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Guess the Episode [Medium]
  • You have selected no, indicating that you have committed a crime, but do not wish to confess. A paddy car has been dispatched to your address.

    Edit: That was from memory and isn't quite correct.

    19
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    YSK: Green man gaming, a site which lets you purchase games directly from the developers, often at discount
  • To go one better, there's http://isthereanydeal.com/, which tracks prices across a bunch of vetted key retailers (i.e. companies that buy wholesale keys from publishers and sell them to users, but not grey-market or dodgy sites) so you can see where's cheapest and get notified of discounts etc.

    Why check GreenManGaming and Steam (and potentially a bunch of their competitors, too) when you could check one site and know who's best?

    I've accidentally made this read like an ad, but they've not paid me to say this, I just always check the site before buying games, and have either saved loads of money by doing so over the years, or have ended up buying a bunch of things I'd have ignored on the grounds they were too expensive otherwise. I don't know in which direction, but it's definitely changed the amount I've spent on games over the last ten years.

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    Tightrope - Monday, October 7, 2024
  • > Website is called Britannica

    > More than half the questions are about American things

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    Why is Lemmy so much faster than reddit?
  • I'm pretty sure Reddit used to be profitable. There used to be a bar on the right-hand side that showed how far each day's Reddit Gold purchases had gone towards covering the day's server costs. When I first started using Reddit, it'd typically be about a third of the way full when it reset, but a few years after the at, it was filling up after about eight hours, suggesting they were covering the server costs three times over, which should have left plenty of money for staffing costs as they didn't have many staff back then. Eventually, they got rid of the bar. Later, they did things that would have increased costs, like hiring people to make New Reddit and the Reddit App, and hosting images and videos themselves instead of leaving it to imgur, and I guess these were enough to make them no longer profitable and force them to aim for faster growth.

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    Embrace the cringe
  • Being mean is willfully making people around you feel worse. Being cringe is negligently making people around you feel worse. Once you're aware you're cringe, if you do nothing to mitigate it, you're being willfully negligent, which is just as bad as doing something intentionally.

    Edit: I've posted the same joke as a response each time I've seen this meme, and this is the first time it hasn't been well-received. Just in case that's down to people thinking I'm being mean instead of making a joke, I'll clarify that I am in favour of letting people enjoy things.

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    contempt of rule
  • I was reinforcing your point about using a monitor and a Linux PC not being able to replace all the things a smart TV can do. You said streaming would work, but regular TV channels wouldn't, and I pointed out that even streaming would be limited as the major streaming services don't allow full quality via a browser, especially on Linux where HDCP can't work.

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    Paralyzed Jockey Loses Ability to Walk After Manufacturer Refuses to Fix Battery For His $100,000 Exoskeleton
  • I'm not arguing for anything in the post above, just pointing out that a broken (or badly repaired) insulin pump is genuinely more dangerous than having no insulin pump. That doesn't have to count against the right to repair one, as if you've got the right to repair an insulin pump, and do so badly, it doesn't mean you're legally forced to use it afterwards, just like I've got the right to inject all the insulin in my fridge with an insulin pen back to back, but I'm not legally forced to do so.

    I do think the right to repair should be universal, but as I think that medical stuff should be paid for by the state, NHS-style, that would end up meaning that the NHS could repair medical devices themselves if they deemed it more economical to do so and recertify things as safe than to get the manufacturer to repair or replace them. The NHS is buying the devices, and gets the right to repair them, and that saves the taxpayer money, as even if they don't actually end up repairing anything, it stops manufacturers price gouging for repairs and replacements, and if the manufacturer goes bust or refuses to repair something, there're still ways to keep things working. It doesn't mean unqualified end users can't use their new right to repair their medical devices and risk getting it wrong, but if you've got an option of a free repair/replacement, most people would choose the safe and certified repair over their own bodge.

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    contempt of rule
  • Sorry, streaming from a browser on a Linux PC is limited to 540x860 due to an inability to establish an HDCP chain. Have you tried using the TV's native Netflix app instead?

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    Paralyzed Jockey Loses Ability to Walk After Manufacturer Refuses to Fix Battery For His $100,000 Exoskeleton
  • If you've got a broken insulin pump, assuming you're in a country with a functioning healthcare system, you should have been given a spare pump with the original, and probably some insulin pens, so when one breaks, you fall back to the spare, and get given a new one to be the new spare (or could get the broken one repaired). Using the spare is completely safe.

    If you don't have a spare, your sugars would go up over several hours, but you'd have a day or two to get to a hospital and potentially several days after that for someone to find you and get you to a hospital, so it's not safe, but also not something you'd die from if you had any awareness that there was a problem.

    If you've got an incorrectly-repaired pump, you could have it fail to give you enough insulin, and end up with higher sugars, notice the higher sugars, and then switch to the spare. That'd be inconvenient, but not a big deal. However, you could also have it dump its entire cartridge into you at once, and have your sugars plummet faster than you can eat. If you don't have someone nearby, you could be dead in a couple of hours, or much less if you were, for example, driving. That's much more dangerous than having no insulin at all.

    Prosthetic legs don't have a failure mode that kills you, so a bad repair can't make them worse than not having them at all, but insulin pumps do, so a bad repair could.

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    Missouri to execute Marcellus Williams despite prosecutors’ objections and innocence claims
  • The article says they were claimed to be found in his car by a then-girlfriend who took $10,000 reward money to testify, not that they were found by law enforcement and collected as evidence and checked against a list of things that were known to have been stolen. It's plausible that nothing was found and the whole story was made up for cash, or that it was just some stuff he'd bought at a yard sale that was misidentified, or something he'd stolen from somewhere else. Someone saying someone had junk in their car isn't strong evidence of anything.

