AFKBRBChocolate
@AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.world
Yet another refugee who washed up on the shore after the great Reddit disaster of 2023
- Comment on are there bots that downvote every comment users have? 1 day ago:
I remember a long time ago noticing, while sorting by new, that posts in some communities had downvotes within seconds of being posted, so yes I think there are bots.
- Comment on Bill Gates Bought His Daughter A $16 Million Horse Farm As A Graduation Gift — But Ex-Wife Melinda Says The Kids Were Raised Very 'Middle Class' 3 days ago:
Few things in life are pure binary, and that’s especially true of humans themselves. My take on Gates is that he was a smart but cutthroat businessman who did a number of things that were at least somewhat unethical, and became one of the richest people in the world. Then he got older and started thinking about his life and his legacy. He has been giving away huge sums of money to really worthwhile causes, like trying to eradicate malaria. He seems pretty sincere in his lobbying for increased taxes for the rich.
Does his philanthropy now erase his unscrupulous behavior when he was young? Not to me, but I do believe he’s genuine in wanting to make the world s better place and putting his riches to good use.
- Comment on Bill Gates Bought His Daughter A $16 Million Horse Farm As A Graduation Gift — But Ex-Wife Melinda Says The Kids Were Raised Very 'Middle Class' 4 days ago:
Something Bill Gates actually agrees with. He’s one of the super rich who has been outspoken about the rich needing to pay more taxes.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Normally: awfully darned funny. When sleep deprived: hardly funny at all.
- Comment on Old-school Creative Sound Blaster cards repaired and demoed 1 week ago:
I had a Sound Blaster 16 in my computer from about that year. Had totally forgotten that sound cards were almost as prevalent as video cards.
- Comment on POV: You're too shy to tell the medical staff that you just woke up during surgery. 2 weeks ago:
My wife had a procedure under general - one where they had her legs pulled away back after she was out. She woke up during it to the point where she could hear them talking, but she couldn’t say anything. She told the doctor at the follow-up that she heard them talking and he said lots of people think that, but it’s just hallucinations from the drugs. She said, “One of the things you talked about was your kid’s soccer game,” and he got an “Oh shit” expression and moved the conversation to something else.
Why did he do that, you might ask? Because another thing they did was make fun of my wife in the position she was in. Extremely unprofessional, and she could have made a stink about it, but she just indirectly let him know she heard it.
- Comment on How do you answer the question "What's new with you?" when nothing happens in your life? 2 weeks ago:
It’s not an absolute rule, but it’s true in the vast majority of cases. The coloring is on the X chromosome, and males usually have only one, but some males with have an extra X chromosome (XXY) and those can be calico. It’s rare.
- Comment on It's no longer easy to play April Fool's jokes on Americans because their reality is so chaotic that it's no longer easy to tell what is real, funny, fake or sad. 3 weeks ago:
It feels like there’s few pranks these days that don’t end up being cruel. We have enough horrifyingly outrageous things in the news, that is the prank is trying to make us think something horrible happened that didn’t, we sure don’t need that. On the other hand, if it’s trying to make us think that something good happened, but it didn’t, then that’s a really perverse cruelty.
- Comment on How do I clean this mess? 3 weeks ago:
Not for PLA
- Comment on Is there a good way to buy chrome lettering in the same font as the brand's original lettering on the back of the car? 4 weeks ago:
No expert, but it seems unlikely. My understanding is that big brands generally use custom fonts, so you’re unlikely to find generic lettering that matches. But maybe you can find something close enough?
- Comment on Multiple Tesla vehicles were set on fire in Las Vegas and Kansas City 5 weeks ago:
Not sure why some people are disagreeing - it for sure fits the definition. I’m not exactly sad about it - Musk is helping to rip apart the country and I have a hard time blaming people who feel that helping to rip apart one of his companies is about all they can do - but committing arson to further an ideology is terrorism.
- Comment on How did you get your job? 1 month ago:
No, a NASA and DOD contractor. Worked on some neat stuff over the years, including the electrical power system for the space station. I ended up managing the software engineering group, and really liked that - very smart people.
- Comment on How did you get your job? 1 month ago:
Old guy checking in. I was a computer science major, graduating in 1985. My goal at the time was to go into computer animation (note that Toy story, the first full length computer animated movie, wasn’t released until ten years later). But there was a big computer animated project that was canceled or tabled just before my last semester, so the market was flooded with out of work animators and I decided I’d better do something different. I was getting married, and I needed a job.
I had good grades, but I didn’t think there was much that made my resume stand out from my classmates, each of whom was making 100+ copies of theirs and applying to every software job they could find. So instead, I asked everyone I knew if they knew anyone who worked at a place that hired software people, and asked if they could get me a name of a hiring manager. I got seven or eight of those, and I sent each of them a letter with my resume, mentioning who pointed me their direction. Out of that I got three interviews and two job offers. My first job ended up being writing control software for the space shuttle main engines, and I stayed at the company almost 40 years. I just retired in January.
- Comment on Having a baby? Use this one weird trick! 1 month ago:
Didn’t they just elect a fairly liberal president?
- Comment on Patients with long Covid regain sense of smell and taste with pioneering surgery 1 month ago:
My wife lost her sense of taste and smell because of COVID, but just for a week or so. I hadn’t considered how soul crushing that is. Food just becomes whatever the texture is. I remember her popping a Reese’s peanut butter cup into her mouth, then spitting it out. She said it was like having a lump of shortening in her mouth - all she tasted was the oil. She’s a daily coffee drinker, but coffee was just gross to her. She was getting pretty depressed before it came back.
