I love eldricth horror precisely because of this. Imagination will almost always be scarier than something that can be put into words. Descriptions give handles to hold onto for your understanding, boundaries and walls for the horror to fit in.

Give me more vagueness about how, gazing at it, the room could not have possibly contained its size. The feeling of the split second while tripping before you connect with the ground, stretched into an interminable constant in the back of your mind.

Do you not have a bug tracker or ticketing system of some sort to manage these things coming your way?

Incredibly few people at my work get much more than dismissive small talk from just walking up or from sending me a message expecting me to re-prioritize everything else for their special pet problem.

My manager sets my priorities, any changes to that need to come from him. They can take it up with him if they don’t like it or disagree.

I don’t respond to IMs or emails not from my boss or from my own team except when I’ve hit a mental road block and need to think about something else to refresh.

And I don’t actually work on any of those requests until there’s a ticket in. If someone comes to me asking why my main job duty isn’t done, I’m sure as hell going to have a paper trail documenting who fucked up the timeline. No ticket, no work.

That also puts some weight on anyone else able to pick up tickets for your team to do it, so it’s not always falling to you because you’re not jaded enough to say no.

There must be a way to stop this feeling.

Been there. I’ll keep it short. The way is to get professional help. Therapy and/or medication.

Since you have no job, first step is to get on whatever low/no income insurance is available to you locally.

Same, but surely you realize that ads have only gotten worse in the intervening time. I also don’t truly believe that we’ll ever reach critical mass on adblocker users. You’re asking people who don’t care, who don’t use the internet the same way we do, to suddenly care enough to take manual action outside of their knowledgebase amd comfort zone.

The only way the adblocker user numbers get pumped up to critical mass for a change is if a popular default browser makes adblocking an opt-out default.

As well as predatory/not, there’s also a trend with attention grabbing/not.

There was a period of time where Google AdWords ruled the online ad space, and most ads were pure text in a box with a border making the border between content and ads visually distinct.

Kind of like having small portions of the newspaper classified section cut out and slapped around the webpage.

I still disliked them, but they were fairly easy to look past, and you didn’t have to worry about the ad itself carrying a malware payload (just whatever they linked to).

Companies found that those style ads get less clickthrough than flashier ones, and that there’s no quantifiable incentive to not make their ads as obnoxious as possible. So they optimized for the wrong metric: clickthrough vs sales by ad.

More recently, companies have stepped up their tracking game so they can target sales by ad more effectively, but old habits die hard, and predatory ads that just want you to click have no incentive to care and “de-escalate” the obnoxiousness.

… not really though.

The one big law about lending out digital copies of books you own is that you only lend out as many as you physically own. They uncapped that restriction, openly, and they admitted to it.

This is an incredibly open and shut case.

It’s stupid as hell, and that law needs to die, but there was no corporations doing people dirty here. This could have ended so, so much worse for IA.

Off the absolute top of my head there’s the redcap. Depending on the material it can be depicted as a gnome, goblin, or kobold with a jaunty looking red hat (generally long and pointy like a gnome hat or like Link’s hat in Legend of Zelda).

It keeps the hat red by dying and regularly re-dying it with its victims’ blood.

There’s also a number of depictions of pixies as essentially flying piranha.

But this sort of mythology isn’t some deep secret, it’s everywhere outside of the kid friendly/disney filtered stuff. I’m sure a simple search will net you tons of content.

I miss the “Tales from…” subs. Tales from tech support was regular reading material for me for many years, and in general just having a place to commiserate with others in the same field as you is wonderful. The other ones also helped me be more concious of what I could do to keep myself from being a nuisance to other professionals like my doctor and pharmacist.

More niche, I miss the gunpla sub a lot. We have subs for model making and tabletop miniatures, but the gunpla community was very well run.

In general, I think the lack of moderation tools has made it difficult for communities to do regular “event” posts and the like which used to really help keep subs alive, guide discussions, and gave good examples of the type of content that fit. Like it’s a lot easier to start a new conversation at a party where everyone is talking than to be the first person to speak up in a silent room.

A big benefit of the fediverse is that it’s still so small that it’s pretty easy to just block the assholes without a constant sea of new ones coming in to take their place.

Whoever the asshole you’re replying to is, I already have them blocked.

Did the lemmynsfw instance die or something?

I’ve tried to do this a few times, and unfortunately it feels like you really have to go all in on managing your own content library.

Like many, I had stopped pirating shit when netflix etc were “good”.

None of the streaming services want you to use them outside of their official sites/apps, so you end up being limited to like 720p when running them through kodi etc.

No worries, microplastics are equal opportunity! You can find microplastics at any of your local ovaries today!

Also, now introducing kids microplastics! Don’t want to wait for your microplastics? Simply be born in the current era and we’ll send you kids microplastics absolutely free! That’s a $60 value, absolutely free! Other companies might trick you into buying fast by making that a limited time offer, but we know you’ll love microplastics so much that this is a forever offer!

Microplastics- we’re already inside you!

Similar to your #2, but less serious, I once wrote a script to power down virtual machines for a data center move. It was a nice piece of work too, grouping them in batches, sending shutdown commands to the guest OS, falling back to forcing a power off through the hypervisor after a configurable timeout…

I don’t recall the specifics of the problem or the virtual infrastructure I was working with, but in short I didn’t have sanity checks on what was being shut down. Ended up force shutting off the hypervisor/virtual infrastructure management system.

Added an extra few hours the move with that.

The software you’re probably thinking of is f.lux

Blockchain also has some useful applications. Most (but not all) of them are also possible with technology and such that existed when bitcoin was first created, at far lower cost for a minor tradeoff in accuracy. On top of that, almost none of them are related to speculative markets.

It’s a way to do distributed transaction logs in a non-refutable and independantly verifiable way. That’s useful and important, but it was a solution in search of a problem. Even for the highest security, most at risk transactions, the existing international fincancial systems are “good enough” to ensure reliability of transaction logs.

In the end, blockchain and now AI are just falling victim to con men trying to milk as much money as they can from things before people build a working understanding of them. They’ll just keep moving onto the next big thing as it comes.

New surgeon simulator DLC

As long as you are using official Microsoft install media downloaded from Microsoft (or verify the hash to ensure what you downloaded matches the official Microsoft isos) then you should be fine.

MAS is just a PowerShell script you run after install. It’s open source, and PowerShell scripts aren’t compiled, so you can examine it yourself to see what it’s doing. It tricks Microsoft servers into issuing your hardware an official “free upgrade” license key. The one I’m familiar with as reliable is MASgrave.

That’s not an 100% guarantee that it couldn’t be doing anything shady, but it would be incredibly hard for it to hide anything if it was.

If it was valid, do you really think people would be talking about it being a problem here? Please use your head a little.

Also, two entitely different meanings of the word signing being used here. Signing as in signing a bill vs. Cryptographic signing. Adobe has some weird “halfway” thing that’s more than painting the sig on the image, but isn’t gpg.

Hooray for proprietary shit becoming accepted for legal use! Yuck.

How would it detect that the currently playing section was an ad then?

It’s a good thing that he definitely didn’t leave the company years ago then!

He released his Coda, he’s washed his hands of the setting.