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    Three Mile Island nuclear plant set for restart on Microsoft AI power deal
  • Nuclear is even less killy than hydroelectric (dams sometimes burst and drown a bunch of people downriver) and wind (sometimes technicians fall off when fixing a turbine) per kilowatt hour, despite the potential for really scary failures, largely because it generates so much power when it's working.

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    Starlink v2 satelites will ruin science.
  • In real life, all quantum entanglement means is that you can entangle two particles, move them away from each other, and still know that when you measure one, the other will have the opposite value. It's akin to putting a red ball in one box and a blue ball in another, then muddling them up and posting them to two addresses. When opening one box, you instantly know that because you saw a red ball, the other recipient has a blue one or vice versa, but that's it. The extra quantum bit is just that the particles still do quantum things as if they're a maybe-red-maybe-blue superposition until they're measured. That's like having a sniffer dog at the post office that flags half of all things with red paint and a quarter of all things with blue paint as needing to be diverted to the police magically redirect three eighths of each colour instead of different amounts of the two colours. The balls didn't decide which was red and which was blue until the boxes were opened, but the choice always matches.

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    Starlink v2 satelites will ruin science.
  • The US government asked the big ISPs how much it would take to wire everyone up to high-speed Internet, then passed a bill to give them a ludicrous lump sum to do so (IIRC it was hundreds of billions). The money was split between dividends, buying up other companies, and suing the federal government for attempting to ask for the thing they'd paid for, and in the end, the government gave up. That left loads of people with no high-speed Internet, and the ISPs able to afford to buy out anyone who attempted to provide a better or cheaper service. Years down the line, once someone with silly amounts of money for a pet project and a fleet of rockets appeared, there was an opportunity for them to provide a product to underserved customers who could subsidise the genuinely impossible-to-run-a-cable-to customers.

    If the US had nearly-ubiquitous high-speed terrestrial Internet, there wouldn't have been enough demand for high-speed satellite Internet to justify making Starlink. I think this is what the other commenter was alluding to.

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    Why haven't you done this yet too?
  • That was basically because you could die from pretending to do it. The challenge was to eat a laundry pod. That's really obviously not safe, but biting a laundry pod and spitting it out after pretending to swallow and die for the camera seemed like a reasonable way to freak people out while skipping the dangerous part to a handful of teenagers. The biting step was the real dangerous one, though, as concentrated laundry detergent can corrode tongues and throats and windpipes really quickly, and you'd lose the capacity to decide what to swallow, what to inhale, and what to hold in your mouth and spit out within seconds. This kills the teenager. The news generally reported this as Teenager dies attempting Tide Pod Challenge instead of Teenager dies attempting to fake Tide Pod Challenge, which didn't tell teenagers it wasn't safe to pretend to do, but did make pretending to do it seem like a better prank, so overall only made it more tempting.

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    Unity cancels the stupid Runtime Fee
  • It also doesn't help that once you've paid the large fee for the Pro version, it doesn't actually guarantee any support if you encounter a bug. You get access to a different issue tracker, and might get a Unity employee to confirm that the bug exists after a couple of months (and maybe close it as a duplicate, then reopen it as not a duplicate when the fix for the other bug doesn't help, then reclose it as a duplicate when it turns out the fix for the other bug also doesn't fix the other bug, and at the end of a multi-month process, there still being a bug with no indication an engineer's looked at it).

    Anyway, I'm glad to no longer be working for a company that uses Unity.

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    Tesco loses UK legal battle over plans to ‘fire and rehire’ staff on lower pay
  • Either:

    • They're in denial that this happens (arguably, it didn't happen, as eventually Tesco lost, and they wouldn't know about it in the three years Tesco was winning because The Telegraph/Mail etc. wouldn't report on that).
    • They think worse things would always happen under other systems (e.g. everyone would be a slave of the state and go to gulag if they complained about anything).
    • They don't see it as an inherent problem with capitalism (e.g. simply make doing this illegal, and refuse to let business lobby to reverse the decision, and everything's fine).
    • They think this is a good thing (e.g. the fired workers will be incentivised to work harder, then earn a payrise, and use the extra 10p an hour to start a competing multibillion pound supermarket chain).
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    This is a bigger culture shock than the metric vs imperial system to me.
  • Bungalow. I don't think you'll find many in London.

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    Man pages maintenance suspended
  • It's easy to get pressured into thinking it's your responsibility. There's also the risk that an unhappy company will make a non-copyleft clone of your project, pump resources into it until it's what everyone uses by default, and then add proprietary extensions so no one uses the open-source version anymore, which, if you believe in the ideals of Free Software, is a bad thing.

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    Man pages maintenance suspended
  • There was an EU-wide one that gota lot of its funding redirected to AI stuff recently that you might be thinking of.

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    Blood Meal
  • A rusty crowbar is also red because of the iron atoms that compose it, but it's not mansplaining to take issue with someone telling people they're eating crowbars.

    9
  • Edit 1: I'm attaching the image again. If there's still no photo, blame Jerboa and not the alcohol I've consumed.

    Edit 3: edit 2 is gone. However, an imgur link should now be here!

    Edit 4: I promise the photo of some plugs does not contain erotic material (unless you have very specific and abnormal fetishes). I can't find the button to tell that to imgur, though. You can blame that on the alcohol.

    Edit 5: s/done/some/g

    Edit 6: I regret mentioning the dartboard, which was a safe distance below these sockets, and seems to be distracting people from the fact that one's the wrong way up. I've now replaced the imgur link with a direct upload now I'm back on my desktop the next day.

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