It’s 2025 and there are still way too many people who utterly refuse to understand that heterosexuality is a choice. Just kidding.

I’m disappointed to hear that that about Josh’s Frogs. I’m a fan of the company overall and had great experience with them, but I have never bought live food or live animals from them. So, I’m a little surprised to hear that they’re shipping roaches and crickets this way. Otherwise, they’re my go to for a lot of other hobby related stuff, so I hope they have made some improvements on that front.

For clarity, I imagine that the species of roach you ordered were likely something like dubias.

For anybody that might see this, most of the roach species used as feeders (or even kept as “pets”) are not associated with diseases in humans and would be highly unlikely to become an infestation issue in most domestic situations outside of fully tropical climates (and even then it would be unlikely). These are critters that need stable, warm temperatures and fairly high humidity, as well as appropriate food sources and surprisingly clean environments just to keep them alive in cultivation. Your home or the post office (in North America) is unlikely to be conducive.

Of all the critters that people feed live “bugs” (i.e “bugs”) to, snakes are one of the least likely.

Food items like live crickets are usually fed to animals like lizards (probably most common example), frogs and other amphibians, fish, birds, predatory invertebrates (like spiders and scorpions), etc.

In the case of pinhead crickets, those are usually purchased (in large quantities) by people breeding insect eating species since the young are too small for anything larger than the youngest and tiniest food items or for people with a large collection of animals like poison dart frogs that need very small, fairly fragile food items.

As for the debate of local pick-up versus online orders, there are pros and cons to each, and different people have different situations and needs. At the end of the day, in my part of the world, pretty much all the places I’d go to pick up crickets locally are just getting them shipped in from large scale cricket breeders anyway, so if you need a bulk order of 1000+, it’s likely cheaper and easier just to order them online and have them shipped. Also important to note, these aren’t just random crickets someone collected in their back yard, these are a specific cultivated species that’s been grown in relatively sanitary conditions so that they aren’t carrying harmful parasites and disease or covered in dangerous pesticides and chemicals.

I don’t even have ADHD but this photo is very, very relatable. At this very moment, I should be cleaning but I’d rather be playing vidja games, and yet here I am looking at Lemmy and writing a comment.

Same way we test everything else on animals. It all starts with the mice.

My rescue pooch is sadly approaching end of life, as best I can tell. So, I’ll be going through this process again some day in the not to distant future.

I’m not in New York, but I will say that when I was last looking to adopt, there were aspects of it that were definitely off putting and demoralizing. Some of the rescues had ridiculous requirements that made me wonder if they were actually trying to place their dogs in a home. One of the most egregious that I semi-recall: It was a breed-specific rescue (ex: Norwich terrier), but most of the dogs they were trying to adopt out were mixes. They required you to have owned that breed of dog before. You had to be in a long term relationship (i.e. no single people). You had to agree to let them make a home inspection every 6 months. They had to be added to the list of approved contacts at the pet’s vet. They could take the dog back at any time and for any reason. Etc.

I have a small number of games in my collection that I know for a fact that I have not played them at all. To be fair, 2 of the games are demos, the other is free-to-play IIRC but that’s completely irrelevant.

My actual point is, none of the games in my Steam library that I for sure have never played show “PLAY TIME 0 minutes” nor “LAST PLAYED Never.”

Is this an old UI thing, is that a made up playtime summary, or is the UI different on different platforms?

The body builder with claws and a skull for a face is the character, Skeletor from He-Man for those of you not aware. Or maybe you recognize him from She-Ra? Was Skeletor in She-Ra? I don’t know I never watched that show.

If that’s how you feel “Garfruleld” then I’m leaving you and I’m going to got live with my new beauchat, Handkerchief.

Several fossils from the congress of the USA were probably around to witness the development of these revolutionary tools.

Well, some people say men are basically just dogs and I guess if some of us can lick our own assholes, that’s further proof.

I use VS Code and GitHub Co-pilot and develop in a variety of different languages and frameworks. I’ve got lots of experience with some, but I’m less knowledgeable on others.

So, having the AI assist with languages I am very familiar with is basically a way to save time and preserve my mental energy. For languages and frameworks I’m less experienced with, it speeds things up because I’m not having to constantly search how-tos and forums for guidance. And for languages/frameworks I have limited or no experience with, it can be a helpful learning tool that speeds up how long it takes to get ramped up.

