wjrii
@wjrii@lemmy.world
- Comment on The after party 1 day ago:
Are we not all middle aged nerds who partied like eight times in our 20s and these days now have a couple of IPAs at our combined LUG/D&D meetings? 🤣
- Comment on The after party 1 day ago:
Live your truth, OP, but statistically and demographically speaking, this may be the least relatable shitpost on lemmy, like, ever.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 day ago:
I find that I want some politics, and the politics that leaks into News and elsewhere is just about right. I un-subbed from anything specifically with the word politics in it and I mostly avoid .ml, and generally I find it very pleasant around here.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 day ago:
I have mine, and frankly I still use it to read about college football and Star Wars and check AskHistorians and post about keyboards. For shitposting and actually engaging with humans – yes, many of whom are my political speed or even further left – I really prefer it here. I “left” during the Mod Rebellion and APIpocalypse when it kind of became clear things were not going to be getting better. If it dies, it dies. We got beans over here.
- Comment on The only way to be 1 day ago:
Plenty of clever boys at well-funded public schools have an ancap phase. Most of them grow out of it.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
- Comment on The only way to be 1 day ago:
Nah bro! You see, I’ll be invested in the corporations so their success is my success, and furthermore the market forces that definitely won’t be manipulated by the most powerful players will ensure that things are so much better, and the illegitimate use of violence has never occurred in the history of private enterprise ever, and they’re also making plenty more land and natural resources so duplicating efforts is not problematic, and separate will be as equal as people can afford, and we’re definitely also all starting from a place of utter fairness! Like, if anything I’m starting from behind! My allowance is only 100 bucks a week and Eddy down the street makes 200 with his job at McDonald’s!!!
- Comment on The crossbow 😭 2 weeks ago:
Looks to be a late-15th century prayer book, likely illuminated by Robinet Testard and owned by the Count of Angoulême.
- Comment on You can only use one for the rest of your life, which you choosing? 2 weeks ago:
Everybody is on the right track that Torx or Robertson are by far the best driver heads, but y’all are not even looking at the threads and shanks. Lots to unpack here. If you are allowed an angle grinder or die grinder, then going longer might be better. Hardwoods don’t like fine-pitched threads at all, and while sheet metal screws can work in a lot of wood products it’s not ideal. Then, can you countersink, or are you going to be stuck the rest of your life with screw heads standing proud of the workpiece?
This is some serious shit, you guys, and should not be reduced “Robertson 4 LYF!” We need a couple of committees and some use-case analyses and some brainstorming on workarounds with our inevitable compromise pick. It’s gonna be exhausting!!!
- Comment on Why is the NFL draft day so "special"? 2 weeks ago:
There’s constant running commentary and speculation, and biographical segments, and sometimes a little drama when surprising things happen, or expected things don’t, and a large group of people simply care enough that they want to know as soon as a pick happens, though how organic that the growth of that group has been is certainly open for debate.
- Comment on Why is the NFL draft day so "special"? 2 weeks ago:
So it’s basically a combination of everything that everyone else has said.
- NFL is by far the most popular sport in the country, but it also only has 17 regular season games (versus 82ish for NHL and NBA, 40ish for MLS, and 162 for MLB), and the entire season is spread over only 6-7 months of the calendar year, versus 8-10 for the others. There is an appetite for any content at all that materially affects the most watched sport.
- College Football itself is probably the fourth most popular sports “league” in the country, though its organization and economics are WAY different (for now) than the normal pro leagues’. There’s huge overlap in general of course, but the Draft brings all of the fans together as CFB fans see where the top players will move.
- Going back to number 1, the NFL and media companies, being what they are, noticed the gap in the sporting calendar (after March Madness, before NBA and NHL playoffs, very early in the MLB season, MLS well… (LOL, I love MLS and it’s a miracle it’s stable but it’s still not an important “TV sport” in this country). They also noticed that a certain segment of die-hards have been watching the draft for 30 years, and they saw an opportunity to tap that dormant interest for months of “segments” and a big day of ratings and revenue, so of course they did.
- More recently, seeing that their hype efforts were working, they’ve moved it out of an auditorium near League HQ and made it a travelling road show, goosing local attention and furthering the image that it’s an event.
