TheTechnician27

::1 gang rise up

Yeah, I was gonna say, Gen IX Pokémon looks like some of the clunkiest, most repetitive shit imaginable.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/buster-captcha-solver/

On the one hand that’s super fair, and I totally understand that. The fact that I’m open to this prospect isn’t me saying that the government shutting down is a good thing unto itself in the same way that being open to chemotherapy as a treatment for cancer isn’t me saying that cytotoxins rule and I love how they make my body feel.

Another Trump term means a bare minimum of four years where not only is actually important government work not getting done, but its efforts are actively redirected toward harmful ends. (And as we’ve seen from his fascist rhetoric, this likely ends up being much more than four years; even if he does leave office at the end of that term, the US government would spend decades recovering from his fuckery.) The GOP shooting themselves in the foot by making it more likely to get Harris into office and make Congress bluer than it would’ve been would mean that whatever issues the government shutdown would create would be vastly outweighed by the benefits of a functioning government and the avoidance of a second Trump term. It’s not a guarantee, but Harris really needs all the help she can get right now, as this race is still too close for comfort.

Yeah, uBlock Origin not working would take me from liking YouTube a fair bit to making it unusable.

• I use Proton but keep legacy Gmail accounts around to ensure I still have access to accounts I may have forgotten about or people I knew a long time ago sending a stray email. The only other usage is logging into YouTube.
• I use a Captcha solver extension.
• I use uBlock Origin to block all their ads.
• I don’t use their DNS.
• I use DDG over their search engine and Firefox over their browser.
• I don’t use Google Drive or their office suite (I think the latter is abysmal to use tbf).
• I use DeepL over Translate.
• I use NewPipe for YouTube on mobile and have a subscription to Nebula.
• I no longer use Google Maps, opting for OSM instead.
• I still use Android and unfortunately can’t unlock the bootloader but have degoogled as far as I know how, including never even registering a Google account with it (F-Droid + Aurora Store).

YouTube is far and away the biggest means by which I interact with Google, and that falls off a cliff if I’m forced to interact with a mess of their ridiculously shitty ads every time I have to use it. uBO has likely saved hundreds of hours of watching ads over my lifetime (and probably thousands of dollars from not being subconsciously influenced by ads), and I’m not paying a subscription fee to such an unethical company to get rid of the ads. This would bring me from YouTube as a timewaster to YouTube only as strictly necessary. Even though I don’t support them directly through ads, I do support them by supporting creators I like monetarily, by sharing links and maintaining the network effect, and by giving them plenty of metadata by interacting with their service. If they do this, they ensure that I continue to monetarily support competitors like Nebula and permanently lose a grip they’ve had on me since I was a kid.

For once, I’m begging the GOP to shut down the government. God that would be so fucking funny if they sealed the deal for Harris.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6R_WTDdx7I

Robot clearly never watched the ending of Fallout 3 about letting the humans do it instead.

Can confirm that /c/vegan officially endorses the Trump/Vance ticket.

I’m not sure that last part’s true. The Death Star’s beam is pretty wide, and it manages to track a planet, which if we take Earth’s travel around the Sun as an example could be moving around 30 km/s. Voyager 1, by contrast, travels around 17 km/s. The main thing it would depend on is your distance from the Death Star. The laser seems to be able to travel a very long distance, and so if you’re far enough away, that only requires a very small angular correction by the station, although they’d have to lead the shot more and would give the ship more chances to make unpredictable maneuvers after they’ve already fired. Collimation means that the beam would stay at basically the same width when it reaches you as it was at the station, so I don’t think that would be a factor. If you’re really close, though, then yeah, even just lazily moving out of the way is probably enough. I don’t think it’s ever quite explained how the Death Star tracks Alderaan, but based on the fact that the laser is facing like 150 degrees away from the planet as Princess Leia is brought in for interrogation, I think it can be surmised that it can orbit itself about its own axis pretty quickly.

