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  • "I want a DQ Blizzard!"

    "We have ice cream at home."

    "But home is a bunch of shipping containers welded together."

    "Correct. And it's wonderful."

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    Where to put a smartphone if you move fast and need it always at hand?
  • Let us know if you ever find a good solution. Stuff in my pants pockets annoys me, too.

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    Can a COVID test show your level of infectiousness?
  • Too many variables. There's two types of test, antigen and PCR. The chemical reactions in both can be impacted by ambient temperature and humidity, light exposure, air pressure (altitude), air quality (contaminants) and so on. At-home testing is far from lab conditions. False positives and false negatives are possible. I wouldn't put any stock in the timing.

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    TIL the theme to Sanford and Son has lyrics. And they were sung by Ella Fitzgerald
  • What the heck. This rewrites a chunk of my childhood.

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    Where to put a smartphone if you move fast and need it always at hand?
  • One of my friends wears a lightweight (mostly mesh) cargo vest thing that looks good on him. But he's one of those assholes who looks good in anything. I would look like a doofus wearing it. Anyway, it has multiple pockets on the front.

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    TIL the penduline tit (shut up) makes a nest with a fake entrance to trick predators
  • No one will suspect a spiral staircase under the manhole cover!

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    In Case: NYT is bought
  • Primary news sources. Here are some others.

    • Reuters
    • Associated Press (AP)
    • BBC News
    • The Guardian
    • Al Jazeera
    • Bloomberg
    • The Washington Post
    • CNN
    • Deutsche Welle (DW)
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    Why would someone desire a pension instead of a 401k?
  • In an ideal situation you want both assets and income in your retirement. 401k is one type of asset. Pension is one type of income. It's certainly possible to plan for retirement with just assets or just income, but having both is better.

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    TIL the penduline tit (shut up) makes a nest with a fake entrance to trick predators
  • I need to do this to my office. I wonder if that wall over there is load bearing. Hmmmm.

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    Am I the only one who is worried about short form video content, and how prevelant the alt-right pipeline seems to be on there?
  • I'm guessing the content offering algorithms are looking at your IP, browser profile, etc. and throwing stuff at you that it assumes you and "people in your area" want to see. Even with brand new accounts, they always try to figure this stuff out. It often gets it wrong, but that never stops them from trying.

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    how do I accept I'll never know why any employer rejected me?
  • I haven't seen the numbers. I have read that they do this for a few evil reasons.

    • It makes their business look like it's thriving.
    • They can gather intel on who's job hunting.
    • They can use job application tasks to get free work out of candidates.
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    how do I accept I'll never know why any employer rejected me?
  • There are thousands of possible reasons and many of them won't have anything to do with you. There are fake job postings. There are many jobs where the hiring manager already has someone in mind for the job (but they have to check the required boxes and pretend to open the position to any candidate). Another candidate may have gone to the same school or been in a frat with the hiring manager. The list goes on and on.

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    Nate Silver reveals who he'll vote for in the US election
  • I have so little faith in polls anymore. I know Silver and others try to patch over the shortcomings by analyzing multiple polls and running weighted probability equations on them and so on. But I always think of GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.

    And of course, probabilities are just that: probabilities. So if they say candidate X has a 75% chance to beat candidate Y, that means candidate Y still wins 25% of the time. Which is much higher than we intuit when we just look at the 75%. Anybody who's rolled a 1d4 in D&D knows that 1 will come up more than we'd like.

    Allan Lichtman's analysis is more interesting to me. He's been right 9 out of 10 times. Which certainly doesn't mean he'll be right this time. But I think it's cool that he ignores polls. I wonder if his methodology, while very clever, may not be up to date for 2024 with all the weird shit going on with judges, electors, etc. The "meta issues", if you will, around his "Keys to the White House."

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keys_to_the_White_House

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    What is your favorite mythological figure (of ancient religions only)?
  • The Demiurge. Not that I like the Demiurge itself. But explaining the human condition as being a product of bad design appeals to me. I don't believe the myth and I'm not religious. But as far as myths go, that one is my fave.

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    Standoff
  • I'm not an expert by any means, but my understanding is there is a "tax accounting lobby" that works hard to prevent any measures to simplify it, because they would go out of business. Intuit and others.

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    UPS is laying off more employees amid effort to boost profitability
  • Interesting that they are laying off managers while "moving towards more automation". I'm guessing they mean draconian employee-monitoring hardware and software installed in the vehicles, warehouses, repair facilities, etc.

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    Standoff
  • Love the meme but JFC I wish they would just send us a simple invoice (or refund) every year. You know, the way adult nations do things.

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    Was it my imagination that most people believed in a 9/11 conspiracy?
  • A lot of people made fun of those theories and sarcastically pretended to believe in them. Maybe that's what you remember. Our human memories are not very reliable.

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    ELI5 How come it seems now the old wise tale of Vietnamese eating pets and now its immigrants into the USA?
  • That's a clever and funny way of putting it. It's just one stupid moral panic after the other, and racism is frequently featured.

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  • We mostly watch news and sports in my house. So unfortunately, live TV. Occasionally we watch other things. I mute the commercials and browse my phone when they're on.

    But I would love a TV that is smart enough to auto hide & mute every kind of ad. Even little logos on the athletes' uniforms. Hide the ads on the pitcher's mound. Hide the billboards and signs in the stadium. Show some cool little generic animation, music video, or slide show during commercial breaks. Hide the damned popup window ads and scrolling ads that some channels do. Remove product placements from movies and shows. Basically make all ads completely vanish.

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    Not asking for tech support here, just wondering if in theory it would be possible to create a plug-in or even a complete browser that blocks ads in a way that's impossible to detect. One model that comes to mind is a quarantined / containerized non-blocking virtual browser which queries the web server directly, then the UX filters the content from that container and presents it to the user ad-free. As far as the web server can tell, the containerized browser is just vanilla Chromium.

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    aws.amazon.com You can now assign multiple MFA devices in IAM | Amazon Web Services

    At Amazon Web Services (AWS), security is our top priority, and configuring multi-factor authentication (MFA) on accounts is an important step in securing your organization. Now, you can add multiple MFA devices to AWS account root users and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users in your AWS...

    Has anybody gotten this to work? If I set up multiple MFA devices with my IAM accounts, they all work flawlessly. But if I set up multiple MFA devices with my root account, only the original MFA device works. No matter how carefully I set up and synch a secondary device, it simply will not work with root. As the linked article says, this should be possible with either root or IAM (though in the past this was not the case). Thanks.

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    www.neowin.net Windows 11 is now automatically enabling OneDrive folder backup without asking permission

    Microsoft quietly changed how folder backup works in the OneDrive app on Windows 11. Now, the OS enables it by default during the initial setup without asking the user for permission.

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