skuzz
@skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
- Comment on Liquid Death Quietly Adds Stevia to Tea Drinks 19 hours ago:
I’ve quite literally drank Flint water. Not for a humble brag (far from it) but I really hate that they became some kind of trope. They have needed help for decades and could have recovered faster if America ever cared about people. Good people there. Shitty America management. It’s like they keep them down for the Internet points.
As for municipal water. Stop by Altoona, Iowa sometime and drink their water. It’s just so terrible. Ground water full of stuff they can’t filter at scale. I don’t hate them for it, it’s what they can suck out of the ground, for maybe a few more years before it becomes brine.
It is hard to produce drinking water that is safe, and also tastes good. Is my global point.
Personal filters can improve that. Otherwise, buying water just leads us to a human future that is by far the worst reality we could ever impose upon ourselves.
- Comment on Liquid Death Quietly Adds Stevia to Tea Drinks 1 day ago:
Have drank tap water across the US for decades. Some municipalities are crappier than others, but a fridge filter tank takes care of those places.
- Comment on Liquid Death Quietly Adds Stevia to Tea Drinks 4 days ago:
How about drinking water from the tap? Much cheaper, not wasting cans, and healthy. If you live in a community with bad tap water, write a letter to your local water board, and buy a filtration tank you can put in your fridge.
If you must really have flavor, buy some of the powdered dehydrated lime or orange powder packets.
- Comment on Gemini wont talk about Bernie Sanders 3 weeks ago:
Have you seen the web lately?
- Comment on Amazon Artificially Discounting Items $0.01 Below the Free Shipping Limit 3 weeks ago:
They likely have an algo running to do this just like how they offer random coupons to entice you to buy items in your cart, and all the other tricks around shipping manipulation.
- Comment on "I know the perfect place for the ESP button! Right in front of the drivers knee!" 3 weeks ago:
Airbag will likely severely damage you at the distance that puts your face at among other potential reproductive issues.
- Comment on "Please fill out this survey about how we didn't hire you." 3 weeks ago:
Had a friend’s dead parent receive a text from the ambulance service asking how they did.
KPM surveys need to go away forever.
- Comment on is Chat-GPT refusing this image? 4 weeks ago:
Some of the models have access to the Internet, and it can process information very fast. As long as it is neutral, it can be “trusted” as far as, it is trying. So you can send it off on a journey to scrape web pages for you and speed a search 30fold. If you’ve used it long enough to know the difference between the hallucinations and mistakes, it can accelerate your work, your learning, your research. You know it’s just regurgitating the Internet and you lens appropriately. You can ask about disparate products and have a table generated to fix the disparate values in their specs. You can have it search large datasets and find errors without having to scroll for 30 minutes. It can regurgitate general learning (that you cross-reference to be sure) and accelerate said learning.
Yes, there is no intelligence to it (neural nets are digital neurons, per se, but that doesn’t mean intelligence), but it is a query-response system that has advantages versus using the current enshittified Internet directly.
Now that it is obviously biased and tainted, no form of it can be trusted. That’s the difference.
- Comment on If you shop by unit prices, double check the math! 4 weeks ago:
www.walmart.ca/en/ip/…/6000197838147
It’s palm oil with some peanuts.
- Comment on If you shop by unit prices, double check the math! 4 weeks ago:
Walmart unit price is completely broken in general. They also have glitches in the “did you forget to add?” page where it will show an item as a sale price, but when you add it, you’ll see total price increase by sale price, and a few seconds later, a second price increase to the normal price. Re-checking the cart will show the item as not on sale. There are some other real weird glitches with that e-commerce platform. A rat’s nest of bugs that might not be intentionally nefarious, but also could be.
- Comment on is Chat-GPT refusing this image? 4 weeks ago:
ChatGPT is already speaking highly of the EO policy statements being put into place, starting on inauguration day. It can no longer be trusted.
- Comment on Steam has the best UI 5 weeks ago:
Well, how else would the energy vampire recharge? Huh? Random Internet person?! HOW?!¿¡
- Comment on We got several more inches of snow last night after getting over seven a few days ago. I went to my local newspaper's website to find out if there was anything I should know. This was their top story. 5 weeks ago:
Corollary: Indiana has no mountains. (Snowstorms in the midwest can trap you in the middle of BFE fairly easily on flat ground, however, with the wet sticky snow they tend to have.)
- Comment on We got several more inches of snow last night after getting over seven a few days ago. I went to my local newspaper's website to find out if there was anything I should know. This was their top story. 5 weeks ago:
Local communications being reduced to social media posts is the sign to just dissolve the community, it’s over.
- Comment on We got several more inches of snow last night after getting over seven a few days ago. I went to my local newspaper's website to find out if there was anything I should know. This was their top story. 5 weeks ago:
Did you know that your newspaper is owned by an Alabama retirement fund?
They own CNHI, which owns that paper.
- Comment on If you save, we will charge you more 1 month ago:
And public utilities commissions just exist so people can think they have a voice while their meetings are just a big circlejerk.
Municipal power is so the way to go, much like everything else, especially because home town service will be run by home town people that care. You think PG&E or Verizon or Comcast cares about your town? Nope.
- Comment on 25 hours of snow. 1 month ago:
That region of Indiana is close enough to the Great Lakes that they do affect the weather there.
- Comment on FedEx has absolutely no clue what 'economy' means. 2 months ago:
Did you check at a FedEx store to see if they had other unlisted rates? Web sites often cater to the lazy for the profits. That being said, I seem to recall an overnight FedEx document envelope across the US costing around $60, so it might not have any advantage.
