sailingbythelee

@sailingbythelee@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024's launch has been marred by long load times, server issues and now it has overwhelmingly negative reviews⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Haha, yes, I was being cheeky. :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024's launch has been marred by long load times, server issues and now it has overwhelmingly negative reviews⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  DCS. Easy peasy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If trump appointments someone that doesn't last as long as Anthony Scaramucci do we measure that in fractional moochies or do we abandon the mooch system because it failed us?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I enjoy listening to Katty Kay and the Mooch. However, I think we hit peak Mooch just before election day.

  I am still favour of using the Mooch system for measuring the length of appointments, just for the sake of nostalgia. We need to standardize it, though. Is it 11 days or 10?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Twitch regrets blocked Israel accounts⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  What are you even talking about?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Twitch regrets blocked Israel accounts⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s really inappropriate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If a planet was completely covered in water, wouldn't it all be freshwater?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  According to NOAA, the ocean was originally not very salty but became saltier over time as rivers eroded the land and delivered the dissolved minerals to the ocean. At the same time, salts crystallize out of the water and are deposited on the ocean floor. This input and output are now more or less balanced so the ocean is not getting saltier. Apparently, this salt cycle involves about 4 billion tons of new dissolved salts being added to the ocean each year and about the same amount being deposited from the water to the ocean bottom.

  So, why aren’t rivers salty? Apparently, it is because rivers carry only a small amount of salt and are kept fresh by constant rainfall, whereas the ocean has been accumulating salt for the last 4 billion years.

  Lakes that don’t drain to the ocean, like the Dead Sea, can get salty over time, just like the ocean.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Twitch regrets blocked Israel accounts⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s true, but my point was that the commenter was implying that Twitch was making some kind of political statement about Israel vs. Palestine, which it probably wasn’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Twitch regrets blocked Israel accounts⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You know there is no country called Palestine, right? Twitch means that they blocked new accounts from the country of Israel, which includes the territories that may some day be called Palestine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Smart TVs take snapshots of what you watch multiple times per second⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Samsung and LG are both South Korean.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Musk’s X blocks links to JD Vance dossier and suspends journalist who posted it⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Is JD Vance required to where the same outfit as Trump, except with a shorter, less girthy tie?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How can you make sure the ashes you get after a loved one dies is actually theirs?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it depends entirely on the integrity of the cremator. I have a good friend who does pet cremations. He cremated one of my pets and told me that he had a hell of a hard time getting the bag of ashes into the box I gave him. I laughed and asked him why he didn’t just pour some out so the bag would fit more easily. Who would know? Who would care if there were a few grams missing? Especially if the reason was that the client-provided box was too small. But he was genuinely shocked and said he would never do that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Youtube has fully blocked Invidious⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not really. The term “content creator” is corporate speak. Google’s ad-based business model has a binary classification: content and ads. It’s not an inaccurate term, but using it implicitly endorses the corporation’s binary world view.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do all there former Republican leaders endorsing Harris do her any good?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is the conclusion I’ve come to as well. I used to be frustrated at how stupid Trump supporters are. I would wonder how anyone could be so gullible, cynical, racist, or mysogynist as to vote for Trump. How does he get away with, even prosper, saying such crazy and harmful things? But I’ve come to the conclusion that Trump voters are just extremely unhappy. A vote for Trump is a big fuck-you to the establishment. Both parties were basically run by a modern day aristocracy. The Kennedys, the Clintons, and the Bushes are the most obvious dynasties, but they also have many, many surrogates. More importantly, they defined a kind of cursus honorum for becoming president, including all of the right schools, fraternities, clubs, contacts, donors, etc that you have to follow to move up through the various offices to get to the top. The Tea Party disrupted the Republican aristocracy, but then Trump came along and just obliterated it.

  Now, on the one hand, we can probably all get behind the idea that breaking up the aristocratic hold on political parties is a good thing. However, history has also shown that supporting populist demagogues who specialize in chaos and hateful rhetoric often leads to a bad time for the country and the people.

  These last five years are the first time in my life that I’m genuinely worried for the stability of the republic. It has been said many times by people who have lived through it that people never think civil war will actually happen until it does. And then they look back and the signs were obvious. Whoever actually wins, when half of the population is voting for a hateful chaos candidate, that’s a big red flag.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Despite tech-savvy reputation, Gen Z falls behind in keyboard typing skills⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That is a good analogy. I think phones and tablets being app-centric has really handicapped Zoomers in some ways. As Gen X, the first thing we learned about computers was the file system. That gave us a map of the computer. It also made it clear that the operating system, the applications running on the operating, and the data you generated and stored on the operating system were all different things. With app-centric devices and cloud-storage, people aren’t exposed to that paradigm so much.