With this set-up, if I start writing a line of code and then pause for a moment, co-pilot kicks in and tries to autocomplete that line, sometimes even suggests the entire block of code. It’s really good at recognizing simple patterns and common boilerplate stuff. It’s less good at figuring out more complex stuff, though.

However, I find that if I start out by writing a comment that explains what I’m trying to accomplish, and to some degree how to accomplish it before I start writing one of those more complex blocks/lines, the AI has a much higher success rate in returning helpful, functioning code. So, basically yes, I write the comment to describe code I haven’t written, and I’ll let the AI take over from there.

This works for code, raw database queries, configuration files, and even for writing tests. I’m not an expert at building out Docker configurations for local development or configuring auto-deployment on whatever random system is being used for a project, but I can often get those things up and running just by describing in comments what I need and what I’m trying to accomplish.

The VS Code co-pilot extension also has some context menu items that let you ask questions and/or ask for suggestions, which comes in handy for some things, but for me, typing out my intentions in comments and then letting the auto-complete kick in as I’m starting a line of code is faster, more efficient, and seems to work better.

Granted, co-pilot also likes to try to auto-complete comments, so that’s sometimes funny just to read what it “thinks” I’m trying to do. And most of the time, I do remove my comments that were specifically to guide co-pilot on what I wanted it to do if they’re super redundant. And, at the end of the day, not everything co-pilot suggests is production-worthy, functional, nor does what I actually described. In fact, a lot of it is not, so you should expect to go back and fine tune things at a minimum. It’s just that overall, it’s good enough that even with all the supervision and revisions I have to make, it’s still a net positive, for now.

I know some folks are joking about and dunking on this, but in modern times, I have justification. Call me lazy, but I have found myself writing out these comments and then letting the AI take over to at least give me a sketch of an implementation. Works reasonably well and saves me a lot of time and effort. Mostly I don’t bother to remove them, though I usually edit them a bit.

On the other hand, there are factions within my colleagues who steadfastly insist that commenting is unnecessary and to some degree even potentially harmful, and that if you feel the need to comment your code, it means your code should be improved so that it’s obvious what it is doing without the need for comments.

Maybe there’s a presentation slide up there detailing the concept of a plan?

My credit card offers virtual credit card numbers AND the ability to auto-lock the virtual numbers so you can set a date and after that the number will not accept new charges.

I make sure to use a virtual card number for everything subscription based, then I immediately set the auto-lock feature to expire in a few days (give the initial charge time to clear but still plenty of time before the subscription would otherwise renew).

Some subscription services make it super tough to cancel. This method fixes that issue for the most part. Some subscription services terminate immediately once you cancel the subscription, even if you still have “time left” otherwise. This way you don’t really have to formally unsubscribe. It’s easy peasy pumpkin breezy as the common folk like to say.

When someone asks a thing like this on Lemmy, look up the same thread on Reddit (guaranteed to find it was recently also posted there) and copy-pasta some of the top posts. Guaranteed worthless internet up arrows.

I found it interesting that Trump claims if he wins the election, he’ll have the Russia / Ukraine conflict resolved BEFORE he even takes office. I’m paraphrasing there, but that’s how I interpreted what he stated.

If that’s the case, then it seems like he could choose to end the conflict at any time. Why doesn’t he just end it now? Save countless lives. Minimize injuries. Prevent suffering. Save money. I’m sure that’d change some voters’ minds if he did it. Might even win him the election.

Yes, this is a rhetorical question. I have no doubt that he can’t actually end it without basically giving in entirely to Russia.

I mean, I’m not a veterinarian and my words should not be taken as scientifically valid, but I feel like way too many stories like this are just … veering way too far into anthropomorphism. I mean, I’m fully aware that many mammals are way smarter than we give credit to and in some ways more human than many people are willing to admit, but this just seems a bit incredulous.

I’ve never thought to try this, granted I rarely ever drink soda.

It’s interesting to see multiple folks saying that Coca-cola and Pepsi taste the same. In my part of the world, there is (or was) a noticeable difference between the 2. I could easily discern the difference between them even in a blind taste test. “Coke” is noticeably more bitter and has more complex flavor. Pepsi is sweeter with sweeter flavor tones.

Y tho?