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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • Part of it is that I made the mistake of implying anyone should EVER read an article rather than just spamming memes and non sequitors based off keywords in the topic title. Why discuss current events when you can instead spam comments that you know will get you some precious gamefaqs karma?

    But mostly it is highlighting how completely internet illiterate people are at this point. EVERYONE hates AI and The Everything Apps and what reddit/twitter/instagram (but never tiktok. tiktok is love. tiktok is life) shows them and so forth. But the moment you suggest that someone can control what they see or seek out information on their own? The (almost) decades of training and conditioning kicks in and people are just unreasonable for implying anything other than what the internet and the totally humans we are talking to shows us.

    Which is especially frustrating when we are already seeing ai/deepfake driven discourse is accomplishing. It really is fucking terrifying that the response was that I am “full of shit” for implying an article about a topic might have an embed of the speech in question but also that there would be blind trust if I just linked to a random youtube.

    I probably should have been nicer and not done the LMGTFY. But it was worth it just to watch someone’s mind be blown because they had apparently never seen an LMGTFY shitpost before. And also… my general stance is that people who are willfully and aggressively ignorant deserve no respect. More flies with honey but… the flies are already morbidly obese diabetics so maybe a bit less honey is called for.



  • The point of LMGTFY is to obnoxiously remind someone that they are on an internet box and can easily find things themselves. The animation is actively meant to shame people into understanding just how much of their time and everyone else’s they waste when they ask for a link to something trivial.

    Also, again: The video is embedded in the article this thread is about.

    Look, I get it: The pleasure box in our hands is fun and The Algorithm tells us everything we might ever need. But you REALLY should learn basic internet literacy if you want to function in this post-truth world.




  • The Rich™ want to buy the dip and buy up property (see project 2025). They need the economy to break but not to completely collapse. And then it will “bounce back” enough that they can transfer their USD to other currencies.

    Whether trump’s fucking stupidity will accomplish that seems REAL questionable.

    That said: Massive power outages (also, this is just the equivalent of a state governor with a crackhead brother saying it to appear strong to Canada’s conservatives) might be what this country needs to get out en masse in places other than the blue states.


  • Good writeup but I really want to emphasize this:

    claims that Zelensky is “gambling with World War 3” (note: Ukraine is defending itself)

    That likely is going to be the angle putin wants pushed and it has been there from the start. Many people won’t remember, but in the days before the war started there were plenty of voices (on both sides) insisting that nobody should help Ukraine because it might cause WW3. Same with the calls for a no fly zone in the following weeks.

    It wasn’t explicitly said (by anyone but the most compromised of republicans and tankies…), but it was very heavily implied that Ukraine needed to die so that “we” didn’t have WW3. And I fully expect those to ramp up from all sides because…

    the US doesn’t want to help Ukraine because putin doesn’t want us to.

    And Europe is going to be consolidating forces and getting ready for the next invasions on EU territory.




  • Last I checked, using Kindle For PC on a windows (virtual) machine still works. I did it last weekend and the instructions are still on reddit.

    In the process of re-verifying and ever so slowly using kvm on my desktop and will likely duplicate the instructions as part of that. But if you just go check the calibre board at reddit, it is super easy to find.

    But yeah. Strongly suggest migrating to a different ecosystem. There is no guarantee that Rakuten aren’t going to shit it up but they are way better than Amazon right now (super low bar…). But since some of my favorite authors only self publish on kindle for pricing reasons…


  • Its an international flight. I went to american public school so my geography is shit but Australia to Qatar has a lot of countries in between, all with their own visa and even safety requirements.

    If it were an actual medical emergency where they (at the airline) felt an emergency landing (which would still be closer to hours away anyway) would make a difference AND they could safely land somewhere that was willing to isolate the passengers who aren’t legally authorized to be in country (also potential quarantine concerns)? They would.

    Otherwise? You go to the nearest safe place to land which is often the destination anyway.

    That is why you’ll see the occasional story about how a transatlantic flight got halfway across and then turned around because of a problem. And a friend who used to fly passenger flights from LAX to HND would always talk about the point of no return where any diversion is about as long as the flight itself anyway.



  • And, as an aside, one of my “favorite” flight stories:

    Was flying into DFW for a connection to get home. About an hour before we landed, the flight attendants got up to do their usual credit card schpiel but cut off partway through and rushed to the back. Everyone around me turned around to look. I… went back to my book.

    A few minutes later they actually do an “Is anyone a doctor” call. Then ten or so minutes later they talk about how when we land everyone needs to stay seated while a passenger is removed from the flight. And then… they got back on the intercom to say that we should ignore that request and deplane normally.

    I meant to check what said passenger died of (even if the medical emergency was under control they would have wanted to get them off ASAP for liability reasons) but it had snowed three states over so DFW was already a refugee camp at 6 PM as every single flight was cancelled or delayed. By the time I got home (three days later…) I was already too lazy to check exactly when we landed and so forth.


  • I mean… it is shit but there isn’t a lot to do in this situation.

    You might think they should put the body in the bathroom or cargo hold. Actual direct access to the cargo hold during flight is not feasible on most passenger flights due to pressurization/climate and safety concerns. Also, if they don’t have enough straps to tie down the body then that is going to be a REALLY bad PR mess when they remove a corpse that had been bouncing around and off of luggage during a landing. And if they do have enough straps, that is a completely different PR mess.

    Same for the bathroom. For a 14 hour flight I assume this jet had multiple bathrooms. But you still have the problem of a body that bounced around a bathroom during landing.

    Versus? You get it away from the family so they are less traumatized. You then put a blanket on it and buckle it in so that the body is safe.

    It would really suck to be the people next to where teh body ended up. But if the flight was full? Having a flight attendant say “Excuse me. Is anyone cool with sitting next to a dead body?” isn’t going to end well… and all but guarantees you get the kind of people who shouldn’t be allowed near a corpse to volunteer.

    MAYBE put them in a flight attendant seat but those tend to be near the galley which has its own health issues. And if it is a flight with sleeping quarters for the crew (likely for a 14 hour flight) that is both a safety concern (crew can’t rest) AND all the same “body bouncing around” problems as the others.

    As for what Qatar Airways should have done? Personally, I would have just offered the couple a shit ton of miles. A full refund isn’t “right” since we have all sat next to things we don’t want to (I would honestly rather sit next to a corpse than a morbidly obese person who insists on resting their arms over my body the entire flight…). And general counseling really isn’t something the airline has on staff, although it would be nice if they offered to pay for some of it.





  • Andrew Rea is a special kind of asshole (gotta love how he uses his own, probably legit, stories of struggles with mental health to sell fucking Better Help of all things).

    But recipes and paywalls have always been a mess. Cookbooks were, and still are, a thing. And the time and cost it takes to develop a recipe is REALLY high. Brian Lagerstrom has talked about this on and off and half joked about how many lasagnas and cakes he and his partner have eaten to get a 15 minute youtube video up. And then someone else just steals that verbatim without any credit at all. So a lot of “recipe creators” are looking at methods to make sure they at least break even on their IP.

    And Rea is very aware of this. Partially because he has a long history of using the exact same techniques that Kenji et al do without any accreditation (Alvin is REALLY good about saying where he got an idea though) and partially because he is pretty good friends with some of the most notorious recipe thiefs out there.

    But yeah. If they had done a “going forward, all recipes are paywalled” I would not be too bothered. But he retroactively paywalled all his old recipes. Which sucks because many videos outright contained errors that weren’t in the text recipes because he screwed up the narration.

    But also? The good news is that you can generally just google a few of the ingredients of a given recipe and get the “real” name of it and five different versions.