  The new paradigm is more account-centric. You have a Microsoft account or a Google account or an Apple account and that’s the ecosystem you work within.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Despite tech-savvy reputation, Gen Z falls behind in keyboard typing skills⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I had a girl drop out of my University class because she couldn’t figure out what a “file” was or how to “email” it to me. She just kept trying to share her Apple storage with me. Really sad. It’s hard to help someone who gets to university without even grasping the basic nature of a file system.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Studios are cracking down on some of the internet’s most popular pirating sites⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Interesting. I’ve got a fast internet connection and a server running 24/7 with Transmission and 9 TB of hard drive space. I run it behind Gluetun/NordVPN to avoid those copyright strikes. My setup has been extremely successful so far. I only delete torrents once they hit a ratio of 1.5 at the moment, though I could extend that if necessary. I don’t use cryptocurrency, though, and don’t intend to start. I assume my setup would be somewhat valuable to a private tracker. Do you have any recommendations?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Studios are cracking down on some of the internet’s most popular pirating sites⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I thought I read that private trackers are hard to sign up to. Or that you have to prove yourself somehow and people get stressed about maintaining their ratio. Is that true? If so, that doesn’t sound fun.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Under Meredith Whittaker, Signal Is Out to Prove Surveillance Capitalism Wrong⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, the article makes the point that Signal needs to compete for talent with Silicon Valley. I get that. And we’ve all heard about the nearly unfathomable amounts of money that tech companies throw around. When you break it down to individual salaries, though, and see that even normal people in normal jobs are making a million dollars a year between salary and stock… well, I think it really exposes the spectacular wealth inequality that we have allowed to fester. I mean, sure, shelter costs may be high in Silicon Valley, but the cost of other goods remain about the same. A $50,000 truck that an average person in Nebraska might have to save for years to afford is barely a rounding error for folks making a million a year. I’m no economist, but it does seem like there are consequences for this kind of ever-growing wealth inequality.

  It is also absurd on its face for a multi-millionaire developer to place a “Donate Now” button in an app and talk about being a non-profit to tug at the heart strings of people who make one-tenth of what the developers are making. It’s feels like Scrooge asking Tiny Tim for a donation.

  Anyway, I don’t blame the developers for this absurd situation, and I do appreciate Signal, and Meredith is clearly a cool person who is fighting the good fight against big tech surveillance. But every once in a while an article like this reminds me how deeply fucked up the world is. It seems we are approaching pre-French Revolution levels of economic disparity, and maybe it helps explain why so many working class people are pissed off.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Under Meredith Whittaker, Signal Is Out to Prove Surveillance Capitalism Wrong⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is a very rude question, but on this subject of being lean, I looked up your 990 and you pay yourself less than some of your engineers.

  Yes, and our goal is to pay people as close to Silicon Valley’s salaries as possible, so we can recruit very senior people, knowing that we don’t have equity to offer them. We pay engineers very well. [Leans in performatively toward the phone recording the interview.] If anyone’s looking for a job, we pay very, very well.

  So, I googled their tax filing out of curiosity. It’s true that Meredith pays herself much less than her engineers, which is great. What I was rather shocked to see is that they pay their software developers enormous salaries. They’re listing developers making over $400,000 per year, with their VP making over $660,000 per year. Now, I’m all for the value-creators making more money than the CEO. I just had no idea that software developers make that kind of coin. I was thinking of donating to Signal, but I’m kind of weirded out by those astronomical salaries.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Recommendation engine: Downvote any game you've heard of before⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve had this game on my wishlist for years. Maybe time to take another look.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are so many leaders in tech evil?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Years ago, I was hanging out with a manager of finance and asking a few basic questions about finance. After a little while, i guess she got tired of the conversation because she handed me her old finance textbook.

  Anyway, I was mostly interested in the foundational ideas of finance, not the details, so I went away and started reading the introduction. It turns out that the introduction was very short, no more than two pages. It was extremely well-written, simple, and to the point.