As to why all that worked, I like the posts that talk about the optimism and renewal that the draft represents. The NFL is unique in how it handles player development, in that it mostly doesn’t because it has an independently-popular lower league that will do it for free. Since that lower league is effectively the sole source of players, and since the NFL is an American-style sporting cartel, the Draft becomes the single biggest infusion of talent that a team will see in a given year, some of it ready to contribute on the field right away, and the teams that need the talent the most usually have the best picks and therefore a real chance to improve quickly, though the same bad management that gets teams in a bad place will often squander the hope of improvement.
For those follow European football (soccer, not the niche gridiron leagues over there), imagine a single day that combines the anxiety of a promotion playoff final (though with deferred results) with the excitement of the summer transfer window (let’s consider NFL free agency the equivalent of the winter window).
- Comment on Call now, and we will give you a second can F R E E! 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on What programs do you wish a good FOSS alternative existed, but doesn't or most of the FOSS alternatives simply aren't good? 3 weeks ago:
FreeCAD still crashes for me a lot, across versions and distros and different PCs. I just don’t know what the deal is; maybe bad luck.
Then, its kernel, being the only truly viable open source one, is understandable but also has some limitations commercial tools don’t, and I’m just talking about super basic stuff like giving up on a fillet or chamfer as soon as two vertices touch.
The workflow is much improved, but I still get frustrated trying to use it for my stupid keyboard and other 3D printing projects. I have Alibre Design on my Windows partition, and with the improvements in gaming (seriously OP, it’s WAY better), CAD is the main reason I even bothered to keep my old SSD on Win.
There are probably things I do at work in MS Office that Libre would have a hard time with, but frankly I just don’t care. :-)
- Comment on Do you use your blinker in a car? 4 weeks ago:
I mean, we don’t really notice the BMW drivers who are acting sensibly, and it’s probably the vast majority. But that being said, outside Germany they attract a certain enthusiast demographic that will include a statistically relevant minority who think every trip outside the neighborhood is Gran Turismo.
- Comment on Do you use your blinker in a car? 4 weeks ago:
I don’t drive a BMW, so yes, I do use my blinker.
- Comment on France to ban students from keeping smartphones in schools 4 weeks ago:
I do sometimes think there is a bit of hand-wringing that happens where people glom onto the most visible sign of changing times and blame it for things that probably aren’t as different as the adults think, but by the same token most schools in richer countries have screens everywhere with school-related interconnectivity and even tools that are not unlike social media.
I see very little downside here, even if it may not result in some magic rebirth of older forms of social interaction. It seems like the major benefit from the French pilot programs was “improved atmosphere,” in which case it’s still better than nothing. Having a period when kids are learning to deal with small-group dynamics is not a bad thing, and neither is taking “dealing with phone bullshit” off the teachers’ plates.
- Comment on France to ban students from keeping smartphones in schools 4 weeks ago:
I mean… fine? France always does things kind of top-down and there’s certainly no reason you have to have your phone readily available, and plenty of evidence it’s good to be away from it.
It’s not like they need to get to their phones to tell their parents there’s an active shooter on campus. 😐
- Comment on It's about that time 4 weeks ago:
Ahh, the rare and prized Ancho Banana.
- Comment on How to easily add a backup internet connection to your home office - and why you should, A failover internet connection is a good idea if you work from home - and it's not complicated to set up. 5 weeks ago:
Agreed. Can we have this article taken off the internet? I don’t want it accessible from any of my connections.
- Submitted 1 month ago to [deleted] | 4 comments
- Comment on Had enough of my boring job. Now free lancing doing sculptures 1 month ago:
From Springfield.
- Comment on I'm looking to buy something like a reverse wheelbarrow, what do I call that? 2 months ago:
Aerocart from Worx looks a little gimmicky, but might be closer to your needs.
If budget is no object, then maybe a Polymule at USD1000+.
Inbetween, there’s something like a “Foldit Cart”.
Try searches for folding wheelbarrow, folding garden cart, or folding “vermont” cart.
- Comment on Looks like Instagram wants some of Discord's market. 2 months ago:
…Revolt is the FOSS alternate for discord right?
Yes, or for a more limited feature set, Matrix.
- Comment on You knew it was coming: Google begins testing AI-only search results | This version of Google won't show you the 10 blue links at all—Gemini completely takes over the results in AI Mode 2 months ago:
I recently had a dream that involved a suburb of Green Bay, Wisconsin. I have never been to Green Bay Wisconsin. I know it as a rather small city that is the home to the Green Bay Packers, an administratively anachronistic NFL team that draws a large plurality of its fan base from the greater Milwaukee area. Off the top of my head, I don’t know if Green Bay has “suburbs” in the usual American sense at all.
