he/him. LARPer, Nerd Organizer, Web Dev.
Mastodon admin, joeterranova@leftist.network
Not the CNBC guy but I’ve got Nihilist Stock Market advice🌻

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Maybe instead of trying to train an AI powered car to deal with the insane chaos that is the road system, what if we designed something to remove that chaos? Maybe like a path that’s just for these self driving cars. There’s a network of paths to get you to your final destination.

    But if we did that, there’d still be our current problems of running out of fuel, or battery power. Which could be solved by electrifying those paths.

    But it’d be very difficult to have each of those individual cars switch between paths. Maybe it would be easier if instead of the cars switching paths, the people switched paths. Maybe we just make really long cars, and numerous people can get in them, and then switch cars as needed. People would need to know where to switch between these long cars. So we’d want to set schedules of when they’re running to where, and then have an app or something that just told you where to get on and off.

    And if they’re really long, maybe we could kickstart this before we have self-driving abilities anyway. We could just have one person in the front driving it.

    And maybe to reduce the need for rubber, instead of regular wheels on a road, they could just be metal wheels on metal tracks.

    Just throwing some ideas out there.


  • Because their practices are anti-competitive. School kids are getting bullied for using Android phones because they’re “green texters” in iMessage. But most importantly iMessage’s connection with SMS causes all interaction to be very low quality images and videos. And when people complain to Tim Apple about the experience, his only response is “Get your grandma an iPhone”. Our only saving grace is that the EU is requiring Apple to support RCS, which should solve these issues, except they’ll probably find some new way to be anti-competitive about it.


  • Not a lot of products have to do that. The one people bandy about is McDonalds adding “Caution: Coffee Is Hot” to their stuff, but the actual coffee spill lawsuit was over coffee hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns. Few things need cautions against their intended use.

    Q-Tips / cotton swabs are an almost uniquely bad tool. It’s incredibly easy to rupture your ear drums. There’s no actual health benefit to swabbing your ears – it just feels good your ears get itchy. A safer tool could be made, but it’d be more expensive, more involved to use, and there’s probably several but I can’t be bothered to find out, and neither can you. They make a product that they know is inherently dangerous to use and has no specific benefit. So it has a warning against doing it. Same as cigarette packs have a warning that they cause cancer, even though everyone buying them knows that and smokes them anyway.




  • Old Republic is still a great game. You can tell the jump in graphics from the original game to the expansions, but it still holds up. It also runs pretty great on Proton, and the launcher was moved to Steam. And it’s free.

    I recommend people try it and if they like it, just pay the subscription, for at least a month. Even if you cancel after a month, paying for a month gets you access to the expansions. When I’m actively playing it I happily pay the subscription, it’s a big quality of life boost.




  • My solution is more complicated but doesn’t require switching browsers

    1. I run a tor client on my home server in docker, the same place I keep my vpn access, torrenting, etc
    2. I run a socks proxy on my home server, that sends all requests through the tor network (and a different socks proxy for when I want to use the VPN)
    3. On my desktop and laptop, I use the FoxyProxy firefox extension (SwitchyOmega on Chrome). I setup the socks proxy (proxies) on it, using URL patterns.
    4. When I go to a .onion link, FoxyProxy uses the pattern, and sends the traffic over my tor socks proxy



  • I have a VPN that I pay less than 100 a year for. Here’s some examples of what I use it for:

    • Free movies. Each of those movies would be at least $5 to rent and more to buy. If I could even find them.
    • Pirating TV shows for streaming services I don’t have. For a long while, almost everything was on Netflix, so I didn’t need to pirate shows. Now with everyone making their own streaming service, it’d cost me $50+ a month just to get access to all the different shows I want to watch. I have Netflix, and Amazon Prime, and I have access to HBO and Disney. But I don’t have: CBS All Access, Apple TV, etc etc. There are a ton of platforms where there’s only 1 or 2 shows I want to watch. I can pirate them instead.
    • Pirating TV shows for streaming services I do have. There are streaming services I have that my friends and family can’t access, especially because of Netflix’s new location restrictions. So often I’m subscribed to torrent RSS feeds for shows to put on Plex for my friends, even though I’ll end up watching them through the actual streaming service.
    • Breaking through geo-restrictions on streaming sites. I’m a pro wrestling fan, but I don’t have cable. In the US it’s very hard to watch AEW without cable, because they have an exclusive deal with Warner Brothers. Eventually they might go on HBO Max, but in the mean time the only way to stream them is over Fite.TV, which is restricted to outside the US. I can VPN to England, then pay $9 for all the AEW weekly shows, with no commercials. I can also access a bunch of wrestling pay per views for half the price as in the US.
    • Pirating audiobooks. Often the only place to get an audiobook is Audible. I don’t want to pay a subscription, the books are expensive, and I don’t want to deal with DRM. Instead I can just download them.
    • Pirating retro game ROMs. I have a raspberry pi with RetroPie on it, a handheld abernic retro console, and a ROM cartridge for my N64. Instead of having to buy the same retro games over and over for new consoles, I can just download the ROMs and use them on very cheap retro consoles. Many of the games I wouldn’t be able to buy at all, outside a flea market for 80 bucks


  • This. I was a redditor for 14 years. I was a moderator, I ran reddit meetups in Philly and Jersey. I have a badge on my profile for working with one of the admins 13 years ago to add /r/friends/comments, for use in a 3rd party app for Ubuntu (the kind that will now be dying). I was there for the Digg migration, Secret Santa, Global Reddit Meetup Days, Reddit Gold, Reddit Mold, Team Periwinkle, I was Snapped. I run a subreddit, different_sob_story, that was literally a meta subreddit about bad reddit posts.

    Did I have a reddit addiction? Yeah, probably. But it was a large background in my life, for 14 years. If there’s a famous reddit moment, I was probably there for it. I had 2 real life relationships, because of reddit. I made a good chunk of my real life friends through reddit. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

    So yeah, it’s a lot. And some redditors will get over it quicker than others. Bear with me; My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, And I must pause till it come back to me.