I have a cheese shredder that is from before the 1980s. I’m not sure what its actual age is. It looks and feels like something from the Gold Rush days. It’s metal, it’s got that old timey metal look to it (not polished), it has a wooden handle, and it basically spins a circular shredder with a hand crank. It’s probably from the 1950s. You can’t put a lot of cheese in it, but it works well.

Our kitchen table is over 20 years old, but we don’t use it as a kitchen table. Mostly it just collects junk. We eat in front of the TV like a lot of modern couples.

I recently found a hat I got 30 years ago and still have. I don’t wear hats though, so it’s been mostly unused.

There was one instance that is in read-only mode. There’s a new one. I forget the names. Browse /all, it should show up eventually (unless you have NSFW hidden).

No, the one I’m thinking of has a shorter name than that, but I’m sure there are lots of good examples.

There’s a user on Lemmy (I forget what instance and the name of the user/comm escapes me right now) but they just blog on their own comm, which shares their name IIRC, and anyone can reply to them. I’ve replied a couple times and they don’t always respond (and I wouldn’t expect them to; I don’t respond to a lot of replies to me), but when they do, it’s usually a pleasant experience.

You might be wondering how you get subscribers. A lot of us just browse /all, so we see everything. (I’ve since learned how to hide NSFW comms/posts and that’s made my experience better. YMMV. I wish I could still see NSFW discussions; I just don’t need to see porn of girls who look 15, and guys who try to get other guys to look at their junk — it’s usually one or the other, and neither appeals to me at all. So not everything.)

The perception of viability of the “Thanos solution” (snap your fingers and a literal random half of every population ceases to exist) depends almost entirely on which side of the snap you find yourself on. Those for are banking on their survival. They don’t care about yours.

There are, of course, a few who do want to be eliminated by the snap. They don’t want to be in the resulting world, and death by snap is completely painless by any account. You simply cease to be. The only issue is you see it coming, so you have a moment to reflect. But nobody seemed to suffer for it. Just the ones who were left mourned the lost.

There’s also the proposition made by The Leftovers (a TV show on HBO), that if you remove just 3% of the population, the world changes drastically. However, in that scenario, it was only on Earth, and it was only humans and, IIRC… birds? Every other population was not culled at all.

Then you should ask the person who answered the other person who asked this for clarification rather than just reposting their question. Because we’re not sure if we should just repost the other person’s answer or if there’s something about it you didn’t understand.

Then they gotta, as the saying goes, lay in the bed they made, except they’re (helping) making it for others, too.

They want the benefit of the privacy-respecting network, they want the exposure of the artist-hostile network, but they don’t want to contribute to bringing their audience to the privacy-respecting network. That choice is 100% on them, then.

I should be the target audience. I have bad eyesight and I wear corrective lenses (i.e. glasses). Something like Meta glasses would, in theory, help me see by constantly showing me the world around me, not recording like to be viewed later, but only showing me what the cameras see in real-time.

Unfortunately, that product does not exist as such, and I won’t use the Meta glasses that way because they’re designed to be invasive, and I don’t use Meta products anyway. Also, my job literally has a rule against the pervert glasses, as I suspect many do, and many more will follow. While some people want to use the glasses, pretty much no one wants the glasses used on/around them.

I like the idea but not so much the title. I think everybody should have something they like that not everyone else does, but not for a goal. But just to have something unique about them.

My favourite singer is Enya, which is hardly unpopular given that she is the best-selling solo artist out of Ireland (she’s behind U2, which is a band, so they aren’t counted against one another). I don’t just like her music, I know some trivial information, like how she lives in a castle, doesn’t tour, and with her songwriter, invented a language (Loxian) after opting to sing the song from The Fellowship of the Ring in freakin’ Elvish, though nobody asked her to do that. It just made sense to her that part of the song should be in that language that Tolkien invented about a century ago. Following that, she not only made her own language, but wrote this whole sci-fi manifesto behind it, most of which I believe is unpublished, it’s just a guide they use for the language. In summary, the descendants of the Irish go to Mars, discover something between a Stargate and a Mass Effect relay that sends them to a faraway galaxy. Yeah, Enya, of all people, came up with that. Why? Who knows. It’s just background for her whopping five songs in Loxian. And it may not be any more since it’s been 11 years since her last album, her longtime/exclusive producer passed away last year, and she and her songwriter (who is also the producer’s wife) are getting up there in years.