I googled the name of this completely nonexistent community, along with the words “Green Bay,” and the AI very confidently hallucinated it into existence, describing it as a lovely shopping and residential area just over the bridge of the same name.
- Comment on Does 'attempted murder' require a viable method? 2 months ago:
Everybody here is kinda right, but there are other factors to consider, and the net result is that it’s usually not a case worth bringing.
The “Impossibility” defense says that in most cases, the “factual” impossibility of committing the crime is not a defense, but taking an action that is not a crime is a defense, and if raised must be proved by the prosecution. Even with “Factual,” the line gets muddy (the article cites a person whose appeal won after they were convicted of poaching after shooting a stuffed deer." Many jurisdictions have a “reasonable person” standard for that as well, where if the act is the sort of thing that might normally be expected to result in a crime (the most infamous case is two US military personnel who thought they were raping a passed out woman, but really she had died from a heart attack) then you get no benefit, but if no reasonable person would believe that their action would do anything, then it’s more likely to succeed. To answer one of your questions, being told the button sets off a bomb would be more problematic for our hypothetical asshole than being told it “just kills” somebody that would be a bigger problem than a Death Note notebook, but it’s not a simple yes/no.
So anyway, this then raises some questions. Was this button setup convincing? Who did the convincing? Why did they do so? Other defenses might arise out of these conditions: e.g. they were told that pushing the button would save a bunch of other people, trolley-problem style, or it was the police egging them on and telling them they needed to for XYZ good reason, and many of them will turn on the defendant’s thoughts, so in any jurisdiction where they are not obligated to testify (e.g. the United States), our very interesting defendant simply doesn’t, and their attorney argues that there’s reasonable doubt they thought the button would actually do anything.
Add on top of this prosecutorial discretion. A prosecutor knows all of this, and knows this is a loser of a case, so apart from truly bonkers hypothetical, they will not bring it.
TL;DR: By the letter of the law, very probably yes, but no one will ever get convicted for it.
- Comment on Downtown Doug Brown » The gooey rubber that’s slowly ruining old hard drives 2 months ago:
You say “tragic data apocalypse.”
I say, “free high quality neodymium magnets!”
- Comment on That damnable radical left! 2 months ago:
- Submitted 2 months ago to conservative@lemmy.world | 29 comments
- Comment on Why do i see so many americans obsessed with the concept of "this is a thing that [Ethnicity] does" 2 months ago:
That tension continues in the USA between recognizing and celebrating cultural differences, and becoming a melting pot of many cultures becoming one.
This is the crux. It’s a uniquely American take on how you deal with a country that has seen dozens of waves of immigration (starting with the illegal immigration of colonization) from many different places over a fairly short timeframe. American culture is kind of like a fork, with a unified base that has integrated but very distinct tines (bear with me… combining the “melting pot” and “salad bowl” tropes is HARD!). At their best, memes and jokes like that can be an invitation to genuine dialogue. At their worst… well… not that. A lot depends on who is putting them out and with what agenda in mind.
Statistically, most European countries seem to be estimated at somewhere between 80%-90% “white,” likely to mean “of exclusively European extraction beyond any sort of family memory,” and I wager the vast majority of those people are from the core borders or frontiers that might well have shifted in the last few centuries. America hasn’t had that sort of percentage for over 40 years, and even then the white population was more “assorted crackers.” Even back into that era, most areas will have had at least two and likely three to five statistically significant populations that would have been visually and culturally distinct (not that this in ANY way implies that these groups were treated equally by the power structures… OMG far, far, FAR from it). These people don’t have to give up their distinctiveness to remain American, and when considered in good faith, particularly by those who mostly live in the base of the fork, the sorts of things you’re describing can be more celebratory than divisive.
I’m not going to suggest Americans are particularly good at multiculturalism (another understatement), but we’ve been at it a long time and specific practices and trends have grown up around it. The balancing act of racial and ethnic awareness without descending into judgment is probably one of the more complicated aspects of navigating American culture, regardless of whether you were born to it or looking on from the outside. So much so, in fact, that certain small-minded people think we should just snap the tines off the fork and pretend the nub was always a spoon.
- Comment on Fanhome Reveals Next Star Trek Starship Models, Including the USS Dauntless from Star Trek: Prodigy 2 months ago:
I really enjoyed Prodigy, but good lord the Dauntless is fugly.
- Comment on PSA: Some of y'all are overly afraid of scorpions 2 months ago:
Yes, but that is less fun for my dad-joke purposes.
