Welp.

I watched several videos in addition to those and feel both better and not, I do understand the simplified analogies in the linked stuff, and they are helpful, as were some of the related content.

I kinda sorta understand the technical stuff, sort of. I’m not in a tech field or anything…

I’m going to keep it there regardless of the negative hype because you never know when I’ll need others to do the same. Im not doing anything wrong so it’s whatever.

I’m up to 10 :)

Thanks for this!

Well I spent the time between when I posted and when you replied looking into various things related to tor, legality, and snowflake more specifically, as well as a bit after your reply since you gave me a couple extra things to look into… (like if there’s a risk of running alongside self-host software like Plex and jellyfin, I didn’t find anything about it so I sort of assume it’s fine…?)…

I didn’t see anything overly bad other than if you yourself use tor, maybe, so took the plunge and… have had a whole two connections already, so yay, I’m a snowflake!

I feel slightly better about myself, like when I started using BOINC crowdsource computing for research in the early noughties. :)

I’m willing to do this but frankly tor intimidates me big time. I don’t know anything about it other than……. Yep that’s it.

I read through the mastodon post, and the project page, and cumulatively I didn’t get any answers that, like, make me feel better.

I assume this is a dark web node sort of thing? Is it safe for me to run the browser extension (idk shit about docker and don’t really want to learn rn), like I’m not putting a target on myself or anything? If yes to question 1, but no to question 2, what does put a target?

I murmur and make weird noises, and I’m usually somewhat aware when I make noises. Happens when I’m falling asleep, mostly. But sometimes I do mutter stuff, I’ve been told. Wouldn’t surprise me. Apparently it’s not really words though.

My sister, idk if she still does, used to sit up and have full conversations with people while she was asleep. They made absolutely no sense but that’s the only way you knew she was asleep. Apparently that runs in the family along with other weird sleep quirks (like my grandma sleeping with her eyes open).

Bring two foam weapons with you, give one to opponent, have blast.

Would the US destroy itself just to enforce this embargo?

I’m not sure why you find that unlikely at this point…?

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I also recently got a tcl with google, and haven’t hooked it to the internet.

The OS on it isn’t very good (seriously too many menus in too many places), it sets full brightness and then reduces to setpoint when you change inputs, and I haven’t figured out why it boots up my ps4 every time I turn on the tv, but beyond that I’ve been pretty happy with it.

It’s a very decent dumb tv.

I’ve been using it for almost a year now.

It… works well enough. I really have no complaints, tho it does have some cookies, which I could do without (I don’t care to track how many trees I’ve contributed to planting, and I’d like a no tracking option) but that’s a pretty small complaint when I clear cookies frequently anyway. If you use ghostery or some other extension that auto-rejects cookies and randomizes data for those it can’t reject, you’ll be fine.

The sponsored listings are clearly labeled, the results typically come up fine. There do seem to be more sponsored results than there used to be, though, so… something to be aware of.

It’s not perfect but it’s a lot better than google, and they use the money for trees (I did look into that claim and it’s true as far as I can tell)

Honestly I have to disagree with consoles being ease of use these days, especially if you like really long sessions.

I have to restart games or reboot the console way more often than I feel should be necessary at this point.

And installing from discs takes forever if you even do physical, but then you need the disc in to run it for whatever dumbfuck anti-piracy reason. I won’t pay for digital, at that point you might as well be on pc, it’s the same thing, and since this generation is probably the last with physical media, I’m out…

It’s funny to me, but one of my highest ratios was on a torrent that never even finished. It was active for many months stuck at 98%, and the seed never came back. So many people started that one, downloaded what was available, then scrapped the whole thing and found another option…

I’d uploaded ~500gb of a 6gb torrent.

That’s the joy/pain of wanting stuff nobody has available…

I’m a big proponent of suicide in humane ways. I mean if you really honestly do actually want to die, at least do it in a way that doesn’t irreparably traumatize people around you… including whomever has to clean you off the sidewalk… they don’t need that.

If I have any say in the matter myself, I want to go with neutral gas asphyxiation when my medical state gets too bad to keep existing. Nitrogen would do it, but I’d probably go out with helium. It’s wasteful sure, like balloons, but I’d have a great time on the way out. Build myself a positive pressure chamber for my head and just ride the silly on out. Ideally with friends to silly with me.

Because it’s never if you die, it’s when and how, and if we know how to choose that, what’s honestly wrong with choosing that? I don’t believe in higher powers, just you here now and those you care about… and if you have a valid reason to want to check out, nobody can stop you, but we can make sure we let them go supportively (including just giving those people some damned support first… most people who get assisted suicide meds never take them, they just want the option)

Not only that, lots of things that sound like official medical titles aren’t. As such they aren’t protected at all but do mislead the public.

