I badly wish that I could get (competent) home assistants with at least somewhat customizable activation keywords. I understand why it’s not customizable. They build it into the hardware so that it doesn’t have to be truly listening all the time. But I’d love at least some options to buy versions that have different phrases.

For me, I just want something that references some pop culture AI (eg, HAL, Glados, etc). I especially don’t like Google’s approach of saying the freaking company name.

In Ruby, 0 and "" is truthy,

What the fuck?

That’s why, when I leave ransom ware outside of offices, I buy the pink ones and put stickers on em.

Those prices feel so expensive, too. Like, does the news cost more to produce than full length movies and TV shows? Cause all the streaming video apps are far cheaper than 9€ a week. The only thing 9€ is cheap for is if you would have been buying a newspaper daily. Incidentally, newspapers have ads despite being bought, so that might explain why they kept ads in the web version too?

A price like that may have made sense in the pre internet days, when a newspaper was a big chunk of my daily reading due to general lack of alternatives. But these days? I probably only read a single digit number of articles per day about the biggest headlines. And since I get lots of news from social media like Lemmy, it crosses many websites, which is unconductive with subscribing. Plus it feels like a sizable chunk of news articles are just quoting AP or Reuters these days, anyway.

Mind you, I’m also Canadian. We have a fully publically funded news service (the CBC) that isn’t paywalled and generally high quality.

Yeah, I make hella good lasagna and have never used a white sauce in it. It’s always been a red sauce. Just a ton of cheeses like you say (“some” is an understatement lol).

The “somehow” is because IRC is extremely bare bones. It doesn’t stand up to modern expectations of what chat software does. Plus accounts aren’t all a bad thing. Anti-spam is vital for the internet today, as is rigid ways of preventing impersonation. IRC is a relic of a simpler era.

They can and I had hoped they were gonna for me. But my problem must be heavily neurological. The cochlear implant did help some, I’m a far cry from normal hearing (I especially struggle with accents, low tones, and when sounds overlap).

I’m hearing impaired and would love if some brain implant could fix me. I already almost have this, with a cochlear implant (it’s not technically in the brain, but it is an implant in my head). It’s not enough for me, though, cause my hearing still sucks.

Bear in mind that some instances blocked Hexbear and similar. This means that what people perceive as the fediverse can be very different. Some instances are super curated while others see warts and all.

Plus some users have blocked the instance on their side. Easy to forget how bad things are when you utilize blocking.

But we (as a collective) do need to remember that what we experience isn’t the same as what a potential new member experiences. Which is why I now advocate defederating instances like Hexbear. I really didn’t want to for a while, but eventually it became clear that they’re too aggressive and bad for the fediverse as a whole.

Yeah, it’s so weird that they’re sooooo in love with Russia and China. They claim to be communist and/or socialist, but those countries aren’t what I’d consider to be either of those things. They’re just… regular ol’ dictatorships full of human rights abuses. Why the hell would they want to support them?

I think that breed is known as “cutie”.

The car is hot because we turned the AC off. And while some of us want to turn it back on, there’s a bunch of people ardently insisting we should do nothing cause god will be back any minute to turn to the car back on.

Honestly, dishwashers are amazing. I’ve rented a bunch of different and when I rented a place without a dishwasher, I thought it’d be no big deal. No way. Dishwasher is so worth it. I refuse to rent a place that doesn’t have a dishwasher (and in-suite laundry – shared laundry is also a pain).

No need to scrub them most of the time. Technology Connections’s tip of putting some detergent outside of the dispenser seems to help a little.

I have one thing that I’ve found needs to be scrubbed (a cup shaped thing that will have cake on egg), but almost everything else seems to get cleaned perfectly.

To be honest, pretty much all my files that actually matter are under my Dropbox folder. Everything else is ephemeral. I mostly depend on Steam or the likes to backup game saves. Not much else I care about. I’ve upgraded my PC a few times (with no full backups) and never missed a single thing that got lost in the upgrade.

You definitely still want locks because most people have no idea how to pick a lock and a lot of crime is crimes of opportunity. But I don’t think there’s that much of a difference in most locks. A slightly better lock might dissuade a thief who learned how to pick cheap masterlocks, but someone who truly wants to get in doesn’t even need to pick a lock. I’d hazard a guess that break-ins happen far more often by breaking the window than picking locks.

Hey, if you can get 15 squirrels to work together, killing god is the least you have to worry about them doing.

Agree on your last sentence. I think one of the big problems is that women as a whole are disproportionately over sexualized and when they are sexualized, it tends to be a lot more blatant.

There absolutely are plenty of works of media where male and female characters are both sexualized. But there’s also many where only the female characters are notably sexualized (or are so damn heavily sexualized that the sexualization of the male characters pales in comparison).

There’s also the fact that things being made for men is so normalized that nobody bats an eye if a video game or movie only has prominent male characters. Society often treats such works as if they were gender neutral. But if you create a work that’s all women, society tends to treat it as “for women only”, toxic masculinity often treats such works as a no-go for men, and many people are much more critical towards them.

It doesn’t even have to be as blatant as all characters being the same gender. In general, society tends to default to male dominated everything and can often even view being 50/50 as “women are taking over”.

Even on the internet, people tend to default to male pronouns. Or when giving a hypothetical, they tend to default to male characters.

All these kinda things lead up to media that also skews for men.

It adds value by helping convince clueless investors to give you money. I’m entirely serious. There’s a significant number of investors that think blockchain technology is a good thing. Doesn’t matter that it’s a terrible solution to practically every problem. The goal isn’t to be a good solution. The goal is to make money. They only need to convince a few clueless people to give them that.