Adalast

@Adalast@lemmy.world

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Adalast,

It feels like you don’t think the people making these decisions see employee salaries as anything but a line item to minimize or “customer service” as a cost liability. They don’t care about customer experience. Hell, they actively want people to get frustrated and give up because it saves the company money.

What can the US do to help Mexico finally stop the cartels?

Politicians constantly talk about stopping the illegal immigrants that are coming from Mexico, but putting a wall has never and will never be a solution since the reason why so many displaced keep coming across the border is mostly to escape the crime, corruption, inequality, and violence of they have to live in their home...

Adalast,

I would also add “Repeal Section 1” to this list. Let Philip Morris, Phizer, and their ilk deal with the problem. The cartels think they have power, they have no idea.

Adalast,

Ah, my bad. Feeling like crap today. Schedule 1. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK538457/

Adalast,

I meant schedule 1. My brain is much today. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK538457/

Adalast,

My wife was telling me that she saw an article about Microsoft supposedly planning to add a “small” banner for advertisements to the desktop on Windows and the essence of this meme was my precise response.

Adalast,

I am pedantic to a fault, capable of simultaneously being the most specific and most vague person you will ever speak with, and have the social skills of a carrot. I am also debilitatingly ADHD, reasonably autistic, and more intelligent than is able to produce an emotionally functional adult.

I will leave it up to you all on if you want me to be the model, but I’d be happy to if it were up to me.

Adalast,

This is such an apt analogy. I only use it because I have a couple hundred tabs open in Chrome and I am too lazy to port them all over to FF. Even then, I usually have to be really manipulative to the search algorithm to get what I want from general searches and heaven forbid I want to find something that is even the least but taboo. I just use DuckDuckGo for those searches, though it struggles sometimes too.

I know I need to swap over to FF entirely, but there is just so much, from shifting my PW bank to the hundreds of tabs and thousands of bookmarks. Does anyone know of any FOSS or FF extensions that can smooth that process?

Adalast,

Weird, I use them almost every day doing procedural animation and modeling.

Adalast,

I aspire to be this man when I am that old.

Adalast,

Ok, the mask if you are actually rested and not just “feeling rested”. Being hit with the physical effects of sleep deprivation and having organs start failing after a couple weeks would be a real problem.

Otherwise, that damn penny. Knowing that I have 12 hours of “I win” without any real limitation, even if it ends up being 12 hrs/month, would be obscenely broken. None of the other artifacts even come close. I make sure I always flip on a Monday at about 8am, if it’s heads, I apply for jobs I want and trade some stocks until about 1 pm, then go for a walk and see what goodness I can fall into for my life. Head home around 6pm with 2 hours of perfect luck left which I spend working on the cure for Autoimmune diseases and Cancer. Once I have enough wealth built up and have found plenty of cures to Salk the hell our of to piss off the pharma companies, I start working on Nuclear Fusion. Continue this pattern until I get bored.

Adalast,
  • I specifically stated that “I apply to jobs I want”. Your statement indicates that you consider all work to be a waste of time. I personally want a job developing AI tools that work for the betterment of humanity. I wouldn’t need it to pay well as the investments I make on penny time would be my income. Also, it is one of those things that take too long to do in 12 hours, and having a team to work with helps a ton too.
  • The trades aren’t taking 12 hours. If you had the golden touch, and intended on making trades that had long-term viability with 100% success, then an hour or two a month would be all you needed. This also makes sure that the growth is slow enough that the SEC doesn’t get alerted.
  • I didn’t say I was going to take a walk to take a walk. I said I was walking around for a few hours to see what good fortune I could find. Again, if I have 100% successful luck, then everything I do is charmed. Walking “aimlessly” around most towns while under such an effect greatly increases the opportunities to happen across something that is beneficial.
  • The limitation is that you mentioned at the end, the 12 hours every 2 weeks. There is only so much that can be done in that span of time. Everything I mentioned was specifically designed to expand the knock-on effects of the good luck into the rest of the time that I don’t have it. A stock portfolio with guaranteed long-term growth, research breakthroughs which need to be built upon by experimentation and work, meeting the right people and forming the right relationships in my community, a long-term employment that provides me the challenges and long-term results in the world. The biggest challenge is to make sure that you have a good life that makes a difference while you have your normal luck, not concentrating on short term success.
Adalast,

I have always had the power fantasy of the superpower of “I can manipulate anything I can understand. The better, more nuanced, and more correct my understanding, the more fine and powerful my control.”