I’d say most people who have heard Orinoco Flow don’t know all that (and most of them call that song “Sail Away”).

My second favourite singer is ReoNa, from Japan, and way fewer people know about her. She’s licensed some of her songs to anime, such as Shadows House and Sword Art Online. She played the singing voice of one of the main characters in the SAO spinoff in the gun world. Her character was batshit crazy, she wanted a true life-or-death stakes VR game like the first season of SAO, and she was secretly everyone’s favourite rock star. Anyway, she’s done a lot of music that isn’t in anime, and her range goes from folksy pop music to hard rock, with a lot of in-between. She also has a “private” YouTube channel where she plays English covers of western songs (I mean, as a Japanese person, she isn’t singing them in Japanese, she’s singing them in English). And by private, I mean it’s her personal channel. Anyone can view it. It’s just what she does on the side. She also cosplays the Vocaloid character, Hatsune Miku (skinny girl with aqua twin tails and “01” tattooed on one shoulder — even if you’re not into anime, you’ve probably seen Miku before). I’ve actually never seen her cosplay. I’m really just here for the music.

Yeah, it’s my understanding that while The Church of Satan, Anton LaVey’s group based out of San Francisco, exists more as a parody of Christianity. But, it has these Eleven Rules I like (though, some sound like they were written by a bona fide edgelord, like “if someone disrespects you in your lair you must destroy them”), like “do not harm children” and “do not attempt to mate with someone who has not given the mating signal” (also edgy but also anti-SA).

And that TST is more politically aligned with Atheists and others who are not members of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

I heard a story about 30 years ago. I don’t know how true it is. But a bunch of metal bands were asked if they worshiped the devil. Most of them said no, it’s all just an act, it’s what people expect so they give them a show.

One band, Deicide, said yes. Who knows if they were being serious, but one of them admitted to it. These days I don’t think that’s much of a bad thing. Between Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, and The Satanic Temple, you have some decent Satanists out there. Everyone who cares about Satanism owes it to themselves to see what these two organisations are all about.

Flags on Labour Day tells me the people don’t know the difference between Labour Day, which is in September, and Memorial Day, which is in May.

Memorial Day is not a day for celebration, it’s a day for paying respect to the ultimate sacrifice made by soldiers. Labour Day is about celebrating labour, i.e. workers. Of course most people do celebrate both days, especially if they have the day off of work, but grilling burgers on Memorial Day and knowing the meaning behind the day is not as egregious, IMO, as waving military flags on Labour Day. Just sounds like someone is confused or not educated.

Clarification: Most Android users don’t use custom firmware (“ROM”). OEM means the company that makes your phone. All the major ones use Google Play Services. Nothing and OnePlus might be exceptions as those are known for using custom firmware that is more private. Also, Pixel phones running GrapheneOS ostensibly do not include Google Play Services. But Pixel phones don’t ship with GrapheneOS. You have to add that yourself by unlocking the bootloader (available deep in the settings, wipes the phone), and manually flashing the custom firmware (CFW or “ROM”) to the phone.

No.

That said, the whole reason Android exists today is because Google was getting a lot of personal data from Gmail, but when they saw Andy Rubin’s invention, they realised they could get a lot more personal data with a phone, so they bought Android from him.

Android collects a lot of data (as that is its primary purpose for Google), but it doesn’t upload everything you say. It — or, more accurately, Google Play Services (and possibly other services) do other underhanded things to exfiltrate your data from the device back to Google. Like if you try to use an ad blocker, it will use DNS filtering to tunnel around the ad blocker for its own uses.

The wildest thing is, Google successfully ran an ad campaign convincing people their way was the right way and that Apple’s way of doing things was wrong. That’s a big part of why Apple is trying to be more like Google. They’re certainly not hurting for money, but they see people willingly accepting this sort of thing, so they’re realising more and more how much money they’re leaving on the table. Imagine if it had gone the other way, if more people rejected Google and its data collecting practices. We’d probably be paying more for some things since we’re not (also) the product, but more companies would be putting privacy first. Because that’s what the consumers would be demanding. But no, we have people out there, a metric fuck ton of them, saying privacy is negotiable. So, companies are negotiating with privacy — mostly against it.

