A while ago, there was a story about a man who made pretty good money from filing lawsuits against companies that ignored his do-not-call requests. If the laws still allow it, it might be a good way to make them stop.

I believe that all he had to do was to keep notes about the businesses and numbers that called him and when he asked them to add him to their do-not-call lists.

Are new instances automatically federated? If not, then it seems like making an instance, then hosting content enough to be federated, would be an awful waste of time and money, as I’d expect an instance like that would be quickly defederated.

There are few theoretically possible technologies as overwhelmingly powerful as time machines. Even an extraordinarily weak time machine, for example, one that could only move you a few minutes back and forth, would be enough to make me insanely wealthy, assuming that it wasn’t cost prohibitive to run.

This one is easy. I would simply do what they tell me to do. After all, since they came back to see me, it’s certainly because the future me sent them back in time.

If it wasn’t me that sent them back in time, then it’s probably a set up, and I would be powerless to resist it.

If they insisted on my ordering them around, I’d have them bring back a copy of their Wikipedia from 50 years in the future, and then I’d try to use the rest of the time to figure out the physics behind time travel, and see if I can’t get plans for a time machine.

Groundhog Day every February 2nd

It’s not just science. You have to simply forget everything you know about science, relationships, the government, space agencies, logic, and smart people, but the payoff is that you get to hear a guy sing about how much he wants to fuck his daughter.

If you’ve been to Reddit since the API meltdown, it’s pretty clear that large sections of it were fucked by angry moderators, and still remain that way. I don’t think the fediverse was ready to take over, but Reddit very clearly has fewer people working for them for free.

Specifically, there are several subreddits where they used to be strict about submissions, and now they let anything mildly related in.

I’m honestly pretty surprised that they still haven’t recovered. At this point, I’m hoping that their mediocrity will continue to push people away until Lemmy can catch up.

According to my college physics 101 professor, a curved sail is generally superior in all situations. There are sails made out of rigid materials, and they generally are curved, even though they could be flat. Everybody who sails knows that you can adjust the slack in your sail, and that sometimes a tighter sail is better, for example when tacking. You can tell this just from the feel.

Now, then, it’s been a LONG time since my physics 101 class, but the explanation was something like this: Although this is an oversimplification, you can imagine that a sail works when air particles bounce off of it. The momentum imparted to the sail depends not only on the direction that the wind is coming from, but also the direction that it ends up going when it bounces off the sail. A curved sail helps redirect the wind away from the sail in exactly the direction that the sail is pointing, which is better at pushing the vehicle in the correct direction.

Another way to look at this is if it is a pure matter of air pressure. A curved surface will be better at creating air pressure inside the curve. It’s like if you’re driving and you hold something out the window. When you hold a rigid board out of the window, it will be hard to hold in place, but the air pressure won’t build up behind it as much as a sack, for example. If you hold a sack out the window, it will probably just be ripped out of your hands.

Everybody else is saying things that some humans are too dumb to grasp. I’ll give you an example that virtually all humans are too dumb to grasp.

How are our decisions affected by conflicts of interests? The last time I looked into this, the research in this area said that humans virtually always underestimate the effect that a conflict of interests has on them, by a lot. Many people don’t even see the conflict of interests. People who recognize the conflict of interests believe that because they are aware of the conflict of interests, they can mitigate the effects completely. They are wrong.

Humans get entangled by conflicts of interests just like dogs get entangled by their leashes. Just like dogs, many times, humans don’t realize that they’re caught. Just like dogs, even if you show a human the problem, they cannot understand. But even worse than dogs getting tangled by their leashes, humans believe they can understand what to do when they’re caught up, but it turns out that they’re wrong.

If your friend is actually a germaphobe, then just because something is safe, that doesn’t mean they won’t worry about infection.

What timing! I am so pissed at my smartwatch right now.

I got a smart watch because I was having some sleep problems, and I found that some Apple watches can monitor your oxygen levels while sleeping. I suspected it was related to other things like stress, but I wanted to be a bit more comfortable and say that it’s probably not sleep apnea.

So, the point is that I must wear it when I’m sleeping. Also, like any reasonable person, I have my phone set up not to disturb me at night. But at least on Apple watches, this means that my alarm goes off only on my watch. I can’t figure out any way for it to not go off on my watch, and only go off on my phone, unless I simply take off the watch.

It’s the MOST ANNOYING THING. First, because it means that you can’t have your alarm go off across the room. You can always turn it off on your watch, which means that you can even turn it off without waking up. And then, you have no alarm at all. So, if I absolutely have to wake up for some meeting or airplane or something, I can’t wear my watch to bed.

Also, maybe this is just me, but I hate when my watch vibrates on my wrist. I hate the feeling. Every time it vibrates, I have the urge to smash the thing. If I had to choose a set up, I’d have my phone always vibrate, and my watch never vibrate. But I can’t figure out how to make that work on Apple.

This morning was an absolute nightmare, though. Now, I’m used to turning off my alarm on my watch, but when I went to turn it off this morning, the watch was deep in some shitty menu. I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. And it was just vibrating on my wrist non-stop. Obviously, this was made much more difficult because I was just waking up.

I eventually figured it out, but the point is that the UI is obviously less refined than, for example, the phone UI, where this sort of alarm hiding has never happened in all of my years owning a smart phone.

Anyways, to answer your question, I prefer to wear a smart watch, because a regular watch doesn’t do anything for me. But goddamn do I hate my smart watch right now!

I don’t know whether they currently sell phones abroad, but I know in the past they have sold abroad. It’s a big market.

So it certainly affects them organizationally. Any phone that they want to sell abroad will have completely different software. They’d likely have to use an entirely different team of people.

any interpreted language is a waste of power

It’s not a waste of power. There are a lot of tradeoffs like ease of development and fault tolerance. And the cost of the interpreter is greatly mitigated at run time. Please just stop talking about this. It’s not as good of a point as you think it is.

Java is not as bad as you’re making it out to be. It’s always funny to see people list the problems with Java as if they’re obvious. They’re trade offs.

With this change, you’re right, they certainly won’t have to worry about selling the device abroad.

I’m pretty sure that’s the Dewey Decimal category for self-help books on how to either do your own research or to give other people enough information to help you.

When people say “no pun intended,” it is always right after they’ve made a completely intentional pun.

When a person says “no offense [intended], but,” it is always right before they say something intentionally offensive.

What I’m saying is that maybe this grammar “no X intended” doesn’t actually mean that literally they don’t intend X, but instead that they want to lessen their culpability for exactly intending X.

Trump actually promised to leave us alone if he lost. He also suggested that he’d move to a foreign country.

“If I lose to [Biden], I don’t know what I’m going to do. I will never speak to you again,” Trump told supporters at a rally in North Carolina.

Trump made similar remarks in 2016 when he rivaled Hillary Clinton for the presidency: “I don’t think I’m going to lose, but if I do, I don’t think you’re ever going to see me again, folks,” Trump said. “I think I’ll go to Turnberry and play golf or something.”

Why would you ask a question that you already know the answer to?

I love word ladders. Here’s one that I do every day, which even has a word ladder in the URL. https://wordwormdormdork.com/

For your second point, do you say that you use Adobe or Windows?

I mean, you already know the answer to that. The point is that you don’t have to give the entire context of your computing environment every time you mention some product you use.

Linux is just the kernel.

It’s not only the kernel. It is also the name that people have settled on for differentiating the computer running the Linux kernel from a computer running Windows.

I was contrasting it with the animal “gnu”, otherwise known as the wildebeest, which is pronounced more similar to the word “new”. I suspect more people know the animal gnu than know the organization GNU.