• 3 Posts
  • 150 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I once got a couple of Amazon Echo Dots as part of a promo. Little spherical devices with about a 3" round touchscreen. To set it up you had to enter your Amazon account info by tapping a keyboard on that tiny screen.

    My password at the time was a random 80 character string, full of special characters. That would have been painful enough, but the password entry box would hide each character a second or so after typing, so it was nearly impossible to keep track of where I was, and whether I had skipped or double entered something.

    I should have just binned them immediately at that point, but I spent probably an hour of typing passwords on those two fuckers–more out of stubbornness than anything else.







  • Honestly, I get it. If you have a relatively small stash of media, say a couple TB worth, you can pretty easily say "well I watched this movie, so I’ll delete it and make room for the next. When you get into the 10’s of TB range, the mindset has switched from it being a dynamic, temporary library to a repository. And it becomes easier just to plug in another 10-20TB drive occasionally, rather than trying to curate thousands of movies and shows.

    I can see both sides though. There’s certainly something to be said for being deliberate about the media you consume–and therefore only needing enough storage for your immediate viewing plans. I’m not quite into the 100TB range with my library, but I definitely have moments where I feel like having so many options makes any given option seem less appealing.




  • I believe it’s very important that these executions are observed. If the state gets to operate with impunity and no witnesses, many of these states have shown they don’t have what it takes to act ethically with regards to the death penalty.

    That’s a really good point. I came into the comments with the same opinion as OP that allowing people (especially victims) to witness executions is kind of fucked up, but you’re 100% correct.




  • Problem is, by the time they’ve failed the test, the opportunity for them to learn the content is largely passed.

    The purpose of school is to educate and teach thinking skills. Tests are just a way to assess how effectively you and your students are achieving that goal. If something (in this case easy access to AI tools in the classroom) is disrupting that teaching/learning process, sure it’s useful to detect that through testing, but I’d doesn’t do anything really to solve the problem. Some fraction of kids are disciplined enough to recognize that skating by on classwork will lead to poor test results and possibly retaking classes, but generally those aren’t the kids you need to worry about anyway.


  • I also thought I’d miss Hulu and Netflix a lot more than I do. What used to irk me so badly was how utterly shit Netflix is when you just want to sit down and find something new to watch. Their front page would be list after list of things like “Hot New Comedies” “Best Independent Films of 2025”, “Classic Action Flicks” and somehow it always felt like the same 30 or 40 movies randomly shuffled together. So I’d spend 15 minutes scrolling through the same slop in different orders, get frustrated and search for a movie that I remembered wanting to watch, only to find that it was on none of the services I was subscribed to, and cost $8.99 for a single watch of a 20 year old movie.

    We had been Netflix subscribers since the very start when they delivered discs through the mail. Kinda sad how they went from having virtually anything you could think of to watch (and having a halfway decent recommendation algorithm to boot!) to where they are today.