Ask a chatbot? Maybe something like ChatGPT might be able to help.

I’m kind of loathe to recommend AI, but this might be a place where it could help.

Years ago, I remembered an episode I saw at a friend’s house. Not of Fringe. I didn’t know what the show was. We were just watching it while other things were going on. I asked all over Reddit and no one seemed to know what it was. Years later I was watching Justified with my wife and we just happened upon the episode (season 2, episode 1). I had described it nearly perfectly, with a couple minor things slightly off. The funny thing was, it was/is cool to say you liked Justified, but none of the people trying to sell the show to others could identify that episode. Maybe they stopped with the first season? It was weird.

Humans are a flawed bunch. It has been documented that people are afraid to answer a question they don’t know they answer to. Like “I don’t know” is worse than dropping the N word or the R word. Cunningham’s Law is an actual thing where it’s been proven that if you don’t know the answer to a question, asking it will get far fewer responses than stating the incorrect answer confidently. Almost as much as people are afraid to admit what they do not know, people love “getting one over” on someone, even if it’s a total stranger. Just like, “I know this thing, and rather than answer your question asked in good faith, I’m going to ignore that and come over to where you confidently stated the wrong thing, and I’m going to prove you wrong, and other people I don’t know are going to see that I am better than you.” Both people could have saved half their energy by the “smarter” person just answering the question in the first place. But again, state the wrong thing confidently and people will come out of the woodwork to “take you down a peg”.

An AI isn’t going to have any of those problems. It’s gonna look at what you said and scan a metric fuck ton of synopses and it’s going to get you an answer. And some jackass is going to tell you “you’re the reason RAM and SSDs cost so much now,” but that same person wasn’t trying to help you solve your problem, because helping you isn’t the goal, taking you down, is. So, remove the human from the equation. Get your answer, and keep it moving.

…As for me, I watched Fringe, but I don’t remember jack shit about it. It was enjoyable to watch though. There’s another one people liked about as much, with that guy from LOST, who played Ben Linus up there. Nerdy guy with the glasses. I think it also dealt with other worlds. Then there were shows like The 4400. Many others I don’t remember. I think The Leftovers was the best of these, by far. I wish I could help. What I will tell you is that I don’t know. Because the neat thing about a logical fallacy is, once you see how it works, it’s piss easy to navigate around it.

People also use Facebook, WhatsApp, Windows, and Android.

I think it’s a choice. Let people make it.

Call me crazy, but I like plain black cases. I like the Spigen Tough Armour case. Sometimes I put stickers on it.

I second the idea of having a custom case made. I’ve been wanting to take the hard plastic part off my case and paint it (with the original Apple colours, like in diagonal stripes). I think with the very top, very bottom, and other parts being black (from the soft rubber part) would make for a nice contrast.

Technically the truth. AI is trained on copyrighted works, but so is every artist alive today. There’s just a really important difference in human inspiration and creativity and a computer program piecing together what it’s already seen. One creates something new while standing on the shoulders of what came before, while the other just remixes what’s already there and tramples upon the backs of what came before. I think it’s important to know the difference.

They still are, even if you disagree with them on one point. It might be worth noting that the EFF isn’t a copyright defence house. Their mission is different. They support the open Internet.

I’m on dbzer0 and they’re pro-AI. I’m not, but I don’t disrespect their POV in their house. I feel like I’m skating a fine line being subbed here. They’re also one of the only instances that supports freedom of speech. I just understand that some of that speech I don’t agree with.

What’s really interesting is how he’s able to tie a plastic bag so it’s waterproof but not airtight. Otherwise he’s arriving on the other side oxygen-deprived.

I’m not saying the story is fake, but, it’s just a photo. There’s probably a low-tech solution, like a snorkel, that allows air in, and it’s watertight around the snorkel, and the end of the snorkel is kept above water. Even then, without an outlet for the carbon dioxide, it’s not sustainable for long — how long, exactly, does it take him to cross the river?