• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • Scam attempts. This may be better elsewhere but in the U.S., every phone call I get is either a scam attempt or my mom (who is old enough that I worry about her getting elder scammed like when my grandma paid a stupid amount for silver coins).

    I’ve never gotten scammed (except small stuff like carnival games or whatever) but if I were president I’d make ending scams — even false advertising ones — my top priority. You’ll be able to pick up a call from and unknown number after my first 100 days: that’s my promise to the people of America.


  • I like to watch sports and, other than soccer, the ads are relentless and so repetitive. When there’s a tournament or playoff, companies will make one annoying ad and show it seemingly every commercial break. Currently, in the U.S. we have a major election so there’s the most vile political ads shown hundreds of times. Those are definitely the worst but online sports betting also recently became legal in many states and their ads are the 2nd worst after political ones in terms of being so dishonest, they should be illegal.

    In terms of other type of ads, I hate 99% of outdoor ads. Billboards are literally made to distract you while driving and now they have electronic ones that change even at busy interchanges. If they didn’t already exist and you proposed the idea of putting distracting shit next to busy highways, people would think you were a sociopath.

    I relentlessly avoid ads on the web and on streaming services. If I find a service useful, I don’t mind paying to get rid of them. But you can’t really avoid the ones during live TV events or on a road to where you have to drive. (A long time ago, I had a TiVo where the remote had a skip 30 seconds button. That was amazing. Internet wasn’t ubiquitous yet so I could record something live, start watching in the middle, and skip all the ads. I was like a kung fu master with that button. I learned exactly how many times to tap for each type of commercial break.)



  • It might be as close to a perfect game as it gets. I love that you can turn off the HUD and it’s still completely playable. Nintendo is one of the few companies that puts so much care into their open world that you can just explore and talk to people and get all the information you need to complete the game.

    For modern games, I also love Nier: Automata and Horizon Zero Dawn for the complex stories and creativity but Breath of the Wild is just so perfectly executed. It’s sort of like classic Pixar movies where it might be rated G but still manages to appeal to adults.



  • I’m American and probably know more about the Bengal famine. I know the effects of the Munich Agreement and Ribbentrop Pact but they were sort of a “sidebar explanation” in a textbook explaining the rise of Hitler.

    I went to high school in the late 90’s and took AP World History but I also majored in International Political Economy, basically, so I read books and wrote a lot of papers on things that would be obscure to most Americans. I’m not sure when I first learned about it. (My high school World History professor was a bit of a hippie.)

    A classic economics blunder is also about when the British offered Indians bounties for cobras and some enterprising Indians started breeding them and it all just made everything worse. But stupid mistakes — and often colonial ones — are a big part of Economic history.

    Edit: I should probably add that I liked economic history more than military history or whatever so I may have read about some things on my own.


  • Things like planned obsolescence and software blocks on things like farmers fixing tractors without John Deere’s software permission almost makes me think the bad guys won the Cold War.

    Between me and a mechanic friend, we can fix my car but we can’t turn off the (wholly unnecessary) “inspection needed” noise without me spending $1000 on software. Apparently, the inspection needed warning isn’t even related to anything. It just comes on every x miles. The car doesn’t have a detected issue or anything. That beep is radicalizing me.


  • These things go in cycles. I remember when “Fedora Core” — they dropped the “Core” part of the name — was the cool new distro. I remember when Ubuntu was the cool new distro. Just ignore it and play around with distros until you find one you like.

    In my opinion, new users should use a very popular distro so they have documentation and message boards. After a few years, you get your legs under you. At that point, start distro hopping using weird desktop environments. Then, someday, you get a lot of experience and use a very popular distro because software is a tool and you don’t care. (If something has buzz, I throw it in a VM and go “Huh, that’s interesting.”)

    It’s sort of like how the target audience for Nike Air Monarchs is people buying their first pair of Nike Airs and dads who aren’t trying to hear the word “colorway” and just want some shoes.





  • As there’s no responses, I’ll offer that my friends’ kids in dense parts of NYC, LA, SF, DC, etc. do all those activities. (Maybe the ones in LA don’t go sit by the LA “river.”) There’s usually loads of neighborhood parks and less formal places in cities where kids play (like playing soccer in an alley). And I know my friends in urban centers have their kids in just as many organized sports leagues as my friends who live in the suburbs. (It might actually be easier on the parents in the cities because my suburban friends are like youth sports taxi services every weekend whereas the ones in NYC have enough population density where the league is in the neighborhood.)

    So, my impression (from the parents’ childless friend’s side) is that kids, like Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs, find a way. They’ll play hide and seek in a desert and try to hide behind tumbleweeds.

    Again, sorry if I’m talking out of turn but this is Lemmy and there were no responses yet so I thought I’d toss in what I’ve seen as an adult. Gotta feed the content maw until the Fediverse grows up to be an uncontrollable beast.


  • This is ancient history and will probably make me sound older than dirt but when Ubuntu first came out, it felt so easy to install and use. I don’t know that any of the innovations were wholly theirs as other distros were trying the same stuff. But it was the first distro I used that really tried to make it all easy and it felt like a complete OS.

    Fedora Core was doing the same stuff and now, we have tons of tools but whether you like it today or not, the early Ubuntu releases were like, “Holy shit. I can partition from the Live CD? What is this witchcraft?” Debian obviously was the core project but little niceties were rare on Linux back then. I did want to install multimedia codecs when I was a teen. I did need guidance and documentation.

    Not defending Snaps or whatever here but early Ubuntu was user-friendly and made it easy to transition off Windows ME or whatever was dominant and shitty back then.

    A separate shoutout to Chrunchbang for customization and minimalism. That was probably the distro that got me hardcore hooked on Linux. I had enough experience at that point to not need hand holding but it was cool out of the box.