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Cake day: July 10th, 2025

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  • Hopefully this won’t get me too much negative reaction: I’m not a proud pirate. I’d rather not pirate at all. I’m kind of ashamed that it’s come to this.

    There were a few solid years where I literally did not do it and felt no desire to, back when streaming was new, and there were only a few serious players. I’d love to return to that era, but I know it will never exist again.

    So now, I and other members of my family, pay a ridiculous amount of money for a rotating suite of services, trying to do things the right way, and still, there are way too many times when we can’t find anything we want to watch on any of those services and/or the thing we wanted to watch is not available on any of those services.

    Finally broke down and just said fuck it. I tried to support this mess as best I could in hopes it would get better, but fully knowing it wouldn’t. When it definitely did not get better I said no more.





  • Which sounds like great, practical advice in a theoretical perfect world!

    But, the reality of the situation is that professionals are usually balancing a myriad of concerns and considerations using objective and subjective evaluations of what’s required of us and quite often inefficiency, whether in the form of programmatic complexity or in the form of disk storage or otherwise, has a relatively low precedent compared to everything else we need to achieve if we want happy clients and a pay check.


  • I’m not a vegan or vegetarian, so that’s my disclaimer.

    I’ve tried numerous “milk alternatives” over the years, and many different brands of each. That’s particularly true for soy milk since there are so many brands in the USA and it’s been commonly, and easily available in my region for 3+ decades.

    Based on that, I have to say that soy milk is, for me, consistently my least favorite option in terms of taste.

    Of the easily available stuff, almond milk is my favorite, but I see so much hate for it online in terms of environmental harm that I finally just said fuck it, I’m going back to real milk, at least it’s cheaper.

    My favorite that I’ve tried so far was hemp milk. I don’t recall the brand but years ago I found a brand that did chocolate hemp seed milk that was so good I swear they must’ve put a dab of fentanyl or nicotine in it to keep people coming back.



  • The single, simple answer is the one that you don’t want to hear: There is no clean split. Bats are a large and diverse group of flying mammals just like birds are a large and diverse group of flying dinosaurs.

    The simplest answer I can come up with (because it’s actually a very complicated and convoluted topic that I wouldn’t truly do just anyway) is: Most birds can fly because they are an offshoot of one group of dinosaurs (avian dinosaurs) that survived the last great extinction when their non-flying non-avian dinosaur relatives did not. Basically the ones that couldn’t fly mostly went extinct. And mammals mostly don’t fly, which is possibly because several groups of vertebrates beat them to it and essentially filled all the niches that would have been available to flying animals, kind of blocking that path for them.

    Obviously that’s nowhere near the full story. There are lots of other factors at play, like some of the peculiarities of mammalian and dinosaur physiology that made one group better suited to flight than the other, ramifications of the great extinction that killed non-avian dinosaurs as well as most large animals in general and whole swaths of other species, and so on.


  • I’ve never heard of that one specifically and could find no sources mentioning it online. So, I’m being up front when I say I do not know the specific answer.

    Having said that, sometimes if we’re building out scenarios in our minds based on an inaccurate or flawed premise, that can also lead to flawed outcome in our logic. For instance, is it actually truly possible to get a 430 on any family member that you want … like just because? And if so, is it possible there are other extenuating circumstances that you might not be considering (ex: Trump is not a family member, none of your family members are president of the United States, etc) which could explain why things might lead to a different outcome between your family member(s) and Trump?

    Having said that and given the additional context you provided (i.e. Mental Examination), I’m wondering if it’s a situation where the individual needs to be more of an immediate threat to the health / life of themselves or others before it’s applicable? Even if you did try to make that case (because I know at least some people would), it’s likely not a case where any random person can just make an accusation / report against a well-known public figure to whom they have no clear social ties and expect it to be taken seriously.

    Also, this wouldn’t apply to the president of the USA, but even people who legitimately do need some kind of immediate institutionalization often can’t get it when they need it. It would be an understatement to say that the mental health facilities in this country are overwhelmed and underfunded.


