In power strips, the lights are (in the overwhelming majority of cases) actually a neon bulb! They’re cheaper for that specific purpose because they can be powered directly off of the mains power with a single resistor.
Your point is entirely valid and I bear the same cross, this is just a fun fact you can use to impress colleagues, strangers, and potential lovers, dazzling them with your deep esoteric knowledge of and passion for illuminators in power strips.
Hah, this is what I liked the most about reddit - learning random bits of knowledge about things I knew nothing about. I’m glad to see this happen here too!
This is also why those power strip lights can sometimes flicker in the dark. They are sometimes over-driven for extra brightness; this does cut their lifespan, but they usually still last for many years regardless. However, towards the end of that shortened lifespan, the accumulated damage to the electrodes leads to flickering as it struggles to keep the neon excited. However, incoming photons can give just a little extra nudge, which sometimes is enough to keep the neon excited and glowing.
It’s probably not advertising that they are afraid that you will block but the trackers. They want to know what user is clicking where, how long you are on each page and what you ordered / not ordered.
Yes they want AS MUCH of your money as fast as possible… but we do want to give them money as fast as possible too.
Disconnect obviously comes at the amount and the margin. They want you to max your credit card on their soda, we want the most satisfying assorted selection with an auto-applied 100% off coupon.
There’s somewhere in the middle there. They can telemetrize their site into it taking just a few taps for you to buy their higher margin combo meals. Their deals, they can hide as best they can without them being impossible to find for those inclined (price-sensitive buyers who open the app with discounts on their mind).
After add-to-cart, it’s in their interests to optimize checkout as best they can… well, with a side of last-minute upsells of course.
Here’s a question: would opt-out first party telemetry be a decent status quo? If you’re not privacy conscious (certainly not enough to pay cash in person), you don’t go to settings to reject trackers… but you still get to benefit from the average user being spied on just a little by internal teams & consultants to improve site/app flows. Don’t think I’m 100% anti-tracker in any case. (I’m definitely medium privacy-conscious as well as price-conscious, so I look for those opt-outs and coupons :) )
Yeah, this warning is pretty clear about that ironically. You aren’t allowed to have secrets, only they are. It’s pretty on the nose, but I guess it could be misunderstood. That’s probably how it got there. The person told to create this wanted to give a warning, but they couldn’t straight up say it.
Forget shitposts, there were legitimate flame wars in Pompeii graffiti:
Successus textor amat coponiaes ancilla(m) nomine Hiredem quae quidem illum non curat sed ille rogat illa com(m)iseretur scribit rivalis vale
Translates to:
Successus the weaver is in love with the slave of the Innkeeper, whose name is Iris. She doesn’t care about him at all, but he asks that she take pity on him. A rival wrote this
A response to this translates to:[6]
You’re so jealous you’re bursting. Don’t tear down someone more handsome― a guy who could beat you up and who is good-looking.
Honestly, the internet was at its best when it was the fever dream of stoned, sexually frustrated grad students at Berkley. Infinite potential - it could’ve been anything. Could’ve. But wouldn’t. The real thing, after it became fully saturated in everyday American life, was always going to be some mediocre, watered down corporate cesspool of lowest common denominator, hyper-sanitized garbage. Because that’s what people like. They like safe, familiar, predictable, and uncomplicated. Well, most people.
Twitter has only lost ~10% of it’s userbase after repeatedly abusing its own users. Reddit probably less. After everything we’ve learned about Meta, tens of millions of people signed up on day 1 to join their new service, Threads. Google Chrome still has like 80% market share.
Changing is honestly a trivial ask, but we won’t, because no one cares.
It’s not that no one cares, per se. We just live in a society where the majority of working adults are fucking exhausted. They have bills to pay, uncertain job security, seemingly constant climate crises/natural disasters in many geolocations (e.g. Canada and US West Coast wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc.), hyper polarized partisanship in many countries (yeah, it isn’t unique to the US), and on and on. That Google, Microsoft, or Amazon own the internet is such a low priority to the much more immediate, life threatening/living security concerns of the majority of people.
I care, but I also understand why many people do not.
LOL that makes zero sense. It takes 5 minutes to switch to a different browser or service. If they were tired or didn’t have time, they wouldn’t be spending it on Twitter and Reddit.
It’s not really the time. It’s more about the mental effort it takes to find out what to switch to.
Sure, it’s easy to install Firefox or sign up for Lemmy once you know that it’s there, but most people just have a sense that things suck with no idea of what they can do to fix it.
Finding out what to do to have a better experience takes a non-trivial amount of mental energy that scrolling reddit and instagram do not require.
The constant hustle, multiple jobs, or jobs with a high mental load, rising prices and stagnant wages all work together to create a lot of decision fatigue and stress. It often takes something major to get people out of that and get them active at changing things.
This just sounds like a bunch of non-sense, making up excuses for people making poor decisions. Like you can’t blame every bad decision on “wahhhh life is hard!”
No, it’s not excuses, it’s just reality. It’s hard. Does that mean people shouldn’t try to do better and make things better? Of course not. Being better and doing better is hard, and we should do it anyway. That kind of personal growth is central to the human experience, or it ought to be.
