I’d buy controlling share of all three companies that own Pokemon and change absolutely nothing except fund Game Freak to hire more software talent and give them enough time for an actual development cycle worth a damn.

It’s not clear at all, no.

Is this proposal patently ridiculous? Yes. Do I believe there’s at least one legislator in Mississippi who unironically believes in this bill exactly as written, and is playing this completely straight? Considering all that’s happened so far, why not?

Satire doesn’t work when the obvious hyperbolic nonsense is within actual expected behavior of the satirized.

I won’t claim one way or the other that this is or is not satire. I don’t know who this legislator is and I don’t really care. But no, with the whole article you’re pasting everywhere in this thread as my only context clue, I certainly didn’t find enough evidence to be convinced he doesn’t actually believe this.

Security questions don’t care what you put in there. It’s not an exam. It’s basically just an alt password.

I just generate a string of alphanumeric text from my password generator and stuff those in there. If I lose my password vault somehow I’m cooked anyway, so.

I got a 1U rack server for free from a local business that was upgrading their entire fleet. Would’ve been e-waste otherwise, so they were happy to dump it off on me. I was excited to experiment with it.

Until I got it home and found out it was as loud as a vacuum cleaner with all those fans. Oh, god no…

I was living with my parents at the time, and they had a basement I could stick it in where its noise pollution was minimal. I mounted it up to a LackRack.

Since moving out to a 1 bedroom apartment, I haven’t booted it. It’s just a 70 pound coffee table now. :/

For your unhinged pleasure, if you haven’t yet experienced.

I love The Polar Express.

The most widely hated thing about it is the mocap. Not much to say here, I’m just straight-up not bothered by it. I think it looks fine. It’s not incredibly expressive like a stylized animated film could be, but it doesn’t look actively bad to me in any way.

The way the titular express inexplicably gains and loses rolling stock scene by scene and behaves in absurd ways like bending around the mountain are a common punchline. “BuT iT’s A mAgIc TrAiN!!!” doesn’t really solve it for me either. But on a casual viewing it’s mostly inoffensive. A silly curiosity.

Some say the plot of the film spends too much time aimlessly noodling around and throwing in needless filler scenes. Meh. If you ask me that’s where all the meat of the film is. The actual plot of the film has nothing interesting to say. “Kid doesn’t believe in Santa. Magic Christmas hijinks ensue. Kid believes in Santa now. The end.” Riveting. Nah, the so-called “filler” is absolutely the meal here.

The fact that the film literally has five named characters, and the main character isn’t one of them is hilarious. To even get to that number you have to count both the Scrooge puppet and the kid who the elves were monitoring in a single scene as characters, and after that, one of the remaining three is Santa Claus. Just more weight to my point that the story doesn’t matter, lmao.

Say what you will about the animation, but the cinematography is incredible. So many dynamic long-track camera shots from interesting angles. Especially whenever the steam locomotive is on screen. God, steam locomotives are so fucking cool. I don’t even care that it’s full of inaccuracies if you actually look up close. They put a lot of effort into it and that effort shows. It’s quite the treat.

The set design of the North Pole is fantastic. It’s admittedly kinda fucked that it’s modeled after a real world Pullman company town, but I guess it’s appropriate as a joke about the whole Santa’s workshop thing while also incorporating a neat little nod to real life railroad lore. Beyond that, it’s blindingly radiant of all that Victorian-era charm that most of the modern secular Christmas tradition is born from. The serene night snow amidst the rustic red brickwork illuminated by glowing amber gaslamps… augh, it’s so aggressively cozy!

All the pneumatic and other steampunk-adjacent elf tech is a treat as well. The film is certainly no slouch in breathing its own unique spin of whimsy into Santa’s toy factory. It’s not the most whimsical out there, but it’s definitely putting in work.

Alan Silvestri’s score is phenomenal. It’s all delightfully extra. Every single song in the film that’s an original composition is a banger and every song that isn’t an original composition for the film is part of that time-tested canon of hits from the 50s and 60s. I think a lot of people are fed up sick of the latter but, I dunno, I grew up listening to them on my Now That’s What I Call Christmas CD, and to me their sound is synonymous with that warm, nostalgic holiday cheer I get from the season. Even if I don’t get around to actually watching the movie, you know damn well I’m putting The Polar Express’s soundtrack in my December shuffle.

Genuine S tier Christmas film. Well worth every single fault.