  • InvalidName2@lemmy.ziptoADHD memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comWell shit
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    15 days ago

    I’m not ADHD, but that particular passage using that particular font and those particular colors seemed to speed up my ability to read the text. But when Staments posted below (https://lemmy.zip/post/45655234/20636698) using what looks like the same methodology, it ended up being an impediment. I struggled to even get through the first sentence.

    So I have to wonder if there’s more to it than just randomly putting a character or few in bold at the start of each word – like maybe it’s also highly dependent on things like the font being use and making sure to use specific words and phrases that are conducive to this technique.


  • How do you know if someone owns a Steam Deck? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.

    So anyway, a couple years ago I bought a Steam Deck. And since I bought it, virtually all of my gaming is on the Deck. Prior to that, virtually all of my game time was on a Windows PC. So, for me personally, there’s been a big shift towards Linux for gaming.

    The other big change that’s coming for a lot of people I know: end of Windows 10 support. Honestly, the majority of people I know who still have a traditional Windows PC are using machines that can’t be upgraded to Windows 11. These computers are perfectly functional and do everything the users need them to do, and they have no inclination to go out and buy a new computer just because. Especially in this economy. Additionally, there are quite a few people with computers that are capable of running Windows 11, but they have no desire to upgrade to a worse experience and an experience that is randomly different in a myriad different ways for no good reason. Both groups are ripe for the picking in terms of a switch to Linux. No, the year of the Linux desktop is not here, but the conditions for such a change are building. And this Steam data may present a picture of the larger trend. Who knows?


  • I’m a purist. The stable and persistent main branch, regardless of what you want to call it, should always and only ever be exactly the same as the code that’s currently deployed to the production server. Generally the only exception is for the short duration between a push and deployment under normal circumstances.

    But every job I’ve ever had, there’s at least one maverick who knows git way better than anybody else and is super advanced, so they do their own thing which is totally better in a million different ways but essentially fucks everybody else over. And I’m not even here to say they aren’t smarter than the rest of us and I’m sure that somehow their process is better than what we currently do. But with version control, my anecdotal experience has been that the most important things for running smoothly are: consistency and having everybody on the same page. Process doesn’t need to be perfect, maximally efficient, bleeding edge, etc to achieve that.


  • People living in cities sometimes leave and many have not lived in a city their whole lives. Additionally, the power can go out at night in cities. For instance, where I live we sometimes get tropical storms, winter storms, and other disasters that can knock out power for hours (and even days) even inside the city – I imagine that’s not uncommon elsewhere. A lot of cities in poorer nations ration power or only have electricity available during certain hours.

    So, overall, I would say that it’s probably not the case that “most” people have never seen a full starry night unless you’re getting super technical and pedantic about the word “full” to where you’re specifically asking about a completely unobstructed view with 0% light pollution, in which case then I would say that almost nobody has seen a full starry night in that case, regardless of whether or not they live in a city.



  • Is there a name for this video artifact effect in this image? I’d love to see a bunch of this.

    It reminds me of the early 2000’s digital satellite television. Any time the signal got blocked a bit by the weather, the on-screen content would do this. Very trippy. Later on when cable tv in my area switched to digital, I noticed it happening there, too, but nowhere near as often as in satellite. Now that over the air is all digital where I live, however, I almost never see this happening anymore. I guess it’s not a thing that happens as much with modern encoding formats.



  • I bought a handful of cheap / deep discount games during the Summer Sale this year.

    One I wasn’t sure about was BIOTA. Turns out it’s been more fun than I expected for such a simplistic game.

    I’ve also been playing Blasphemous. I really like Metroidvanias but these “souls like” style games are irritating to me. Still, it was cheap and I can appreciate the aesthetic.

    I’m looking forward to having more time to play these games, as of yet, it’s been like 20 minutes here, 30 minutes a few days later, so it’s hard to make much progress and enjoy them with such limited time to dive in.