The thing is, just because people aren’t doing better in the area that you understand and care about doesn’t mean that they aren’t in other areas that you may not know about.
For example, someone who is stressed out and overburdened with work may be using all of their available energy to be a better parent and make sure that their child is raised in a healthy and emotionally stable home. If that doesn’t leave room for people to support FOSS and privacy friendly browsers that’s ok.
Just be the best human you can be every day and don’t beat yourself (or others) up for not being perfect.
It takes 0 minutes of my limited spare time to use what already works. How someone chooses to use their corporate allotted time off is none of your fucking business anyway. Your username checks out for real.
It takes 0 minutes of my limited spare time to use what already works.
Uhhhh nope, it takes way less time than it does to simply continue using it. All the time you’re using could be spent finding and switching to something else. It literally only takes a few minutes. Way more than people are actually spending on these other platforms. And if they’re spending time on these platforms, they can’t possibly avoid learning about competing platforms.
How someone chooses to use their corporate allotted time off is none of your fucking business anyway.
How an individual chooses to use their time is none of my concern. How millions of people choose to use their time directly impacts everyone else, myself included, so yes it abso-fucking-lutely is my business.
Man, I would love to run a Linux box and still be able to run the like 4 programs I use my computer for, but I don’t have any interest in running an OS I have to build and make work. I got Redhat working once (feels like a million years ago) and I am just not that interested in my PC anymore. It’s a tool. I want it to work without any fiddling on my part. It has exactly 5 programs it ever has to run. I touch it on the weekends. Windows it is.
Linux today is plug and play in almost all areas. Off the top of my head the ones that have problems are creativity (no Adobe and also wacky color management, though it’s getting a complete rework with Wayland setting it on par with macOS) and engineering (next to no support from big CADs).
I have played through Skyrim and No Man’s Sky in Linux VR. Valve has done a great job keeping up the development of Linux Steam VR, especially considering how low its market share is. It’s part of their nuclear option against Microsoft and Windows or something.
In fact just yesterday I installed EAC so that I could play New World, and all I did was to install it straight from Steam before also installing the game from Steam.
You realize all of that old shit is still possible today right? Static plain html still works. It loads quicker than ever. The only thing preventing it is the creators of the content. The masses on social media were never going to create that so having Twitter around doesn’t change the possibilities. Get cracking.
I interpreted “we” as the general public. And yes, that was kind of my point. ActivityPub exists. NOSTR exists. Probably a dozen other decentralized social media protocols and services. And yet no one leaves the garbage-ass, bot-riddled, insanely-popular social platforms.
No we can’t. It’s been consolidated. Sure some of us might get a little piece of freedom but the web is going to stay consolidated unless something major happens…
These things are ableist. We are reaching the point where AI can solve these much more reliably than a human. As a result the difficulty has to rise and will exclude more and more people which might have problems with “basic” tasks from a neurotypical perspective. Not to speak sometimes there might be multiple solutions depending on language and cultural interpretations.
Do audio captchas require English? I’ve never actually done one but I sorta assumed they were language agnostic, or at least would adapt their language to the system language.
Try them. Last one I tried was absolutely utterly impossible. Two times ago, it was easier or just as easy as the visual CAPTCHA. Unfortunately can’t recall either provider/site.
I’ve had to do a lot of Jira captchas over time. They were so horribly ambiguous that I had a failure rate of about one in two. So I tried the audio captcha and was met with the sound of a demon being murdered and nothing else.
WCAG AAA actually mentions that. Which includes things like OTP. It’s going to be tricky to balance security with accessibility in situations like this for those with cognitive and physical limitations
OTP is a success criteria instead of captchas but then you have issues with accessibility when you require somebody to have a device like a phone for the code or require them to app/context switch. So somebody using a device using their eyes or tongue as an input trigger would have a hard, if not impossible, time logging in with that arrangement.
Eventually shouldn’t we theoretically reach a point where AIs can solve any possible practical to use captcha just as well as a human? I kinda wonder what the answer to replace them will eventually be
It’s already beatable right now, there are services in third world countries where people get paid fractions of a penny to solve captchas for machines.
Well, this isn’t a problem for smaller, less centralized services, so that might be an answer. Obviously not an answer big corporations will bring to the table, but ultimately, it might simply be among the reasons why users do still prefer smaller services.
Yeah it’s almost like the whole thing was fucking stupid from the get-go.
“Prove you’re not a machine by training this machine to pass this exact test.”
And we know what the response will be, here. More and more of the internet gated by incredibly invasive verification methods.
If you’re not willing to let the OS/web browser fist fuck your computer’s most intimate areas, down to the hardware, and work it like a puppet just to make sure you’re not a bot, then you’ll just be hard blocked from every site.
Never mind how that will incidentally allow them to report that you’re using a VPN or an ad blocker to websites, or some other unapproved software, and even take action against all that while harvesting data…no, truly the biggest concern is the bots.