I think the phrasing they wanted was “The person with the least disincentive to do the ethical thing”.

These people aren’t inherently more ethical. They simply have the fewest barriers standing in the way of turning it into action.

I used to own one of these SpongeBob lamps…

Technically all you need is a DNS server.

No computer knows where <whatever.tld> is located, unless that route is hard-coded in a host file somewhere. It always has to ask a DNS server for that information. If that DNS server doesn’t know, it will probably try asking some other DNS server, and so on up a chain. Eventually, it reaches a master DNS server that either has the answer on-hand somewhere in a database, or it says, “lmao, that doesn’t exist”. All the DNS servers and your PC down the chain take that answer. They might memorize it for a little while and hand it out to anyone who asks them, but after a while they’ll ask their way up the chain again to see if the answer has changed since the last time they asked.

In order to “create” a TLD, all you have to do is make a DNS server that doesn’t ask up the chain. Just pre-program the list of valid domains yourself. You can make them anything you want. You can even “steal” existing domains and make them point to anywhere you want. Nothing is stopping you. Your DNS server will confidently report its pre-programmed answers to anyone who asks.

The catch is that any Internet-enabled device that you want to be able to use your fancy new custom domains needs to be configured to ask your DNS server in particular. People would have to manually set your DNS server as their master server to ask, or they’d have to set it to ask some other DNS server that is itself pointed through some chain up to your DNS server. This is an explicitly opt-in system, and getting a significant mass of people to do that voluntarily is practically impossible. But it’s not technically impossible.

The only reason you don’t have to do this manually with every single device you buy is because most devices either come from the manufacturer with a hard-coded list of DNS servers they should trust by default, or a device on the local network whispers in their ear and tells them who the local DNS server is and the device just goes along with it. It’s still technically an opt-in system; devices are simply either already “pre-opted in”, or there’s a system running on your network that auto-opts-in every device that connects, and most devices are designed to accept that auto-opt-in the moment they detect it.

Provided you manage to get the devices you want to listen to your DNS server, you may additionally want to set up a root certificate authority. The thing that makes the little padlock show up in your browser URL box to let you know the connection is secure. Kind of like the DNS server thing, this is also very simple–just run a cheeky little OpenSSL command or two and you can be a root CA in no time–but it suffers from the same “opt-in” problem. You have to manually configure any device you want to use your system to trust your certificates. Most devices just come with a list of “acceptable authorities” built-in, and those defaults are all most people are using. But nothing is stopping you from adding anything you want to that list at any time. You’re just limited to doing it on a device-by-device basis.

At my company, we’ve set up our own custom DNS server and our own root CA. We serve internal websites at a custom TLD we made up, and we sign them with our custom certificates to keep the connections secure. But that only works because we’ve manually configured our workstations to ask our internal DNS server for DNS requests, and we’ve manually configured all the workstations to trust our root certificate authority. A random device that connects to our network that isn’t configured with either of those things will not resolve any of our custom domains, nor will it securely connect to them. It also breaks if the configured devices aren’t on the local company network, since the DNS server isn’t reachable from the public web. Which is fine for us, since those internal websites aren’t reachable on the public web either. But yeah, that’s an example of the limitations.

If you want to create a TLD that will be auto-accepted by everyone who is already running the default chains of trust (which is probably what most people actually mean when they ask something like this), you have to seek out the big daddy at the root of that chain of trust and ask them to poof your TLD into existence for you. That would be ICANN, and they probably won’t do anything like that without a big fat check and a lot of corporate lobbying.

tl;dr - The tech is built in such a way that nothing is stopping you from making your own toy, and anyone can play with your toy without needing to do much. But if you want your TLD to “just work” for everyone in the world without asking every single one of them to explicitly opt-in, which is probably what you actually want, then no, you basically can’t do that.

Rinse aid is what we call a surfactant. It disrupts the surface tension of water, which in turn lessens its ability to cling to surfaces.

You know how when you get a smooth surface of glass or plastic wet, there will be a lot of beads of water that just cling there and don’t go anywhere? Unless they grow big enough to start finally running down the side? That’s surface tension in action. Adding the rinse aid will reduce water’s ability to bead up like this on dishes. Instead, water will be more likely to run down the surface in unbroken sheets instead of beading up.

