DarrinBrunner
@DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world
- Comment on Majority of Americans Think Trump Military Plots Have ‘Gone Too Far’ 3 days ago:
The majority of Americans didn’t vote for Trump. Such declarations mean nothing.
- Comment on You mean it's not? 3 days ago:
It probably is? I mean, there are so many damn fonts.
- Comment on Digg launches its new Reddit rival to the public 3 days ago:
I left Digg 15 years ago. I’m surprised it’s still around.
I’ve only heard about it since in this way, some quick announcement about the “new Digg”. And, then, nothing.
Reddit banned me for saying “see a Nazi, punch a Nazi.” There’s no way I’m going to bother with Digg, that’s the past, and I have no doubt they’d sooner than later be the same as Reddit in that regard.
- Comment on Amazon is forcibly upgrading Prime members to Alexa Plus, and users are not happy 3 days ago:
I dumped Amazon ten years ago, when I got scammed by a third party seller and Amazon did fuck-all to help. Amazon doesn’t extend the same protections to third party sellers, I suppose that’s in the TOS, which I’m sure everyone has read carefully.
I could go into detail how the scam worked, and probably still does work. The jist is, shippers don’t provide full addresses to Amazon, only the zip code. So, if the scammer shows that they have a shipping receipt for a zip code, Amazon just trusts that the box was shipped to the correct address. Turns out they shipped an empty box to a local restaurant–it took a lot of calls to find that out.
- Comment on Amazon is forcibly upgrading Prime members to Alexa Plus, and users are not happy 3 days ago:
Maybe I’m now in the minority, but I never bought a spy speaker, or bought spy cameras to attach to my house, inside or out.
My suggestion is, if you have them, get rid of them. But, I’m probably just an old man yelling at clouds, and am safe to ignore. Carry on.
- Comment on What a great idea 3 days ago:
They’re very common in the U.S., too, in the past six years.
At first, I was against them, because of fewer people being employed, and I’d be “working for free”, but the much shorter wait convinced me. Also, Walmart employs a bunch of people to do the pick-up shopping, so, I think the number of people employed has stayed the same. Although, I suspect they pay the pickers less.
I refuse to use the pick-up shopping because half of my shopping is fresh vegetables, and I don’t trust anyone else to choose them for me. Yeah, I want two onions, but I want big ones, and ones with no mold or bruises. Food is expensive, and I don’t want to pay for poor quality. Yeah, I want a bunch of celery, but if the organic looks better than the normal, I might pay a bit extra for that this time. Paid pickers can’t make those choices for me.
- Comment on What a great idea 3 days ago:
I’m one of those old people. We know what’s up.
- Comment on What a great idea 3 days ago:
I don’t. Not for shopping. I had to wait outside in line, in the freezing cold for an hour, when my state decided to limit the number of customers allowed in at one time. Sucked balls. That didn’t last long, fortunately.
- Comment on What a great idea 3 days ago:
I do my grocery shopping at about 7AM on Sunday. I cruise through the aisles, slowing down to grab what I want. A full week’s shopping done in under 30 minutes, including checkout. I’m sure it also helps that I choose not to live in a big city.
I suppose if I had an online following of any kind, I might shop at a time that gave me something to complain about.
- Comment on Heave-ho! 4 days ago:
This is it, down to the bow:
- Comment on Good luck 4 days ago:
Generally speaking, we should not be eating hot food from plastic containers. I certainly don’t.
Ideally, we wouldn’t use plastic containers for food at all, but that ship sailed 60 years ago. Also, even if you are able to avoid buying food in plastic containers, the machines used to process the food, even just to transport fresh vegetables along a conveyor line, shed plastic from gears and bushings, etc. But, that’s micro plastic, not the chemicals that leech from the plastic much more readily when it’s heated.
Here’s a study about micro plastic in olive oil. TL;DR: there’s no difference in the amount of micro plastic in olive oil between oil sold in glass containers compared to oil sold in plastic containers.
- Comment on Good luck 4 days ago:
My daily driver is a basic white, glazed mug I’ve had for nearly 30 years. I probably got it at Goodwill for 25 cents. It has no clever saying on it, because I’d get tired of that in a week.
(No, it’s not leeching lead into my coffee.)
- Comment on RAM may be abominably expensive, but hey, at least SSD prices are also exploding 5 days ago:
I long for the days when one could download RAM.
- Comment on We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages 5 days ago:
I had a co-worker who took a few semesters of Spanish in high school, she got all As, and then went on a class trip to Mexico. At first, she couldn’t understand a thing, but she said as she listened and tried, “something snapped” and suddenly she got it.
- Comment on We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages 5 days ago:
Most people who take a language in school don’t keep at it. We’re just doing it because it’s required, and to pass the class. I took French in high school. The only person I’ve ever met who spoke French fluently was my teacher. I really should have taken Spanish, but I wanted to be “different”.
In Europe, also, because of the open borders, and being packed so close together, people encounter foreign languages far more frequently. It makes sense they’d all want to, and benefit from, knowing multiple languages. And, they’d have more opportunities to practice. Not many Japanese speak a second language, compared to Europeans, for instance.