- Comment on I live in the green part 2 months ago:
21% of the state is also of Hispanic or Latino descent and growing, but yeah, predominantly white.
- Comment on Bug bounty denied? Hmmm ... OK, let's see ... 4 months ago:
Great write-up and great find! You’ll find companies will often try to weasel out of actually honoring ethical programs more than not, but that doesn’t mean give up! If nothing else, the learning will lead to long term education and basically forever employment in various fields.
- Comment on Life saving hurricane info locked behind a paywall 4 months ago:
It’s shitfunny because this is a perfect opportunity for apps like this to play into Capitalism and succeed twentyfold.
Open up the app to everyone for free during the hurricane, remove that after hurricane. So many people will go:
- “OMG this app is useful, I’m paying”
- “OMG that company is so kind, I’m paying”
- “OMG I didn’t even know about this but people spread the word, I’m paying!”
So many opportunities for longer-term profits missed by idiocy.
- Comment on Life saving hurricane info locked behind a paywall 4 months ago:
We know the best ways to suck, even our storms!
- Comment on if you're not going to let me do this microsoft then let me turn off auto restart all together. 5 months ago:
I was trying to think of a mental image that was internet-safe to imply something like you’re stuck in deep mud that is pulling your boots off but at least you survived. Or less internet-safe, you’re trying to get home and have no ride and for some reason the weather turned to a storm of actual shit and you’re walking home with shit raining down upon you but you must survive.
It definitely wasn’t scientifically accurate.
- Comment on if you're not going to let me do this microsoft then let me turn off auto restart all together. 5 months ago:
Hey, friend. Definitely not saying Windows is better.
That being said, in this example, a UI open dialog that will blindly consume any file fed into it with behavior bad enough to crush the entire computer into absolute uselessness is… let’s just say, not something one would want to run into on a bad day just trying to deal with life stuff.
Now, if one were piping /dev/urandom into the framebuffer expecting to load Firefox, that’s another matter.
- Comment on if you're not going to let me do this microsoft then let me turn off auto restart all together. 5 months ago:
Hey, good to know. It was one app that was only available as a Snap. Will look for alternatives.
- Comment on My new m.2 ssd 5 months ago:
And jumpers and terminators and make sure your SCSI IDs don’t conflict!
- Comment on My new m.2 ssd 5 months ago:
No diss. I read that slot comment above you and went, “yep, yep, yep, makes sense. Man our standards are often dumb.”
Laughed with joy at your comment, because I totally get how foreign this shit is to so many people. It’s like if I walked up to a building engineer asking how they know that iron beam is safe for another 50 years via their skills and I’d just be like “…do what now?”
- Comment on if you're not going to let me do this microsoft then let me turn off auto restart all together. 5 months ago:
You know. It’s interesting. I’ve been trying out Debian 12 with KDE Plasma. It actually has been a joy and feels like what Windows 11 should have grown into, had Microsoft actually been designing software with the customer in mind.
…but then there have been times where things so easily critically break until you fix them. Don’t get me wrong. I’ll go mess with kernel code if I have to, so I’m comfortable, but… I just want my computer to work. Windows, for all its shittiness, still keeps working through it like a slow cargo train pushing through a park piled in millions of pancakes.
I had one event the other day where I was installing a Snap app for the first time. Decided rather than installing the Snap package manager because I wanted to avoid Canonical if possible, I’d just manually put it in /opt. Figured out how to edit the KDE “start” menu to add the app using the included GUI tool. Wanted to use the app’s icon. The snap app had an icon embedded in it that Dolphin file manager recognized and displayed.
So I went, “ok, sometimes applications can parse out images from binary files. I’ve seen this work for decades,” so I tell the menu editor to ingest the snap binary for the icon, to see if it will scrape the icon. No icon showed up, so I found a a svg online and assigned that to the icon.
Then I went and saved and launched another application.
GUI slowly started not working and eventually the entire OS locked, even the alt text consoles would not load. Ctrl+alt+backspace was dead, caps lock died, which was when I knew, “he’s dead, Jim.”
Tried rebooting, tried launching that program again, (bearing in mind, not the program I manually added to the “start” menu) and every time the whole OS freezes up. Tried launching apps in different order, launching from command line, etc. When the one app launched that wasn’t the one I created a launcher icon for, same thing. Freeze.
I go remove the start menu link, hoping that, what I assumed was part of Plasma was trying to load this binary as an icon even though it should have checked the file, recognized it as “no I can’t parse this,” and done nothing or displayed an error or parsed it and showed the icon. Especially after I assigned it another image. I just hoped whatever screwed up would be connected to the code inside that app launcher icon config.
Shit you not, the computer became rock solid stable again after that and one more reboot. Hasn’t glitches since.
It’s shit like that that makes me proooobably give up on this experiment and end up on a commercial OS like MacOS again despite the cost and downward trend they are also suffering in a lack of innovative energy.
- Comment on Please pick a password starting with ad and ending with min 5 months ago:
- Comment on Useless Calendar Widget 5 months ago:
Having left the platform for 5 years and migrated to Android, been considering migrating back due to Android not showing a promising future.
Playing with iOS again to see if I can tolerate it, it feels like everything is giant font giant icon Duplo Brick UI. Which could very well be why they’re so terrible at space management. Do they realize some people have eyesight? That widget has a terrible amount of wasted space, but then so does most of the OS.