The primary intent is that more water will simply drip off the dishes due to gravity. This does make dishes come out dryer after a drying cycle, and/or decreases the time the drying cycle takes or the energy it requires to get the same effect. But the main reason wanting water to drip off of dishes is to prevent limescale on them.

When water evaporates, only the water disappears into the air. Anything that was dissolved in that water gets left behind. If your water is hard, that will mean there’s a bunch of calcites that will stay behind as a whitish powder called limescale. So if you wash dishes with hard water, let the rinse water stay beaded up on them, and dry it out via only evaporation, you get some limescale buildup on them in the form of so-called “water spots”.

If instead you add rinse aid, more of the water will drip off the dishes, taking all the dissolved calcites with it. Less water has to evaporate, fewer calcites are left behind on the dishes, so less limescale and fewer water spots. Thus why many brands of the stuff show photos of crystal-clear glass on the box. A water-spotted glass will be cloudy and speckled. Rinse-aided glass will–supposedly, anyway–be clearer.

There’s lots of software out there that is available to use without payment, but is still license restricted in such a way that you are not permitted to redistribute, modify, use for commercial purposes, etc. To many, these rights are the far more important facet of “free” software, above what it costs.

But since the English language has the same word for all of these concepts, we have all these yucks running around with zero-cost but right-restricted software wearing the “FOSS” badge thinking they’re part of the club. So some people add “Libre” to the acronym to explicitly disambiguate.

Oh, I expect they well may, in Wreck-It Ralph 2 fashion. They might make it the target of a quick tongue-in-cheek remark at its own expense, but its mere appearance will nonetheless be an ad for the brand.

I mean, if your goal is to keep the meat experience, then yeah, I get your point.

I think that was indeed very obviously the point. The point of both the comment you were replying to and this lab grown meat idea as a whole.

Does it even count if you’re advertising on your own platform? If I’m able to see the “ads” in the first place, I’m already using it.

I also wouldn’t exactly call a donation drive “advertising” either. They’re not trying to onboard more users to the service, they’re nagging people who already use the service to give them money. Which is itself leaning a bit on the wall of what is and isn’t “free”.

Show me a Wikipedia ad that they paid money for?

Correct. It’s not a scam. Because it’s not free. The sandwich had a price posted, you paid it, you received the product. Valid business model.

What would you think instead if you saw a NYT front page ad taken out for Free Sandwich Mart, the all-you-can-eat totally free sandwich emporium?

Or in this case, a free browser extension that paid to sponsor five thousand YouTube videos that promises to help you pay less money to every store you activate it on at no cost to you?

There is no such thing as a free and benevolent product with an advertising budget.

Not really a show, per se, but

Reaction videos.

Specifically, reactions to consumable media like videos, games, or music. And it needs to be real, like, from some nobody with a webcam pointed at them in their bedroom, not that sterile reality TV tier content mill trash.

There is a dirth of really low quality trash in this genre. It has a well-earned abysmal reputation for being low effort, non-transformative, and all too often not even remotely entertaining. I’m never proud to go looking for it. Frankly I’m more embarrassed about my YouTube search history than my Gelbooru search history.

But even so, watching a recording of someone experiencing something I love for the first time… it’s like, the closest thing you can ever get to experiencing it for the first time again yourself. It’s a piss-poor substitute, but it’s a substitute. If I’m lucky, sometimes they might even give me a new perspective on something due to the unique way they perceive it. If, of course, they bother to actually give insightful commentary at all, which is itself fleetingly rare.

Processing all this trash just to chase a phantom of that feeling, I feel like it’s the YouTube version of huffing paint cans for a high or drinking antifreeze for the buzz.

I do spinach in lieu of lettuce. It’s something.

I presume this is a very well-understood fact, but l also find that a sandwich prepared the day prior and given a night in the fridge before being carted to work is superior to one prepped and eaten immediately or only left in a lunchbox for a handful of hours from that morning. The bread softens up nicely as it passively takes on moisture from the spread and toppings.

it’s a venture capital-backed startup that has been very eager to exit its growth phase and enter its aggressive monetization phase so it can start making its shareholders some money. They’ve already tried a few things that didn’t work, like trying to turn it into a Steam competitor.

The service to date is mostly fine. If you’re like most people who don’t mind exchanging some privacy and control for access to an app that has a nonzero professional UX design budget, it’s pretty fantastic. But the writing has been on the wall for a long time that enshittification is near on the horizon. It’s not a question of if, but how soon.