- Comment on What happens if I eat a box of paper clips before an MRI? 1 month ago:
They wouldn’t do the MRI because they’d be ripped through your body
- Comment on Is there a less stinky way to cook broccoli? 1 month ago:
Honestly, broccoli is wonderful microwaved. Put it in a covered dish with just a little water. For a couple servings, I do on high like 2.5 minutes. Easy to adjust the time to get it just the way you want it. You can’t get it crispy that way, but it’s basically like perfectly steamed.
- Comment on Can I still consider myself a “young woman” after I turn 24? I turn 24 in March (next month). 1 month ago:
Thanks! Even though we’re ten years apart, I think we’re together on the tail end of the Lemmy age bell curve. It’s nice to have company.
- Comment on Can I still consider myself a “young woman” after I turn 24? I turn 24 in March (next month). 1 month ago:
It’s all relative. I’m 62 - from my perspective you’ve only recently gone from being a girl to being a woman, so for sure a young woman. Of course in ten years I’ll be 72 and you’ll be 34, and I’d still call you a young woman.
- Comment on What 5 Megabytes of Computer Data Looked Like in 1966 ~ Vintage Everyday 2 months ago:
I remember our first personal computer had 40 columns on the screen, but we ended up getting an 80 column graphics card for it.
I taught myself basic, but the first language I took in college was fortran, and it was on cards. A bit of an aberration: they had moved on to somewhat more modern equipment, but the lab was being upgraded, so they reverted you the card system for a semester temporarily. It was out of date, but not wildly so at the time.
- Comment on What 5 Megabytes of Computer Data Looked Like in 1966 ~ Vintage Everyday 2 months ago:
Well, it might or not be a line of code - depends a lot on the language. It’s 80 bytes, and a byte is one character. You could have continuation cards if your line was more than 80. That wasn’t ever needed for assembly language, rarely for Fortran, but very common for COBOL.
- Comment on What 5 Megabytes of Computer Data Looked Like in 1966 ~ Vintage Everyday 2 months ago:
Seems about right. One card had 80 columns, a byte for each one, so 5,000,000 bytes divided by 80 would be 62,500 cards.
- Comment on Giving the neighbors a laugh 2 months ago:
According to translate, the side of the van says “Home delivery service, we always come.”
Does that pun actually work in both English and German?
- Comment on eggs in japan 2 months ago:
The protective barrier is true, but you’re either making assumptions about the rest or you’ve been misinformed. There really aren’t major issues in any of the developed countries today, but the washing and refrigeration is still the safest with the longest shelf life. It isn’t the condition the chickens are kept in - there are countries where it’s much, much worse than in the US - it’s just that chickens very easily carry salmonella.
Many years ago, more countries washed, but there were some escapes, especially one from Australia with the eggs exported to the UK, and it got a bad name, so some countries dropped it, but the US figured out how to make it work consistently. Most countries require chickens to be vaccinated, but the US hasn’t needed to because of the washing and refrigeration.
Lots of good info online. Here’s a USDA article on it, and here’s a higher level NPR piece.
- Comment on eggs in japan 2 months ago:
It’s just two different strategies for avoiding salmonella. The US method has worked very well for a very long time. So much so that other countries did adopt it, at least for a time, but it requires an infrastructure that can keep the eggs refrigerated through from processing to consumer, which isn’t trivial.
- Comment on xkcd #3033: Origami Black Hole 3 months ago:
Huh, I’ve always thought that a black hole required a lot of mass, not just a lot of density. Apparently not true?
- Comment on When they tell you "oh of course it's safe" they are lying 3 months ago:
I understand why it looks that way from good reaction, but there was nothing my dad wouldn’t have done for my mom. I’ve never seen two people who loved each other more completely, trusted each other more thoroughly, or gave a bigger priority to each other’s happiness. But apparently they had an awful lot of sex.
- Comment on What is the origin of aliens looking like humans? Why and when did it become the norm? 3 months ago:
Several people have mentioned budgetary restrictions, which is a huge part, but there are practical considerations, regardless of budget. Even with a big budget, it’s only recently that they’ve been able to make convincing non-humanoid aliens that interact with other actors (mostly through CGI). Earlier, there were good examples of movie monsters or aliens that were done with stop motion or puppets, but not in a way that they shared the screen with the human actors in a meaningful way. Can you imagine if, say, the Vulcans on the original Trek series were wildly non-human - how silly it would have looked? The technology just wasn’t there to pull it off.
Also, most aliens, even in books, are some variation of earth life. They’re reptile-people, big spiders, intelligent bugs, or whatever. I think that’s mostly because it’s pretty hard to envision something truly novel/new. So lots of books, movies, and shows come up with some rationale for why everything in the galaxy looks like some kind of earth life to excuse that.
- Comment on What is the origin of aliens looking like humans? Why and when did it become the norm? 3 months ago:
I’d say that’s more of the excuse/rationale for it. The underlying reason is hot much not expensive it would have been to do otherwise.
- Comment on When they tell you "oh of course it's safe" they are lying 3 months ago:
Sharing an overly personal story because I think it’s funny.
When my first marriage was swirling the drain, and my wife and I hadn’t had sex for a number of months, I was visiting my parents, who were in their late 60s at the time. I noticed that my mom kept getting up to go to the bathroom, so I asked my dad if she was okay and he said she had a yeast infection that was bothering her and they didn’t know what to do about it. I told him that those were generally pretty easy, she can get a cream that will take care of it in about a week. Not much else to it other than avoid sex for a couple weeks.
My dad looked incredulous. He said “A couple WEEKS? Like two full weeks? No sex at all for TWO WEEKS? If we don’t do that, will it go away on its own?” My dad, pushing 70, was having a hard time coming to grips with the thought of going two weeks without sex, while I was in my 20s and hadn’t had sex for four or five months.
I remember driving home and thinking, “Well there’s something I didn’t need to think about.”