plastiquebeech

8 ms·

1.
by plastiquebeech 4y ago
Interesting. One quirk of browsing sites with JS disabled is that the cookie banners rarely show up. Often, they are implemented as scripts loaded from a site like "cookielaw.org". I've long suspected that these sites default
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
Same. I tried to switch to iOS about a year ago, but I ended up returning the device after spending over $50 on highly-rated ad/script blockers for Safari, and finding that none of them really worked. Back on Android, my daily life is
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
It's not feasible to do a real "Lord of the Flies" experiment on purpose; not even the notoriously sociopathic world of reality TV producers could get away with that. If you have adults watching and ready to spring in at a mo
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
Might be worth mentioning the name of the conspiracy: the Phoebus Cartel. It sounds cartoonishly evil, but "cartel" is just an economic term for a market where a small number of participants collude to control supply and pricing.
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
Those are the same questions that people ask on SO, although the respondents aren't exclusively men with beards. OP bemoaned how people on StackOverflow would tell you not to do what you're asking about. Reference material is not
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
When I was young, we didn't have StackOverflow or Google. We had to hike through snow to access the internet at all, uphill both ways! In those days, we would usually read the manual when we needed to dig past a surface-level understan
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
We need to be very careful with brain implants designed to relieve pain, lest we repeat the mistakes which brought us the opioid crisis. I've seen videos at BCI conferences of deep brain stimulation implants which provide the patient w
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
Whenever I hear people describe a complex chain of events only to conclude that there was a single root cause, I'm reminded of the old proverb: >For want of a nail the shoe was lost. >For want of a shoe the horse was lost. >Fo
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
People might scoff at the petty vandalism, but how many of you over the age of 35 had a scrupulously clean adolescence? For the under-30 crowd, everything in their post-puberty lives has been carefully recorded in a semi-public ledger, and
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
Impossible to manufacture? Or financially impossible to build a factory for the purpose and larger infrastructure to accommodate transportation? I'm curious if there is something about acrylics which makes it impossible to make very la
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
The publishers usually can't publish their games' source code, because of various library and middleware dependencies which are not free or open-source. Same issue with cheap IoT gizmos. Even if the retailers wanted to publish an
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
Developers will package browsers in their code as a way to spy on users with fewer restrictions, not because Safari is unusable. That being said, I returned my first and last iPhone after realizing that Firefox on iOS couldn't run the
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
Fair enough. I would still rather have a diverse ecosystem of power-tripping moderators than a few unavoidable ones, though. There would probably be more calm tidal pools like the one that dang cultivates here.
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
The small town was just an example. You could just as easily make a small social network for a band, or a hobby, or anything you could imagine having its own subreddit/discord/etc.
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
Same reason that people run community gardens, or set up trusts to maintain local trails. Because they care. Maybe some things, like human relationships and communication, are better off without a profit motive.
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
If requiring moderation made it impossible to operate UGC sites at a large scale, wouldn't we expect to see more competitors and choices, albeit at a smaller scale? For example, a small group of friends could easily run a social medi
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
They were barely keeping their heads above water, but the interest payments on their new loans was like tying cinder blocks to their feet. It amazes me that the world's richest man was able to buy this company with a bunch of borrowed
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
What about a car? You probably shouldn't finance a vehicle you can afford with current interest rates, and you may not want to give your debit card to a secondhand dealer for processing. While I do have fond memories of paying less tha
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
I had to look up this story, and it's about as ridiculous as it sounds. This source places the event in 1835, but I believe it's the same incident: http://southernghoststories.com/the-witch-of-fentress-county >
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
One of the first lessons that a junior developer learns is: >My job is not to write code. My job is to solve business problems efficiently, using computers as a medium. Sounds like data scientists have the same problem. Sometimes, to sol
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
Not surprising, airplane wifi has always been ridiculously insecure. Back in the day, when it was first rolling out, you could (theoretically ofc) join the plane's network and scan for MAC addresses, then clone someone else's for
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
I think he was trying to express the importance of resilience. Things that happen, stay happened. So the best outcome for yourself following misfortune is to move ahead as best you can. Personally, I don't think that stoicism is a good
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
Call it what you want. If you spend all your time whinging about misfortune, you'll never grow. As Marcus Aurelius wrote sometime around 170CE: >It’s unfortunate that this has happened. No. It’s fortunate that this has happened and
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
That sort of nihilistic attitude is anesthetizing, though. If we shrug and mutter that everything is evil to some degree, we'll stop trying to address large problems on a societal scale. In the words of John Oliver's character in
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
Not necessarily a new idea, but it's a good one. One of my schoolteachers edited a historical figure's Wikipedia page the day before a major essay about them was due. The need to check your sources is an important lesson to learn
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
And before that, Apple got a generation hooked on iMacs by making the colorful pear-shaped all-in-one CRT computers the standard in every school. Education is a prime target for rent-seekers for two reasons. First, you can use the same prod
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
Top Gear did this, back when they were still on the BBC. They dropped one presenter and a camera crew out of a helicopter around the top of a hill-climb OHV track in the Canadian wilderness, and had them activate an emergency beacon. The ot
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
>It seems like there are a few potential negative consequences of using AI-generated answers on Stack Overflow. For one, This is where my "Probably written by AI" filter tripped, and I skipped to the end. I can't exactly s
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
Prolly depends more on where you are than when you are. In a rural area, you're still looking at a pat on the back instead of handcuffs, in the unlikely event that an authority figure notices. In a suburban area, you get cops asking if
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by plastiquebeech 4y ago
>Are fabless vendors, composed of a few people, who basically rebrand white-label shit from alibaba really making (and perhaps in this case losing) millions of dollars in time-frames of months to a couple of years ?? It wouldn't be

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