• 16 Posts
  • 249 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I’m more unhappy with messaging apps that notify people if you’ve read a message. It did have a positive side effect in that with Facebook, once they introduced that feature sometime around 09 or something, it caused me to reduce my use of the messaging capabilities significantly but frankly I’m not sure that’s really what Facebook or I really wanted. It’s a common feature in messaging applications and I fucking hate it. I need to read the message to decide if I want people to know if I’ve seen it and I can’t do that without telling them I’ve seen it.





  • I didn’t hear anything before now about this issue and am not well informed at this moment. Some preliminary reading from a CNN article indicates that the Houthi leadership acknowledged the agreement praising it as a victory because it separates US support from Israel. I didn’t immediately find anything regarding further attacks since the announcement but also I see that the agreement was specifically about halting the bombing campaign in exchange for the cessation of attacks on specifically American assets in the region, which I think would be why the Houthi leadership were quick to call this a victory. Are the attacks you’re referring to on American assets?


  • I don’t know, if I’m the alien in this scenario and could plainly see they don’t have the ability to traverse interstellar distances I wouldn’t be concerned from a personal safety stand point about making first contact with the intelligent life on a distant planet even if they did show they still had problems with conflict. I’m obviously projecting my own assumptions based on living on Earth but, on Earth inter and intra species conflicts naturally occurr across the kingdoms of life (maybe even all of them?) so it’s doesn’t seem that unusual.

    Maybe if life, and intelligent life particularly, is common and perhaps intelligent civilizations commonly eventually figure out how to avoid conflict, I wouldn’t be presumptuous and judgemental because this particular one hadn’t got that far yet. It would seem that’s something they likely all have to go through and that’s just operating on the arbitrary assumption that civilizations somehow do tend to figure out a way to overcome conflict, it could just as well be that they typically don’t given how hard it seems to be, so the would be aliens here likely have or have had conflicts of their own.




  • Why doesn’t the damaging and hot particulate matter in smoke do any harm to or otherwise clog up their spiracles like it does to the inner lining of lungs? I gather lungs are wet and also very delicate, but if they’re directly oxygenating their organs through these spiracles eventually it must get to somewhere wet and delicate for the smoke to get in and potentially harm.



  • I realise the dumbass here is the guy saying programmers are ‘cooked’, but there’s something kind of funny how the programmer talks about how people misunderstand the complexities of their job and how LLMs easily make mistakes because of an inability to understand the nuances of what he does everyday and understands deeply. They rightly point out how without their specialist oversight, AI agents would fail in ridiculous and spectacular ways, yet happily and vaguely adds as a throw away statement at the end “replacing other industries, sure.” with the exact same blitheness and lack of personal understanding with which ‘Ace’ proclaims all programmers cooked.


  • Thanks, that’s actually the one I’m using but I mistakenly called it “Android Pass” originally. I’ve edited my post now to reflect this correction. Unfortuantely, at least in the only 2 situations I’ve ever tried to use a wallet which was now twice in days, I was receiving emails from organisations, one with an auto club membership digital card and one with a ticket to an event, on both occasions, I was given a link to add to my google wallet or a link to add my apple wallet and neither link actually leads to a pkpass file or any downloadable file. In the case of one of them at least I saw it links to some unrelated company that I guess they teamed up with for distributing these passes called urban air ship. I assume if you go ahead an sign-in it eventually goes on to give you a pkpass file or something similar that a google wallet app deals with but I obviously wasn’t going to do that. I was wondering if there was any commonly known way to just get the pkpass file from links like those since both seemed to work in much the same way and I assume somewhere at the end of the hoops you jump through you get an actual file.




  • I think I’d be pretty pleased with that actually, so long as it’s on my local machine. That’s because I often find myself wanting to locate a particular email that is along certain lines, or on a certain topic, or involves an organisation’s name that kinda sounds similar to this one word but isn’t actually that word or things like “the email where they mention they’ve had a kid” but I can’t actually recall either what they called their child, or what gender they were, or when the email was received. Or actually, even better, in that last example “What’s Dave’s kid’s name again?” and just getting a 1 word, correct response, with the ability to open the email it found where this was mentioned for additional context if I want it. Or things like “how long has it been since we moved out of that house?” and instead of finding the earliest email I can on the topic of moving house and reading emails to surmise when we discussed leaving and then finding which one might have mentioned that actual date we moved out, I could just get an answer, in English again hopefully with a link to the email or emails that provided the rationale for how the answer was arrived at.

    Often in those simpler search situations I mentioned where I just need to find a specific email, keyword searches don’t always cut it. I have an absolutely appalling memory so figuring out pertinent details to things happening now based on what was going on in my inbox at some point in the past are a very important way that I get by. If I could achieve this more easily by asking relatively vague, English language questions that will help direct search efforts that are being done for me would be really helpful. Sure, theoretically all existing means of filtering and searching email should eventually find me that message but they’d likely be more effort than just asking directly like you’d ask a person tasked with digging through a filing cabinet for you, and sometimes even after extensive filtering by all kinds of clues: date, senders, keywords, labels, subject lines, emails I remember around the same time that I can find; I just for whatever reason can NOT dig up that email only to discover it later when it’s too late to be useful to me anymore and get to see what obscure reason it was none of my clever search methods caught it…




  • Will it actually kind of was ironically. I was going to try and make a go of it, but I was immensely worried I’d be caught in the act and having to maintain the channel flipping with the remote made things awkward too. When it suddenly tuned in consistently I thought I’d hit the jackpot but then I got so worried I’d leave evidence I flicked away from the channel again before I could really you know, get anything out of it.


  • Once I went on holiday in Europe as a young teen. The hotel room had a tv with like 2-3 free normal channels and extra channels including porn that you could access if you called the front desk and gave them credit card information. I definitely wasn’t going to do that since I didn’t have a credit card and this room was booked in my parents’ names, however the whole reason I knew about this was because I was flicking the through the normal channels simply because I was bored and I accidentally flipped past the porno channel. You weren’t supposed to be able to see anything on there because they want you to pay up for that so when you land on this channel you’re presented with some kind of teletext on black screen saying something like call reception to access with a phone number or something, however, when you first flick to this channel, it takes a little while to kind of tune in to it before it displays the teletext and as it tunes in it looks just like the image from this post before instantly clearing in to a complete picture and you get about 1 almost 2 seconds of whatever porn was showing at the time and then the paywall. So being pretty desperate, obviously I flicked up past the channel and back down again to get my 1-2 seconds of porn and did this repeatedly over and over again. Funnily enough, I would have been content with this uncomfortable viewing arrangement but after doing this in a rhythm for a while I noticed that sometimes you’d get 1 second or sometimes 2, or sometimes even like a full 5 seconds or more and this would happen in no particular order of successive channel flips when then suddenly it just flicked on to the channel permanently with no interruption. I have no idea why that happened but this image definitely reminds me of that. Funnily enough I didn’t really take advantage of this luck because I was so shocked by that suddenly happening and so worried it might get billed to the room anyway that I just flicked away from the channel and turned it off.