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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • I wouldn’t worry about the battery. Any potential harm comes in before it gets to the battery, and there’s likely a DC-DC converter before that anyway.

    The first thing to validate is the listed specs. If your laptop expects 12v (usually listed on a sticker on the device), don’t connect a 19v brick. Same for center-positive/center-negative. USB-C bypasses all of that, since it negotiates a matching spec before charging.

    The second thing is how well it adheres to the specs it lists. This isn’t something that you can really test yourself. It would require a lot of specialized equipment and skills, since the answer can change in different circumstances. It might work fine for a while, but eventually deliver rich, chunky volts. This will (likely) fry the motherboard, and maybe more than that. USB-C does NOT bypass this. Some of the worst chargers on the market are USB-C.

    The only realistic way to avoid the second is to get a quality charger from a trustworthy source. Many will only recommend OEM, but you also have to be careful about counterfeits on eBay or scAmazon. You can use aftermarket, but only if it’s a trustworthy brand like Anker.










  • Someone else suggested that it’s a common regional term, and (apparently) not my region. I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt that it’s common and nonsexual in her area. However, around here I would’ve avoided terms and phrases associated with porn/fetish.

    As for how it could’ve been written, she had already very clearly established her gender, so she could’ve just said student. But that can also be reasonably inferred from her age, and isn’t really relevant to the rest of the point she was making. The entire clause could’ve been dropped. Start the sentence with “Like most teenagers”.

    I presume her goal was to highlight her age and lack of obligations. That would make sense given the following details of her and her peers spending so much time on these apps. The more natural flow (again, my local dialect) would be “15-year-old high-school student”, or possibly “15-year-old girl in high school”. But these are still unnecessary.






  • There is a ratio, which may be a new experience if you’ve only used public trackers. It’s not really a big deal if you have some patience, though.

    TL (as do most ratio trackers) gives you bonus points for your time seeding, even if you have done nothing more than make it available. You don’t have to upload even a single byte unless someone wants it, and you’ll still get points. These points can be used to buy upload credit.

    If you simply keep seeding everything you download, and buy credits as needed, you’ll quickly have more ratio than you could ever hope to burn. No need to spend money or anything.

    As for limited content, it’s a general tracker. You probably have niche interests, so you would be better suited on a more specific tracker. I’ve almost never had issues finding anything mainstream, although quality can be a crapshoot. That’s the main reason I usually use other trackers.


  • It’s not entirely true that you can’t identify him from that Facebook account. It’s just really, really hard.

    Facebook almost certainly knows who he is. Like specifically, name and all. Their data mining is VERY extensive, and he likely has other accounts.

    Anyway, with a lawyer’s help, you can (possibly) get a court order for Facebook to reveal what they have on the guy. They certainly have things like IP addresses and timestamps, but they also probably have name, other associated accounts, viewing history across the web (from those “share with Facebook” icons/links, even if untouched), and hundreds or thousands of additional pages.

    Is it worthwhile? Probably not. But it can be done.




  • This is part of a series frequently known as “Microsoft interview” questions. The most famous one is, “Why is a manhole cover round?” They are partially meant to gauge your problem-solving abilities, but more importantly see how you react to a question you did not (and could not) prepare for. They’ve since fallen out of fashion, because it was always a terrible way to gauge roles like software developers.


  • During US prohibition, there were “grape bricks” with warnings not to dissolve in water and place in a cupboard for 20 days, because then it would turn into wine.

    A simple negation probably won’t cut it legally (the bricks had a significant legal purpose), but you could probably word it in a similar way. For instance, “While VPNs are effective at anonymizing yourself during piracy, they can also protect your privacy from data mining ad companies”.

    At some point, you’ll have to conspicuously avoid the topic and let people infer. Remember when high-speed connections were advertised as being great to “download movie trailers”?