That would be great. The only time I’m ever adjusting the slider is the dimmest 5%. The top 50% of the slider really doesn’t matter to me. It’s annoying trying to hit exactly the right pixel on the low end though

Combined PTO (along with a salary job not needing coverage) does have its downsides, but it’s nice just being able to use PTO whenever without needing any sort of proof. I can just wake up in the morning and decide I’m not working that day. No fuss, no doctors notes, no nothing. As long as I’m not blowing off important meetings or deadlines, no one cares

My introduction was the old Call to Power game. Still waiting for a Civ-like game that has a near-future age of gameplay. That was always the coolest part to me.

Feels like most of the similar games today are either historical/current or purely scifi. I like the transition point. To play out possible ways of advancing forward. How do we get from today to entering the stars? Those were fun scenarios to play out.

There’s a couple of mods for civ that covers this I know, but they’re all abandoned and somewhat buggy these days. Plus this sort of thing works best if the game is balanced around it to begin with.

Ok, so data used was:

• My search history
• Knows I’m friends with her
• Knows both of us were in same location (either location or same wifi)

Ergo, friends search data in similar locations will be used as part of your advertising profile?

Wonder why I don’t get more makeup ads or something. Since the same should be true for stuff she searches for.

I also believe this isn’t true, but did have something happen that we couldn’t figure out the other day.

I was looking at this really specialized gaming keyboard on my phone (cyborg gaming keyboard). I showed it to my wife and we talked about it a bit. Later my wife, who’s not a gamer and never looks up any of this type of stuff, gets ads for this hyper specific niche gaming keyboard on Facebook. She never looked it up on her phone, she has no signed in accounts on my phone, she is not a target demographic for this device. The only connections possible that I can think of is that Facebook does know we’re married (though it’s never used that for this sort of ads before) and that we talked about it with her phone in the room.

It was freaky and I still can’t explain it.

I don’t actively use it, but I don’t see the point in deleting my account? My HOA is only on a Facebook group, so it’s the only place I can go to check for updates on some stuff (typically trash day getting moved, neighborhood pool stuff, etc). That’s the only use. My understanding is that Facebook tracks me even without an account so doesn’t really seem like I’m gaining anything other than good feelings by deleting my account.

It’s not like I’ve gone out of my way to delete my old Myspace or xanga accounts either, I just stop using them.

Same. I originally got it for YT music. I don’t listen to as much music as I used to without a commute anymore, but my wife and I watch a ton of YouTube. And it’s mildly more difficult to block ads on the Roku too. I know pi holes exist, but my wife plays those freemium games that give you currency for watching ads and blocking all ads will break shit for her and then I have to fix it. Someone will tell me there’s an easy solve I’m sure, but honestly the subscription is just way easier and I really don’t mind paying. $16/mo for a family plan is 100% worth it to just not deal with all of that.

Let’s see:

• WoW back when I had friends that played and a decent guild
• Playing pretty much every co op game with my best friend that we could find.
• Trying to beat the last level of Halo at 3am while having way too many energy drinks and one of us always managing to fuck something up while driving the warthog
• Playing Crota’s End raid in Destiny 1 blind with my friends when it came out and trying to get through the maze with the lamps
• That summer me and my girlfriend were both unemployed and we played hours and hours of Dungeon Defenders

Everyone either has kids now or travels too much or just isn’t interested in playing anymore. It’s sad those days are probably forever over for me now. Maybe once we’re all in nursing homes there will be a resurgence in lan parties, instead of bingo for our generation.

Pretty sure since it’s a layoff they’ll argue it wasn’t specifically targeted as a form of discrimination. America is full of things that feel like they should be illegal, but aren’t.

Like how my state has absolutely zero laws enforcing access to bathroom or food breaks at work. Totally baffling.

