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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • But to truly beat the house you need to find that one ATM which has a transaction flaw where you can withdraw your entire balance but the withdrawal does not get recorded anywhere, and for extra measure nothing about the transaction gets recorded so they don’t even know it was you who accessed that ATM.

    Fun fact: there have been a few such cases of ATM flaws in the last few decades, either time-limited to a specific period (the hour after midnight, for example) or transaction-limited to a specific type.



  • It’s not that we’re not allowed to look at it, it’s that we have oodles of evidence on how severely damaged our vision becomes when we do look directly at it without sufficient protection, and anyone with two functional neurons to rub together isn’t going to be doing any looking unless they are wearing the appropriate vision protection.


  • PowerPC performed much better and made design changes that made much more sense long-term.

    There were also volume production issues and architecture advancement issues.

    Essentially, they couldn’t get volume guarantees and they were at the mercy of a much slower improvement cycle than they would have liked.

    PowerPC was absolutely an excellent top-tier processor, and the current Power11 line absolutely smokes anything else out there from either Intel or AMD, at the cost of being 100-200× more expensive. Like, think $30,000 USD for a single entry-level workstation, or $70,000 USD for the high-end one.


  • Windows 11 refusing to install on hardware it can absolutely run on.

    RUFUS is not only a great tool with which to build your USB installer (it has an option to download the correct and latest ISO directly from Microsoft), but in the subsequent steps it also asks if you want to modify the installer in some pretty useful ways. Such as bypassing a Microsoft account in favour of a local account, and neutering some of the more recent requirements. IIRC the TPM 2.0 requirement can still be nerfed.


  • 50 shades of grey. The writing was so cringe that I just couldn’t get further than one chapter or so.

    What I find so bizarre is that the women who go hardest for this stuff tend to be either repressed housewives or hardcore feminists.

    Because if Christian Grey had been an unemployed layabout in a decaying double-wide, it would be a horror novel instead of smut. The only reason why it’s smut is because Christian is filthy f**king rich and exemplifies almost every toxic masculinity trait imaginable. And that is in addition to behaving like a controlling abuser.


  • Back in the day (mid/late 90s), any download on Internet Explorer had a “file transfer” pop-up with an animation involving a planet (the Internet) sending flying sheets of paper (the download) to a Manila folder (the computer’s file system).

    I legit had one client ask me why they couldn’t make the download go faster my moving the planet closer to the folder, or vice versa.

    I recall just sitting there for a number of seconds while my poor brain tried to grasp just how badly out-of-whack their interpretation of the universe was.

    Spoiler alert: they were a very poor client, and refused to relinquish an entire raft of very poorly thought out or even entirely wrong concepts of computing and the Internet. They were also credulous AF, and while I could have made an arseload of money correcting what they did on a weekly or even daily basis, I just didn’t want that kind of headache.




  • So what? Most of us were never meant to be impactful, or even lack the ability to be impactful. I would posit that life in general was only ever meant for us to vibe with the universe for a brief time. In the span of epochs, and especially once humanity makes itself extinct, vanishingly little will have any material impact on even the planet, much less reality as a whole.

    Unless you manage to trigger false vacuum decay. Then you have made the biggest possible impact by destroying the entire universe. Not sure this is an appropriate goal to reach for, but hey. You do you.


  • But somehow matter magically organizes itself into life?

    There is a recent, decently-supported hypothesis that the emergence of life is a byproduct of entropy, and the need for a system as a whole to almost “self-process” itself from a state of high order to one of lower order. So life is an emergent “engine” that allows entropy to function more efficiently. Or, at least a more efficient path than non-life.

    Downside is that life - as we understand it - is only possible under a narrow range of environmental conditions, and complex life even more so. So while “life” may exist throughout the universe in measured single-celled doses, complex life - especially sapient life - may be distressingly rare or even wholly absent except for us.

    Which is a real kick in the nuts when you examine the scientific evidence of how fast we are hurtling towards our own extinction.




  • I am sometimes forced to wear size 11 shoes, despite having 9½ feet, because so few manufacturers put out 9½ size shoes in an EEEE (quintuple wide) or oversized EEE (quadruple wide) width.

    At least a size 11 in a W (wide) is comfortable enough for me, and most shoes come in at least a wide.

    I think out of all the shoes I have ever bought, only two styles in 40 years have been wide enough to allow me to wear a 9½. I recently found that second style in a work boot that was being surplussed (through Princess Auto) and no longer being produced, with the marketing that it was wide enough for any foot. Once I confirmed the comfort, I immediately bought three more pairs for a lifetime supply, clearing out the stock of size 9½ for that shoe nation-wide (I checked, as I wanted even more… would have gladly gotten a half dozen pairs if I could). That brand was Terra. Highly recommend, as the model I got have been fucking awesome work boots.







  • Yes,because dad cool, mom uncool.

    Funny sexism from the 50s.

    Or maybe mom responsible adult, dad irresponsible man-child?

    It’s the funny anti-male gender bigotry of this century.

    I don’t think great-grandpa could make a meme like this, so your characterization is probably going to be the much less likely source. And honestly, it has the same man-hating, man-as-incompetent-idiot stench as a lot of feminist propaganda.