think there should be some regulations in place. I grew up on social media and it was bad enough for me that I got away from it…mostly, obviously I’m here…but I look at the next generation afraid for them and their future as I see these platforms define their very reasons to exist today. It’s so much worse today as they were able to get hooked younger and at their most impressionable.

    I’m not even sure it can be safely cured at this point without some nuclear option. Kids today don’t know anything else.

    I could blame the parents, but most of that generation is almost as addicted many of them don’t see the problem either.