- Comment on Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards - X’s deepfake porn feature clearly violates app store guidelines. Why won’t Apple and Google pull it? 6 days ago:
Because, it’s NEVER been about protecting kids, or other vulnerable people. The filthy rich don’t give one flying fuck about vulnerable people.
- Comment on Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document 1 week ago:
My atheist parents had me circumcised because at the time it was recommended for “health reasons”, and was common to do so at the time.
I suppose this means I was a victim of child abuse?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending circumcision, and my son isn’t for what that’s worth. But, They need to be careful how they word this law.
- Comment on 'Worst in Show' CES products include AI refrigerators, AI companions and AI doorbells 1 week ago:
I just installed a new doorbell button, the little light burned out in my old one.
I don’t have a “security” camera. As far as I can tell, all they do is provide a memento of the crime after the fact, and prompt my neighbors to worry about “suspicious” people outside walking. They seem to do the opposite of making people feel more secure. They seem to raise anxiety.
- Comment on 'Worst in Show' CES products include AI refrigerators, AI companions and AI doorbells 1 week ago:
Screaming is well and good to build public opinion against this stupidity, but all the CEOs in their towers will heed is no sales.
We need to make it uncool to like or tolerate AI bullshit in consumer products.
- Comment on genius 1 week ago:
See, what no one in here realizes is that the plan was to use this as a master to cast an aluminum one. Aluminium is a metal, and metal is strong. I’m sure everything will be fine.
- Comment on Logitech caused its mice to freak out by not renewing a certificate 1 week ago:
JFC, it’s a fucking mouse. Do they need to ruin everything, like fucking EVERYTHING?!
- Comment on Law enforcement can now use Flock’s software to directly request doorbell videos from Ring users 1 week ago:
If you think they’ll use it to find the package thief, you’re fooling yourself.
All these cameras do is give you a memento of the theft or other event. They do nothing to stop crime, and cops DGAF about looking at your video:
“Yep, that’s a video of a guy stealing your truck from your driveway. Prolly should’a put it in the garage.”
- Comment on My apartment building gives me free water but I pay for electricity. What if I run the faucet nonstop and rig up a hydro turbine in my bathtub to generate my power from it? 1 week ago:
Here ya go:
- Comment on Video Game Websites in the early 00s 1 week ago:
I’d almost totally forgotten about webrings. Thanks for posting this for that reason if no other, it has a big list of webrings to explore.
- Comment on Give me some good ones 1 week ago:
“I could agree with you, but then we’d both be wrong.”
A former co-worker got me with this one many years ago. I laughed out loud. I’ve never forgotten it.
- Comment on 3.5" floppy disks were peak tactile feedback in storage: easy to stick in, drives had a button to immediately eject them, big enough to get labels, thin enough that stacks didn't take too much space 1 week ago:
Certainly better than the 5 1/4" floppies they replaced.
But, installing big programs, like Photoshop, off a stack of 30 or 40 disks was a hassle. Imagine Photoshop fitting in 40 MB, tho.
- Comment on I am so scared of nuclear war, how do I cope with it? 1 week ago:
The billionaires don’t want all-out nuclear war, what they want is world domination by a few, over a literal slave class mix of humans and robots.
However, in case of imminent attack in an outbreak of a nuclear WWIII, the best plan is to drive toward the biggest city in your region, or stay put if you currently live in a big city.
I’ll take instant vaporization over whatever the survivors are going to need to deal with in the aftermath.
- Comment on Speed test pits six generations of Windows against each other — Windows 11 placed dead last across most benchmarks, 8.1 emerges as unexpected winner in this unscientific comparison 1 week ago:
I agree, 8.1 with Classic Shell was good. I also liked Windows Media Center.
I hung on through 10, but last year, as I learned more about Win 11, I decided to finally bite the bullet and figure how to switch to Linux.
- Comment on Mom with the real questions 1 week ago:
I have a big bread baker’s Hoosier cabinet in my kitchen. I’m not a baker, I’ve never had any use for it.
Very similar to this one, with a flour sifter, and slide-out porcelain steel table:
My older sister shipped it to me without asking me, and then told me it was coming about two days before it arrived. Our mom had just died, and my sister didn’t have room for it, but she “wanted it to stay in the family.”
It is a beautiful piece, solid oak, probably over 100 years old. So, I kept it. It just sits there, taking up space in my barely-big-enough kitchen. I expect when I die, my only son will sell it. I should probably just sell it now, my sister would hate me for it, though.
- Comment on Microsoft kills official way to activate windows without internet 2 weeks ago:
I’ve been perfectly happy on Mint since switching over a year ago. The few games I play run just fine (FO4, FOLON, Portal, and such), and the other apps work too, GIMP, Inkscape, LibreOffice, Blender, etc.
In spite of the recent post about which Linux distro to recommend, and seeing many no longer recommend Mint, I’ll stick with Mint. It just works.