How would the Death Star hit the cube in the first place though? It can travel faster than light, whereas the Death Star is meant for stationary or nearly stationary targets and has a long recharge time. Everything else – the fighters and the turrets – the cube would adapt to immediately. The Death Star 2 is shown to have a shield around it projected from Endor, but the first Death Star is never shown to have such a shield. So unless the cube gets in firing range of the main cannon, it just adapts immediately to everything and starts neutering the station’s defenses before beginning the assimilation.

When people ask me why we put so much money into space research, I’ll point out that cosmologists might find a way to treat Laura Loomer’s bipolar if they ever find where all the missing lithium went.

He’s going to hurt your pocketbook*

Let’s be real here.

Damn, and you almost picked the cool, not tankie kind of communism too.

Veganism. I went vegetarian and stayed there for a long time, and I assumed taking the extra step to being vegan would be too difficult relative to what I thought at the time was a marginal benefit. A couple years back, I watched the documentary Dominion (NSFL) and realized pretty quickly that I’d been mistaken. Of course it was more than just Dominion, but it’s such an acutely traumatizing kick in the teeth that it was definitely the last straw.

They’d rather haaaave

Is there such a community here? Maybe you could start one.

I blame both, much in the same way that I’d blame a quack doctor and parents bringing their kids to the quack doctor.

13 words per minute isn’t impressive

Worse than that, it’s abysmal. That would’ve been a failing grade back when I had a few months of mandatory typing classes back in 6th grade. 40 WPM was an A, and arguably that was overly generous due to factors like 1) most students weren’t nearly as exposed to the keyboard in their daily lives as they are today, 2) the testmakers probably didn’t fully grasp how important the Internet would become, 3) the test intentionally obscured the keyboard so you had to go by feel, and 4) because of (2), the class was very short despite taking you from knowing no typing to using all the English-language keys. (I just barely passed it IIRC in the 45-ish WPM range.)

On a whim, I decided to pull up a typing test – something I haven’t done in probably 5 years – and tried to see how I could do by simulating the speed of hunt-and-peck. I really tried to make it excruciatingly slow, and it still came out to just under 20 WPM. Next, I tried to see what I could do if I only had my left hand, and it was 35 WPM with 97% accuracy. If you chopped off one of my hands, I could still type 2.7x faster than the average kid in that school’s fourth grade could – bearing in mind that that’s the average, meaning as long as the data is roughly normal, about half of the students fall below even that.

That’s completely insane in a world where this iPad generation almost assuredly has tons of exposure to the QWERTY keyboard layout. It’s just inexcusable, it’s absolutely not the kids’ fault as them doubling their average typing speed after actually being taught to type shows that, and it totally tracks that it’s in Oklahoma.

I made that point short to be pithy, but what I actually take issue with in there being so many streaming services is that:

• Upfront transparency for what shows and movies are actually there, let alone in what state, is often incredibly limited. This isn’t inherent to there being multiple services, but when I haven’t found one whose experience isn’t profoundly shitty, I’m counting it against them.
• Even if you accurately assess which subscriptions you need at first, that can collapse at any time because shows are treated as playing cards, and you often need to put ongoing effort beyond just paying money into maintaining that list. (I often watch shows over months or years instead of binging them, and this is super shitty under a streaming service.)
• Even if you have all those subscriptions and maintain them well, there’s no place to centrally view their content, something which cable TV – for what a piece of shit it was – shockingly made easier than streaming. If I purchase half my games from Steam and half from GOG, I can still access what I buy from a shared location: my desktop. If I purchase a bunch of discs from multiple different vendors, it’s all centralized on my DVD rack. The UI is consistent (and even slightly quicker to access). This isn’t massive, but it’s still objectively a point against them.
• Unlike the PC gaming landscape where games are often available across multiple stores, streaming services are becoming increasingly exclusivity-focused, and this happens because there’s such an oligopoly in the TV and film industry, and basically every member of that oligopoly now runs a streaming service.

I don’t think the point should be that there should be one streaming service to rule them all, but that in their current state, they represent an objectively substantial downgrade to piracy even taking away costs.