I rarely use any kind of chat, but I used IRC sometimes back in the day. I was recently working on a thing where I needed to use Discord for some programming advice. I got the info I needed, but yeah that Discord is a convoluted mess. Newer hardly ever means better.
Great software, used it a lot. Also Handbrake.
What an everlasting tool history will remember you as, elon.
Biggest tool in the history of tools.
Only clearer by the day that this was all an exercise to intentionally kill Twitter to the benefit of billionaires, fascists and other extremists.
When I initially heard about Elon paying what he did for Twitter my first thought was he’s buying it to kill it, then I thought nobody in their right mind would spend that kind of money to carry out a personal vendetta. Now I think that’s absolutely what’s going on.
I believe he’s killing Twitter purely for personal reasons (he hates it because people gave him shit there). I don’t think there’s some kind of grand social agenda. It would require an assumption he cares about someone other than himself. Unlikely as the guy’s ego extends past Planet 9.
Actually after thinking about it, the stuff he’s doing to the company is just batshit insane. It has to be intentional. He’s on a campaign to kill the company for the tax write-off and because he has some kind of personal beef with it. If he were to just fire everyone and shut down the servers he wouldn’t be able to take the write-off. The company has to die a slow death for it to look legit.
In imperial units I get this for a single stack of 44B in $100 bills;
.0043 inches * 44B / (12 inches in a foot * 5280 feet in a mile) = 2986 miles
That would be approximately the distance from Los Angeles to New York. That’s a long stack of bills.
For sure, either he’s destroying it on purpose of he’s that stupid, either one is just way out there.
How does it impact Chromium?
Chromium is the open source part of Chrome. I’ve actually run Chromium before, but it’s kind of hard to find a binary release. Chromium lacks some Google additions like an mpeg player and PDF reader. It’s also free of some annoying add-on stuff like that app tracker that runs a background process full time. Who knows what that process does really. Of course I have it disabled on my system, but you have to go out of your way to kill it.
Otherwise Google has the Chromium project under their thumb so they’re not going to do anything Google does not approve of or refuse to do anything Google wants them to.
Speaking of Google influence, it bothers me that Google is a big contributor to Mozilla. I think it’s mainly to stay out of hot water with the FTC. They know all too well what happened to Microsoft and Internet Explorer in 2001. They need to keep the competition alive. Still it makes me cringe knowing they could exercise their will on them as a big contributor. I mean everyone has a price, and in Silicon Valley it’s not very high.
and am stunned when I see the web without an adblocker.
True, True, it’s damn near unusable. You take it for granted what a job your blocker is doing for you.
I know my uBO has saved me from some hostile shit. So yeah it’s a part of my browser security. I have it configured to a stricter blocking mode so it’s not just blocking ads for me, it gets other stuff that can be a problem.
Anyway I’m aware of the Manifest V3 business and being on Chrome I’m just waiting for the hammer to fall before going to Firefox. If they start adding DRM as well, I’m out of there quick.
Yeah, yeah, I know, just go to Firefox now, but I don’t really want to deal with a new browser and all my custom stuff until I have to. I’m old and that shit is super hard to motivate on for me. Not to say I’m inept, I mean I’ve spent my whole career in tech, but old dogs and all.
I use fastmail, great service.
What motivated me to do that is finding these megacorp providers do not keep your email private.
All I can say is Netflix at 12.99 was a tough sell. That was the rate hike that made me drop them. 15.49 forget it.
When Netflix was the ticket and my sub was 8.99 some years ago, I didn’t pirate anything because I didn’t need to. I’d have to pay a hundred a month due to the fracturing and inflation of streaming services now, and I still wouldn’t get everything. I didn’t wanna pirate, but the industry backed me into a corner.
It works great for that. It’s also good in automotive for bulb sockets, I’ve used it for that as well. It’s amazing actually, slop some in a socket and next time you pull a bulb it will still look brand new, even if not well protected as the case with antique cars. You would think it might interfere with electrical contact an Vaseline is completely non-conductive, it doesn’t seem to at all. You can also use it on car battery terminals and it will completely stop any corrosion, however I actually use 90W gear oil on those since it attracts less dirt and works as well.
I have this thing about astronomy. Kind of a perspective thing of our place in the cosmos. I try to remember all the distances of planets from the sun and distances of moons from their planets. Also the diameters of solar objects. There’s other factoids I try to remember about neighboring solar systems and galactic bodies. For example I remember the black hole at the center our galaxy is called Sagitarius A and its mass is 4M suns. The black hole at the center Andromeda our closest major galaxy at 2.5M light years is 25M suns. The black hole at the center M87, the closest active galaxy at 50M light years is 4B suns. I didn’t look that stuff up so tell me if I didn’t get it right.
That Eucerin makes really good stuff. They have a thick healing cream that’s amazing, like supercharged moisturizer. I use it on my feet once in a while to avoid skin problems.
I use it to lubricate machine parts at times. Also good coating for rust protection like the sockets of outdoor bulbs or tools in storage. There’s better products for skin protection. Years ago it was commonly used for infant diaper rash, but again there’s better products for that now. I don’t think I’ve ever used it on my body, it’s made from petroleum so it’s really just highly refined axle grease.
They made a funny joke about them in the movie Idiocracy, they thought they’d be around forever; Evolution of Fuddruckers
Depends on the monitor. It’s pretty horrific on a 27" desktop monitor. On a phone it’s probably good. Anyway, like I said I added an AA mod and it looks a lot better on the PC screen, still pretty crude though. I play a number of 2D games on my PC and Stardew Valley has outstandingly pixelated artwork in comparison. That’s not to say I don’t like the game, I like it a lot and have put a good number of hours into it.
Stardew Valley, hands down one of the graphically ugliest modern games, like 80’s console style. Though it’s a really good game and I’ve put a of lot of hours into it. People say it’s meant to look that way as intentional retro styling, but damn it’s ugly. I actually added a mod on PC to use AA on the blocky graphics and it makes it look a lot better.
I know that game, used to play it on BBS in the early 90’s.
I’ve ripped a good number of blu-rays to network storage. If you’re looking for older, less popular stuff it’s the best option. And older releases are usually just a few bucks. The new stuff I torrent because I can usually find a decent rip, but for stuff I want to put in my library a rip from optical disk is the best, but not free of course. You can even do it for free, public libraries often have a good collection of older releases on optical disk.