It is essentially an int stat demipotence. Obviously, I would never achieve omnipotence or omniscience, but it would be cool to just rewrite the laws of physics because I understand how they work normally.

Also, I know better than to ever touch the Hubble constant or vacuum energy state. It would be fun to do extremely local manipulation of the gravitational constant or maybe some of the Riemann curvature constants to adjust the local shape of spacetime.

Adalast,

Au conteaire, money well spent does, in fact, buy time. If you are broke and have to spend half your day riding buses to get your errands done and you buy a car and can get them done in an hour or two, that is half a day you just bought. If you can hire a maid and a chef, that is all of the time that would have been spent cleaning and cooking that you now get to figure out how to spend. Don’t let anyone lie to you that money cannot buy time, because being able to use money to speed up tasks or offload them entirely is literally buying time.

It's funny how google pretends the music on YouTube isn't straight up piracy and everyone just goes along with it

Most people have extremely weird ideas of what’s considered piracy and what isn’t. Downloading a video game rom is piracy, but if you pay money to some Chinese retailer for an SD card containing the roms, that’s somehow not piracy. Exploiting the free trial on a streaming site by using prepaid visa cards is somehow not...

Adalast,

His logic chain may have been flawed for his argument, but his premise is not wrong. YouTube providing a distribution platform for any type of music video means that content holders are putting music on there and suffering the same rules as anyone else. To the best of my knowledge, Google does not pay any additional license fees to content owners should they elect to upload a music video to the platform. The owner makes ad revenue just like all other creators. This effectively circumvents the costly licensing agreements that the likes of Spotify and Pandora have to enter into.

Adalast,

I’m swapping the first-aid kit for the crossbow, but spot on for the rest. Body armor is rare and definitely raises your odds of survival in the short term after the initial spread. A machete is the ultimate all-purpose blade, good for defense as well as butchering, breeching, and it is easily maintained. And the water purifier is a no-brainer. Waterborn diseases are a real problem in any situation where public utilities become inaccessible and clean drinking water grows scarce.

Assuming that I am obviously able to expand my kit as I survive, the ranged weapon that uses easily craftable ammo would be ideal. A first aid kit could be cobbled together over the course of a few days of persistent scavenging. No promises on the crossbow, they are far less common than bandaids, gauze, sterilization solutions, and splints. Really the thing that would likely be the hardest to source is the suture needle that you should have in there.

I always loved 10k in Z-Nation for using the wrist rocket slingshot because that is truly the king ranged weapon for a survival scenario. Lightweight, ammo that is infinite and easily accessible, and lethal out to ranges that matter. Not to mention that they are very easy to maintain and repair.

All that said, I would likely accumulate the aforementioned electricity/fuel items as I am familiar with the production of biofuels and can build some alternative generators (wind, methane, solar concentrators) for electricity once I have somewhere secure. Methane in particular has always been attractive to me for survival scenarios because anaerobic decomposition is a great way of dealing with biowaste and what is left over ends up making really good fertilizer. Just need a couple of propane tanks, some steel, and a car battery to rig as a welder and you can turn one into a digestor and the other into storage, then get a couple 2 cycle lawnmower engines and some AC motors and you can get a power supply running. At least enough to run some incandescent bulbs. Need a voltage regulator for more complex electronics to keep the line clean, but that is a different conversation.

Adalast,

He’s right, unless you study up on making biodiesel. Then you have the upper hand in the argument, as a diesel Jeep can be run on biodiesel. Rendering those fatty zombie corpses to fuel should be a functional disposal method.

I feel like the Steam Deck is the best proof of Gabe Newell's quote that "piracy is a service issue."

They could have easily crammed the Steam Deck full of stuff to make it hard to use for piracy - locking down everything, making it usable only to play games you legitimately own, force you to go through who knows what hoops in order to play games on it. That’s what Nintendo or Apple or most other companies do....

