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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • The issue isn’t about what it can and can’t do, it’s that it is CONSTANTLY attempting to step in and “fix” my spreadsheet in bizarrely inane ways. Why won’t it give me the “shut up and stay the fuck out of my way” option? There is no option to remove or silence copilot. That damn thing follows my cursor like a ring wraith after Frodo. It has already fucked up more than one of my spreadsheets without asking or being asked. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I might not have caught the absolutely bat shit insane edits it was making to simple and correct functions I’d already entered. No, copilot you don’t know what I’m doing. Clippy was less intrusive.



  • Don’t worry. Time is a flat circle. What is old, is new again. Smart glasses will get smaller and more discreet packages and the kids will forget the original chunky look that meant “potential invasion of privacy”. I like what I like and I’m content to remain true to that until the merry-go-round of fashion comes back around again. Sometimes I may hop on a new trend and take the ride a bit, but it’s always my choice. Nostalgia is often used as a derogatory term by trendy/edgy people to feel superior about picking some style that is new to them. That fashion is almost always someone else’s “nostalgia”. Fashion is all just picking and choosing which spot on the nostalgia merry-go-round feels right for us in this moment.





  • I’d like to see ideas like this make a comeback, hopefully with some modifications this time around to protect our privacy and resist corporate exploitation.

    We used to use del.icio.us and other variants to do exactly this before browsers had profiles. Back then, its primary draw was that you could take your bookmarks with you anywhere to any machine (this being before that function was baked into browsers and before web browsers could be carried in your pocket). The secondary effect was that you’d share and tag those websites with your own categories/descriptors, thus crowdsourcing a new version of the old web’s link directories using Web 2.0. You could browse through symantic tag clouds to discover new things. Del.icio.us was for websites, but people were tagging and logging all of their favorite stuff and sharing it online so that like minded strangers could filled the gaps in their cultural awareness. We tagged our books with librarything. We tagged recipes with recipe thing. Audioscrobbler (later known as last.fm) logged our music listening to automate the tagging, not by direct symantic tagging, but by relational/temporal coincidence. If other people that listened to a lot of the stuff you listened to and they also listened to some other stuff you didn’t, those became recommendations for you. That kind of relational algorithm would survive the slow death of Web2.0 to become the backbone of recommendation services like Spotify and probably even TikTok.







  • You can absolutely shovel with chopsticks. It may take a little extra dexterity, but is far from impossible. It’s really only harder if you haven’t much practice with chopsticks. Besides, shoveling anything with a fork is kind of a disaster when you throw leafy greens into the mix.

    That’s not how I eat a salad with chopsticks. No stabbing, no shoveling; at the dinner table that is bad etiquette. It’s more like “grabbing” a clump of lettuce and toppings mixed together with a couple “fingers”, except your “fingers” are chopsticks. Most of the small bits stick to the leafy greens or are inherently wrapped up in them. I find picking those few remaining tiny bits out of the bottom of a bowl is actually easier with chopsticks than trying to shovel them on to a fork.





  • You’ve just traded down votes for the report button.

    I say they are two different use cases. There is often a very wide gulf between a comment that I feel does not contribute to good discussion and one that is so heinous that it needs to be removed. Most of your comments for instance: pretty naive and banal adding little good to the discussion overall, but I don’t feel that you’ve said anything hateful, obscene, or aggressive enough to warrant total removal. Usually I just downvote and move on, especially when I don’t want to hear that person’s bad take reply on my own point of view. I’ve made an exception here for you simply because you are trolling all over this thread, seemingly inviting downvotes. But, I’m going to block you and move on because you’ve killed any interest I have in this thread or the larger discussion. I still don’t think your comments rise to the level of reporting.

    Reports and blocks aren’t a replacement for downvotes and if your instances doesn’t federate downvotes you shouldn’t use them that way.


  • They remember at time when we weren’t all within reach of our own personal phone line 24/7. During that forgotten time, they were mostly children and expected to answer the landline and play the respectful secretary for the family. Sure, you MIGHT call someone’s house if you cared or dared to run the gauntlet of dealing with whomever answered the home phone and it wasn’t so private that you’d risk someone listening in from another room of your house or theirs. Party lines were even still a thing in some places. You could listen in to wireless handset phone with a baby monitor. Phone conversations carried a lot of emotion baggage.

    The dotcom bubble burst just after we all got cell phones. As a result of this quirk of timing, most millennials grew up socializing a lot with people remotely via text based conversations over the Internet using things like Bulletin Board Services/Forums, IRC, ICQ, newsgroups, etc. These were free and far from the prying eyes of parents or easily hidden. But, that would have all been done at the home or school computer just like the landline (usually sharing the same literal line), not a thing you carried with you.

    Millennials spent vast oceans of time being completely and utterly unreachable unless physically present and together, learning to converse face to face or in paragraphs of text from a box at home. Even emojis were text. Images were slow, small, and low quality, so the memes were rare and crafted with care.

    When millennials got their first phone, it would have been likely for most that they’d most often be used by parents checking in. Cell phones were still mostly an in case of emergency type communication device, not your daily driver. That battery was limited and charging was slow. Even though text messages of the time carried a stiff financial cost, millennials stuck in class could converse by tapping out messages on the phones physical number pad buttons while pretending to pay attention.

    TLDR: Millennials grew up during a communication technology revolution and as a result they’ve got some hang ups about always with you communication devices. Voice and video calls are an intrusion. For many, a ringing phone signals only parents, authority, or debt collectors.