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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 13th, 2023

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  • spam del or f2 keys

    Also, sometimes it’s ins, F1, or F10.

    If you find yourself doing this a lot, and are okay with attending every reboot, some BIOS’ can be configured to just always boot to the BIOS menu. Also, there’s sometimes a configurable time-frame for when it listens for keystrokes.

    Disclaimer: I have 30 years of doing battle with PC’s that I’m sifting through here, so some of that’s bound to be old advice.


  • Some of these kinds of things […] are actually intended for people who are partially or wholly physically disabled.

    After I learned this, I immediately felt bad for poking fun at these kinds of products. Normalizing their use by the non-disabled, and depicting the products likewise on TV, makes it that much more acceptable to the intended audience. If this wasn’t the case, it might sting a bit as a gift for someone that really needs it. And then there’s the economy of scale effect you mention; nobody would get a Snuggy if they cost $100 each.


  • I am not a lawyer.

    I did some rapid web searches to dig in here because I was curious about how this might be abused. It turns out that is better worded than it would at first appear. I think the trick here is it depends on whose definition of “depressant, stimulant, narcotic” you go by.

    For example, the CDC considers caffeine a stimulant, but the FDA says it’s a “food additive”. So there’s no FDA schedule for caffeine, which means you also can’t get a prescription for caffeine pills, nor pay for them through insurance. But that also means it’s arguably not a drug or “stimulant” under this definition.

    Meanwhile, alcohol labeling is handled by the FDA, but it looks like everything about the substance itself falls under the ATF (it’s in the name after all). The ATF seems to take great care to not categorize alcohol as a depressant and goes out of its way to never call alcohol a “drug” (example). And, as it turns out, (Federally) alcohol is not a controlled substance.




  • Jumping on the “don’t use flushable wipes” bandwagon. Seriously, they can screw your home’s plumbing up.

    For anyone doubting this is even possible for a product that is mass-marketed and available everywhere, look back a little over a decade. For a hot minute we had scrubs and soaps that had tiny little plastic beads in suspension to provide some grit. All those microbeads got flushed down the drain and wound up who knows where. That is until it was made illegal.


  • I’ll preface this by saying this shady shit gets all my hate.

    It’s tempting to opt for telematics/black box insurance because of the initial cheaper prices but the privacy violations and potential downsides make it not worth it.

    The overall problem here is that human psychology tends to frame this difference as a loss not a gain. Given the choice, people will see the cheaper option as the baseline, and then ask “can I afford to pay more for privacy?” instead of affirming “my privacy is not worth this discount.”

    Also, those of us that have paid for insurance without such a “discount”, are likely keenly aware of the difference. For new drivers, from now to here on out, the lack of past experience presents a new baseline where this awfulness is normalized. Competition between insurance providers won’t help us here since the “privacy free” option is still profitable and is enticing for new customers (read: younger, poorer). So it’ll take some kind of law, collective action, or government intervention to make this go away.

    Have fun fighting with your insurance to get them to remove anything from your record. […] If I had spyware insurance they would’ve dinged me for it.

    I think this is the bigger problem. If someone has the data an insurance company wants, you probably agreed to an EULA or signed something that makes their ownership, and its sale, legal. With the “yeah go ahead and use my data” option on the table, the machinery to do this without your knowledge is already in place. All the insurance provider has to do is buy the data from someone else. When the price is right, 1st party spyware isn’t required at all.


  • Never understood the appeal honestly.

    Same here. I spent about 30 minutes trying to play one (DoTA I think?) and figured out:

    • Each hero has a zillion upgrades and abilities
    • Each hero is basically on their own roguelite style upgrade path
    • The game has a dozen or more such heroes
    • icons and text too small to play on livingroom TV, controller play out of the question
    • at mercy of online match-making algorithm if I’m not in a league/clan/whatever


    From this I could deduce:

    • There’s no way in hell this is perfectly balanced - too many variables, it may as well be MttG
    • Going to take 20 or more hours to dial in a personal play style
    • Going to take probably 50-100 to develop a play style that can adapt to most situations
    • League play will probably kick my ass, requiring another 50-100 hours of practice/training
    • Causal play is out; likely can’t pick up and play immediately due to lobby, variable match times


    I’m not knocking the genre as a whole, but this is not for me. It’s too far outside my typical mode of gaming and is likely to just frustrate me more than anything else. I’m familiar with hard to play online games like Quake, TF2, and even Soldat. But those have small power systems that, even with gross imbalances, were still playable because there were usually only one or two scenarios you couldn’t overcome. Adding more on every axis just sounds like a wildly unbalanced system where the skill curve isn’t steep enough, costing a lot of time invested in bad strategies before you figure it all out.