Semi-relatedly, but totally tangential:

I have a dream town that I visit pretty regularly (but randomly, unfortunately). I’d love to make it a VR town, but haven’t the skills. I think it would be perfect as an exploration experience, since it’s pretty fleshed out, but I’m not sure if the tech is really there yet, and if it is idk how to use it.

It has all the qualities of a real town (but a lot more… grand? In some ways), tho as far as I can tell many of my residents are homeless as there simply isn’t enough space for all of them to have their own place (it’s never been rendered by my mind, so it doesn’t exist)… It’s authentic mostly because I typically experience it the way I do the world; first person recluse (tho I do have a mini-map sort of sense for the layout, so that absolutely wouldn’t be out of place). For example, when I go to the mall, school, or a restaurant or something, most of the people are doing normal people things and have no real interest in interacting with me. They will if I bother them, but like real people, they get annoyed, or it’s a passing interaction. It’s a small town vibe sort of place (loosely based around a mesh of every town I’ve lived in), so you start to recognize people from where they hang out, and can interact with them from there. I have one older gentleman I talk to quite a lot, and a variety of very nice employees of the places I frequent. But bar patrons don’t bother me. Like I said, dream.

Unfortunately it’s really a slice of life town, nothing interesting ever happens, it’s sort of an exploration escape, and I couldn’t think of anything interesting to happen there if I tried. It would be great for collectibles, though. The house is really the fun bit for me, because while there, I understand that this is -my- house even when I’m in a new room I’ve never seen before. And then once I figure out where it belongs in the structure (often a landing room that has several stairways and doors) that room just is part of my house forevermore. Same thing happens with the round mall; some features are permanent, everything else gets added on and becomes cannon.

And I have no idea how to create it in VR… if I did, that would be awesome, especially if I could make it grow with time (dlc?), like my town does. I think a lot of people would enjoy exploring it, and maybe even identify with my weird labyrinthian house (it canonically has three floors officially but about a dozen representationally, and don’t even get me started on the weird college and dorm towers I’ve come up with…), or the circular mall with a free-use sports arena in the middle, and an arcade in the basement. Or any of dozens of local shops and eateries.

I wish AI was better so if I ever did figure out how to build a whole town and make it interesting to explore, the people could stay interesting. But I’ll never overcome the “how to build in VR” portion, so it doesn’t matter.

Counterpoint: there are so many things a person could be doing that are far far more valuable to society than bullshit “profitable” work, and those things don’t pay, or pay very poorly. You think being required to earn basic existence in life is better, even though the vast majority of jobs are entirely pointless and/or could easily be automated? Such a shameful waste of human potential.

If people had all the time in the world to do what they wanted, most people would still work at least part time, but it probably wouldn’t be for shitty megacorps that treat employees like trash (and those companies deserve to die). Some people would choose to only do community improvement stuff, though, like beautification, guerrilla gardening, or helping to build/remodel community spaces. And that’s actually awesome. We need way way more of that, and less of developers/companies coming in and doing whatever they can to extract money from the community.

They do it now, when they have time or it’s directly beneficial to them, but volunteering is an inherently privileged activity. Poor people don’t have time or energy because they have other shit to do to be able to afford to survive.

Hell, it’s a very different target market from the rest of the horizon franchise…

Lego games are a slog. They can be fun for a while, but the design of them forces you to speed through the story and then go back to replay the whole damned thing to collect all the shit you can’t get the first time around.

Frankly I’m not excited about it. I love horizon, but I think it’s a stupid decision to make a Lego game as the next installment in an otherwise exceptional franchise. Especially since it launched for $60 on console. No way it’s worth that; it’s a Lego game.

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Honestly it’s just so useful. It should be the default.

I picked it up when I lived in Houston, but when I was bartending and stuff after returning to my home state, I’d use it heavily.

Interestingly, though, it made people think I was from another country entirely? Because in absolutely no other way do I sound even remotely southern. (I do use various non-American slang, but not with strangers) Was always a blast to have someone ask where I was from, and try to get them to pinpoint why they didn’t think I was local, when I was born 15 minutes from where the conversation was taking place :p

how does pop handle touchscreen devices, do you know? The only machine I have left that I’d install something different on is my laptop, and its touchscreen but fully discretionary. The others are a server which I’m not touching because PITA, and a shitty ram-deficient thing I use for watching Plex in my bedroom, but it doesn’t run anything well at all for whatever reason - I tried antixlinux, mint, and a few other lightweight distros, and they all ran like shit. Probably failing hardware, idk.

Ubuntu handles touchscreen and hdmi output ok, it seems, but that laptop is still windows for now because idk if I need it to be windows for my next job… I guess I can reinstall it, since keys are hardware encoded now… for that device I don’t -really- need good file management, just compatibility.

I’ve thought about pop, but never really looked into it because nobody ever, like, recommends it for anything I guess? Like I never hear about it…

Just some blokes making sandwiches, nothing to see here.