Have you never actually seen a crosswalk before? Because I’m having trouble figuring out which part of these rainbow flag colored crosswalks makes them look any less like a crosswalk or makes them less visible or recognizable in any way. Literally the only other pavement marking that comes anywhere near looking like or being placed in the same way on a road is a stop bar. And guess what, car drivers routinely mistake the plain crosswalks for stop bars, thereby blocking the crosswalk. Making the claim that painting a pedestrian crosswalk in bright colors somehow makes them less visible or recognizable has got to be the dumbest argument I’ve heard this week.

A fucking Members Only pizza.

Plexamp has gotten better lately. It can save your progress on audiobooks now. It’s a per library feature, so I have one library of music (that does not save progress) and one for audiobooks (that does save progress). I used to have trouble with some audiobook formats (M4Bs needed to be converted (really just renamed) to mp4s, but that wasn’t necessary for the last few I loaded. Plex still has a little trouble with standards around multiple authors and different productions (and different readers) of a single book, but that’s more of an ID3 tag problem and is resolved if you’re consistent in normalizing the tags on your library. I’ve also used the syncing features a bunch for offline time (like on a plane or on long trips). For a large library, I see syncing offline files as a necessary feature.

And before the Jellyfin fanboys chime in, if Jellyfin could match these audio and syncing features (and be easier to setup for access outside my LAN and sharing with family), I jump ship in a heartbeat.

Somehow this reminds of a meme thread that just popped up wherein there are a lot of people proudly declaring their inability to study and claiming that the mere suggestion that one should read the manual as a first step to solving a problem is actually very offensive.

“pretty easy” is a bit of a stretch

I was just pointing to the simplest answer I had, which didn’t rely on a bunch of circumstantial and vague hunches. Since you take issue with that, I guess I’ll rant a bit.

Fake photos have been a thing as long a photos have been. Very little has changed in that regard. The various tips and tricks to spot AI fakes will become obsolete a lot faster than the other critical thinking skills needed to decipher fact from fiction in any other medium: news articles, YouTube videos, social media, etc. This will be especially true as the tools used to make these images will evolve. One of those critical thinking skills is tracing a claim, especially a repeated claim, back to it’s source. Another is looking at the timeline of the spread of the meme. These both involve gathering actual evidence and work for a variety of mediums. This is why so many lamented the death of rigorous independent journalism. Suddenly the news becomes so much more trouble to trust and to verify. AI is here just a fungus feeding off the corpse of journalism in the dense jungle of the death of critical thinking in the news consuming public.

Also, I’m pretty sure I saw this pic being meme long before AI images were a thing.

He wasn’t “walking around in public”. He was a gardener, walking around with gardening tools, gardening. I have one of those tools. It’s fucking amazing at digging small precise holes under difficult conditions, but as a weapon it wouldn’t be any more dangerous than any of my other tools. It’s absolutely not a knife. It’s just a narrow trowel with edges necessary to cut through roots. Most gardening tools have a sharp edge somewhere. Context fucking matters. And the fantasy your spinning about this scenario is just more pathetic nanny state authoritarian nonsense.

The et cetera: Shouldn’t be allowed to work overtime either. And they should get taxed more if they work a second job, so only 40 hours per week. Attach ridiculous fees to any attempt at saving money in a bank, can’t have their money earning interest for them. They should also be in a high cost of living part of hell with no public transportation. And they should be forced to buy their own safety equipment. They should have to pay for healthcare out of pocket, no good health insurance. And they should be penalized for aging the same way too, with new billionaires coming in cheaper and forcing them out of their position and making their experience a liability in finding new work. Let’s throw in some inflation to keeps things spicy. An HOA that is constantly fighting them and won’t let them grow food. How about random detentions and beatings for being the wrong shade in the wrong part of hell town, the part they work in. And they should never be allowed to forget for one moment what they had in life and how they squandered it on petty selfish things.

It’s also an argument for not having your own domain for emails, because you may one day loose that domain too, and someone could poach the domain to impersonate you.

The Google Nest Mini is a smart speaker, not the smart thermostat with a similar name.

It’s not a completely different thing. They were both trying to fully integrate the operating system and the web browser into one monolithic and inescapable thing: Windows XP + Internet Explorer to squash competition on the desktop; Linux + Chrome to squash competition on laptops; Android + Chrome OS to squash competition in the mobile space. The money to be made on operating systems is trivial in the consumer space compared to the power of control over platforms (like web browsers) that deliver advertisements and harvest data from comsumers. M$ saw the writing on the wall way back then in their fight with Netscape Navigator. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I feel like I’m talking to an AI chatbot completely unable to reason abstractly or consider the full context of the conversation.

Why bother commenting at all if you’re going to be proudly ignorant AND a jerk?

Who’s talking about Windows 8 or 2012? I said 2 decades and meant it. I wasn’t talking about the same time frame, just pointing out the history we are repeating. I was talking about “United States vs Microsoft Corp.” (2001). That would have been regarding Windows 98 and Windows XP. Internet ExplorerEdge is still an integral and unremovable component of Microsoft’s operating systems to this day and I guess everyone really has forgotten about Netscape Navigator.

Two decades ago people would remember when M$ decided to do something very similar on the desktop. Nothing has changed.

Somehow I think the national lab test company’s lawyers have got them covered. This wasn’t exactly a fly by night, no name company. Having in known third party send you a medical bill months later is pretty fucking common place. This was just one anecdote of many, not an isolated incident.

The best part is the random bill.

• Go to the doctor. Get blood drawn.
• Doctor send the blood to a lab for the test. Doesn’t tell me who. I don’t care who. It’s their subcontractor, let them worry about it. *Go back to the doctor or get a call for results. Pay the doctor the standard co-pay. *Months later a random company sends me a bill. This is a company that I have never interacted with or entered into any contract with, for work that somebody else (presumably my doctor, but who the fuck knows for sure) asked them to do for them, sending the results to that other person and NOT to me.

The system is broken. If any other company subcontracted a part of their work to a third party, you as the client would reasonably expect that work to be paid through the original contract, not get a bill directly from the subcontractor. I didn’t hire them, the doctor hired them. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the doctor’s subcontractor and their debt, not mine. I paid the doctor already.

Or another variant.

• Go to the emergency room.
• Get separate bills FOR THE SAME SERVICE from the hospital, the doctor, and somehow the hospital again but this time it’s the emergency room (which is somehow separate with a different billing company).

The system is not just broken. It is designed to fleece us and train us to always accept whatever debt the institutions decide to levy on us without question.

Mpd + a frontend of your choosing, I prefer ncmpcpp, will run on just about anything and is remotely controlled through apps or ssh. Mpd is great when the server is physically connected to the audio output device. I use it to remotely control a speaker connected server that can also run Plex (because I prefer plexamp for streaming and syncing to my phone, other android devices, and smart speakers). They both look at the same directory of a collection near 30 years in the making with hundreds of thousands of files and a wide array of formats.

Nothing in either comment speaks about pain either, just screams. I only posted the wikipedia link because it referenced the numerous articles about this well established phenomenon. I didn’t realize I was defending a doctoral thesis here. Y’all are fucking toxic.

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