Cause ours started from militia hunting down slaves

I’ve honestly been really surprised that this was the only ‘real’ assassination attempt in recent memory. I was surprised that no one went after Obama, nor Trump after him and Biden after him. The rage was so high, yet it’s only now that anyone from either side makes a real attempt.

Because the lefties are essentially a loose coalition of every marginally sane political view that remains, containing the actual fiscal conservatives, the center, the progressives and the far left all in a single party.

I’m the opposite. All the focus on the people and the random facts of their lives and trying to constantly manufacture some sort of sob underdog story around various players is boring.

I can appreciate a good game, one that’s close and exciting and played with skill, but the whole sports culture and focus often feels like celebrity gossip, but for men.

Which is also why esports are boring to me too, despite my love of video games (and even watching people play video games, like let’s plays). Esports just brings that whole sports culture and it’s a huge turn off for me.

Oh, I absolutely agree with you on the probable outcomes if America did implement structural changes these days. That has like a 1% chance of actually being something positive. I think perhaps the most recent, best possible time for significant reforms was somewhere between 1930-1990. It depends mostly on the specific kind of reform (basically whether or not women or minorities were relevant to the change, farther in the past would be worse outcomes for them).

But some things like campaign finance reform, how many seats there are in the House, Supreme Court Reform, etc could’ve been accomplished with a relatively high likelihood of positive outcomes.

Basically before the complete collapse of proper journalism, when broadcast media was still king and most politicians still tended to compromise and were at least mostly interested in actually governing. It feels like post 90s, our governing body has passed some sort of tipping point where the majority of members are simply gaming the system, obstructing others from actually doing anything and shooting down any and all reasonable compromises. The actual productivity of Congress seems to be in total free fall. Bad actors pretty much always existed, but they only became a crippling number somewhat recently. (Or at least this seems true for the last 100 years, I have no idea if Congress was this dysfunctional in the early 1800s or something)

I’m not sure if anyone could conclusively declare a certain country’s democracy is totally better than ours, but several more recently created democracies have avoided many of the pitfalls that have been discovered with American implementation. Things like mandatory voting, ranked choice voting, better and stronger rules around money and political campaigns, more comprehensive list of citizen rights, etc. Most of those countries have their own missteps as well, but a lot of our issues have been solved, we just haven’t adopted the methods and improvements already shown to work. Typically because they’d require pretty extensive reform, which is incredibly hard to achieve with our government especially in the current political climate.

I’ve often thought that America suffers from being the first successful iteration of our style of government. It was great and a huge improvement over all the other examples at the time. So much so that much of the world eventually followed in its footsteps.

But where other countries looked at our first successful attempt and further improved and refined the idea, we’re still stuck on that very first version. What was once a radically new idea that worked so much better than everyone else, is now an old, outdated and barely functional relic. We’re the early prototype iPhone 3g, while several other countries have iPhone 6/10/etc

The problem with humans reviewing AI output is that humans are pretty shit at QA. Our brains are literally built to ignore small mistakes. Digging through the output of an AI that’s right 95% of the time is nightmare fuel for human brains. If your task needs more accuracy, it’s probably better to just have the human do it all, rather than try to review it.

Yes, which is why I specifically said I support libraries and want them to be available to those of use.

Which is why I said I support them and want them to be available to others?

Edit: apparently people can’t read as I already said I support libraries and want them to exist for those that benefit from them. This was never a ‘it doesn’t help me so screw you’ type of comment. I was just sharing my experience of liking the concept, but failing to find any personal benefits and wondering if others experienced the same.

I like the idea of public libraries, but honestly I just don’t have a lot of use for them in my life personally. Unfortunately the books I read are primarily published under Kindle unlimited, so they can’t be checked out of a library either in digital or paper form (not that many of the titles ever even have a paper copy). I don’t really watch that much TV or movies, and the ones I do watch are generally acquired from the high seas anyway, which is honestly easier than checking them out of a library. I support the concept and want them to be available to others, I just don’t personally feel like I get any value from them.