  The foundational idea of modern finance, according to this standard textbook, is very simple and highly reductionist: the one and only goal of finance is to maximize shareholder value, and share prices are the ultimate way that goal is measured. I’ve never seen a whole discipline reduced to such stark and prosaic terms with absolutely no attempt to articulate ethics or justify it in relation to some wider public good.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Chick-fil-A is reportedly launching a streaming service for some reason⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is so true. My own daughters, who I raised from birth, and who I tried to inculcate with good sense…yes, even they…they tolerate ads. I know, I know. It is hard to believe. But I have personally witnessed them watching Youtube ads with apparent interest. That was a hard day.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Was Elvis Presley a pedo?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you may be wrong. Wikipedia tells me that:

  “In 1880, the ages of consent were set at 10 or 12 in most states, with the exception of Delaware where it was 7.”

  …wikipedia.org/…/Ages_of_consent_in_the_United_St…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Was Elvis Presley a pedo?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, but she was his cousin so…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do any "thickening" products actually work to prevent hair loss/thinning?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You, sir, are a poet. And now we all know it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨can you smoke bacteria out of meat boiling it?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  As everyone else has said, this is a risky practice due to heat-tolerant bacterial toxins. Here is an article about it, if you want to do some more reading:

  blog.foodsafety.ca/what-are-bacterial-toxins

  The reason the meat smells better after you partially cook it is that you are killing the spoilage bacteria coating the outer surface and washing away or destroying their smelly byproducts. Oddly enough, those aren’t the really dangerous bacteria. The ones that cause serious food poisoning mostly do not stink.

  Also, cutting the larger chunk of meat up into smaller pieces is a very bad idea. You are just spreading the surface contamination into the muscle. Also, using water as a medium actually limits the upper temperature you can achieve. If you really want to save a piece of meat while minimizing your risk, do this instead:

  1. Leave the cut of meat intact.
  2. Put a high-heat vegetable oil like canola or sunflower oil into a steel frying pan.
  3. Heat it until the oil smokes just a little. The smoke point of sunflower oil is 248 Celsius, whereas water boils at 100 Celsius, so you can easily see why this method is more effective than boiling.
  4. Pick up the piece of meat with two pairs of tongs and place it into the hot pan. Rotate it around until a brown crust forms on the outside. This is called searing.
  5. Remove the meat from the pan and let it cool.
  6. With a clean sharp knife, cut off the seared meat at the surface and discard.

  Note that you should not attempt this with poultry, only whole, non-tenderized cuts of beef or pork. This, by the way, is how restaurants prepare beef for serving raw dishes like steak tartar. Or at least that’s how they are supposed to prepare it from a food safety perspective.

  Note also that this doesn’t guarantee that the meat is safe, but raw, whole, non-tenderized cuts of meat are usually only contaminated on the outer surface. Obviously it is safer to avoid the risk altogether, but if you must try to save the meat, this method is far, far better than your current practice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are jabronis a necessity for a social media platform to be successful?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a story, possibly apocryphal, about the Israeli Cabinet, after the surprise attack that started the Yom Kippur War, always requiring a “tenth man”. The theory is that if nine people agree, then it is the duty of the “tenth man” to disagree, no matter what and no matter how much the other members pressure them. They are considered irritating but necessary to avoid dangerous group think.

  I’m not sure I completely understand what you mean by a jabroni. Do you think they are the “tenth man” of our communities?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NSA Claims It Can’t Watch a Tape It Recorded in the 1980s⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “Jesus H. Christ, how is this gonna help us against the Russkies, Larry? I ain’t spendin’ one red cent on this ancient history nerd bullshit. We got commies to catch! Or, uh, whatever the Russkies are nowadays. Throw that FOI shit in the fuckit bucket, goddammit.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fallout London's Robot Speaker of the House Played by UK's Actual Former Speaker of the House⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I also enjoyed watching Mr. Bercow’s antics. It is also interesting to note that he was found guilty in 2022 of quite serious bullying charges against House of Commons staff. It is unfortunate that he did not reserve his acid, if entertaining, tongue for deserving politicians alone, but rather used his sharp wit to belittle staff as well. Not cool.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NSA Claims It Can’t Watch a Tape It Recorded in the 1980s⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It is true that they could resurrect the tapes if they had a compelling reason to do so. Denying the request indicates that they don’t believe the reason to be sufficiently compelling to warrant the extra expenditure of resources. That is subtley different from “we don’t want to”, which implies a level of capriciousness.

  Government departments get FOI requests all the time and they take resources to fulfill. FOI is not intended as a way to have taxpayers fund people’s pet projects. That’s why FOI law doesn’t require your government to spend (even more) money to acquire technology they don’t have or need for anything other than the FOI request itself. Rather, something that requires that kind of extra effort and expenditure should be submitted as a research request, normally with its own funding.