Adalast,

Valve is one of those companies that I genuinely believe makes a strong argument for ethical capitalism being possible. Sure, they have some shitty things, but overall they do treat developers and customers reasonably well, they provide hardware and software that is easy to use and non-abusive (not filled with spyware and data harvesters, doesn’t use advertising, is well maintained, etc.). If we could obliterate all of the other major conglomerates and replace them with people/companies that understand that you don’t have to be a massive pile of shit to make money the world would be better off.

Adalast,

Ok… What are you even talking about? Most fusion solutions use the same second stage for power generation as many other power generation solutions. Heating water to spin a turbine. That is the same thing as all coal, natural gas, petroleum, and solar thermal. In a roundabout way you could even say hydro is just generating power from heated water if you abstract it to include the rain cycle that moved the water behind the dam. There is literally 0 “weakening” that is needed to generate power from fusion under the current predominant paradigms that are being researched. Tokomaks and inertial fusion both generate fusion and bleed the excess heat off to boil water. The only method with promise that does not use this method compresses colliding superheated plasma vortex rings in a strong magnetic field to induce fusion causing the plasma’s magnetic field to ramp up and push back against the containment field. The flux is captured directly into an electrical current that is shunted into a capacitor bank so it can be slowly discharged into the grid. This last method is the only one that has the potential to overload the grid if some sort of runaway event happens, though I don’t see how it would happen as every stage of it is reasonably confined by well-known physics.

Adalast,

Lol, thanks. It was late.

Adalast,

A. If you haven’t played ΔV, do it. One of the most amazing games out there imho. So good in fact that I just went to find a Δ on the internet so I could use it and not disrespect the dev and the game. B. He is such an amazing dude. I don’t know him personally, but I do know that when Ukraine was invaded he made the game free for months on Steam so people in Ukraine could get it and have something too distract themselves from the conflict. A+ move in my book right there. I had already bought the game at that point, but I wish I could buy it again just to support him further. C. Reading this almost makes me think it would be a good tactical move to offer early access games at a steep discount on Linux if it has this great of an effect. Pay back the “free” QA kindness of the community.

Adalast,

ToS are the worst thing ever. They are “contracts” that you are required to sign to do literally anything in the world but are not allowed to negotiate and can be modified at any time without your consent and your original signing is propagated to the new contract and it is still considered binding. Also, they are allowed to put clauses in which hand over rights to your property, intellectual or otherwise, which is irrevocable and perpetual. Additionally, you have many “software” providers putting clauses in which state that you only lease the license, you do not own it. Even if you have a physical media with the software, you only purchased a lease and it is therefore illegal for you to resell it. They are also allowed to revoke your lease at anytime, without recompense of any sort. That is the real power of SaaS, not the subscription, but the fact that nobody is ever allowed to own something, no matter how much money you have paid.

Yes, as others have said, they are virtually unenforceable, but it does happen often enough to make sure you are afraid of it.

Adalast,

Omg, this makes me want to cry almost as much as it singing Happy Birthday to itself every year like a real life Claptrap party.

Piracy is Preservation (feddit.de)

Image description: a screenshot from the Wikipedia page for the Doctor Who TV series, with a user-added caption that reads “Preserve the media you can before it’s gone forever.” The Wikipedia article reads, “No 1960s episodes exist on their original videotapes (all surviving prints being film transfers), though some were...

Adalast,

I had the brilliant idea the other day of passing an amendment to the copywrite laws to include “independent distributors” for media that is abandoned or removed from active sale/distribution by its copywrite holder. The stipulation is that “independent distributors” are not allowed to make money in any way from the provided service and if the holder wants to rerelease something or remake it, the ID has to pull that title until the holder pulls it from circulation again. I would also put the stipulation on holders that any release has to be materially similar and at a fair market price. They are not allowed to re-release a game from 30 years ago at full modern retail, remakes have to be the same game to count (FFVII:remake would not count, but the updated PC releases of FFVII would), and the sales must be readily available to all citizens in the country (so releasing something on your JP store exclusively does not preclude the independent distribution in the states).

The concept is exactly this. Legalize the preservation of media and art for future generations and allow free access to it, something akin to a digital online museum of games, movies, television shows, and commercials. If a content owner is not willing to make money from it, then there can be no damages.

Adalast,

This is all well and good, but remember that stereotypically they think that the latter is ok too.

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