Oh yeah, it’s ableist as fuck. The worst offender I’ve run into was a CAPTCHA I had to solve to make a neuropsychologist appointment, of all things. Sure, they only required the use of basic skills to solve, but those were the very skills I was seeking treatment for.
I feel your pain. I have rare disorders which affect my executive functioning, so simple tasks are insurmountable at times for me while my intellectual ability is unaffected and likely above average. Which leads to two things: I rarely get help making appointments and what to do and just “do it yourself” without guidance and get kicked out. And the other one is that I could not be possibly correct interpreting the test results, because how could I have the ability without being an official researcher to research things. I am deeply frustrated, the more tests I run and see my thesis is correct, the more push back by doctors it is more likely to have randomly a dozen conditions instead of a single one uniting them. Welcome to Ehlers Danlos.
I can hardly claim to know enough about captchas to weigh up the cost / benefit, but I was delighted to come across a captcha that didn’t try to force me to train an AI
I ran into this recently. Trying to get access to a credit union’s system as a vendor, they had a captcha that was the old style image of distorted text, with a text box labeled “are you a robot?”. Having the tendency to take things literally, I initially typed “no” into the box. That was not the right answer.
I don’t think it’s that big of a deal if it’s an event or 1p release but I can see why people wouldn’t like it tbh,
For the love of all things holy, can you people, for once in your lives, oppose something on principle? This weak-ass justification, this “it ain’t that bad” shit is exactly why we end up with something far worse in a few years. They count on this.
Do you know what Microsoft learned from the Xbox One launch? They didn’t learn not to be anti-consumer, they just learned that they need to do so slowly and gradually. The mistake they made was going too hard too fast, and creating kickback. They learned to implement little things, the things that “aren’t that bad”. And then another one a few months later. And another one after that.
It’s called boiling a frog. It works because of the average person’s passivism.
So please, I’m begging you, think forward. Develop some pattern recognition. Stop downplaying the minor things just to be contrarian and defend a billion dollar company from perfectly valid criticism.
Principles are a luxury most people can’t afford. If I have to compromise mine just to survive, I might as well also compromise them to survive comfortably.
All I’m hearing is that your exceptions to principles are fine and perfect and valid, and mine are not. The only mitigating factor seems to be your belief that we disagree on the subject of xbox advertisments, specifically.
You started this by calling principles a luxury. In defense of ADVERTISEMENTS.
The present condition of subsidies and moral status of entire industries is NOT the topic of discussion. It’s ADVERTISEMENTS. How are you seriously so dense as to conflate the two?
We’re talking about a company doing further enshittification in a system that’s already supposed to be paid for by subscriptions. Not about what commodities are perfectly moral to consume. Your entire interjection is a fucking what-about-ism that started via a selfish statement of dismissal.
There IS a place to talk about immoral consumption under capitalism, but it is NOT as a dismissive response to a corporation doing yet another shitty thing.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: We have a HUGE Apathy epidemic right now, and it mostly affects younger people (Gen Z on down mostly but some younger millennials too). I think this is mostly because they were born too late to realize that things don’t actually have to be this way and could in fact be better if people just…tried. But they’ve been beaten down and had the phrase “that’s just how it is/always been” beaten into them so much that they just stopped caring.
Microsoft makes shit practices standard. They duped their user base into paying for p2p online multiplayer. And that became standard. All the people who said they don’t mind paying for literally nothing made it happen for everyone else on each platform.
As someone who worked at GameStop long ago, when these pre-order bonuses started becoming cancerous, no, no they can’t. The number of people who bitched about them, or how every FIFA game is just the same game with a different roster, yet still bought them and stood outside for midnight releases, was almost an overlapping circle.
Having integrity/principals requires abstaining, and that’s not how a lot of people think, unfortunately. They voted with their wallets and what they voted for was shit.
Even just people with luggage and baby strollers are fucked. People who are blind also are really disadvantaged here. The scars on the shins of people who have used a white cane for years are numerous.
I'm a fan of fewer cars on the road, but things like this are also reasons why we need still some forms of direct transport access. Travelling a few blocks from a public transport stop can still be filled with hazards like this that prevent people from arriving at their destination.
It’s not an old video game. They’re not immovable parts of the level design. You can likely move or bump them out of the way enough to pass through.
Meanwhile right next to them is a huge metal box that stole 4 times as much sidewalk, transported half as many people and is literally un-moveable if you’re not in a heavy motorized vehicle.
I have poor spatial awareness and learning to drive later in life - plus still getting to know my car. With a long, low nose, these bumpers are so handy, particularly the lower ones and/or made of rubber, so I don’t scrape my car’s poor snout!
After a while you just get used to the fact that your license plate is going to be bent at the very bottom if it doesn’t have a plastic holder behind it.
While we can’t unasshole everyone we can start ticketing ppl who park outside the lines. In most cities there’s traffic wardens anyways, so that should be cheaper than installing bumpers on every parking spot.
Yes, though the other reason to have bumpers is physical safety. This is a walkway. If someone is just a little bit negligent, they could run over someone. Ticketing them doesn’t help at that point. And the cost of that life is more than a million bumpers. So again, as much as I’d like to punish bad parkers too, as emotionally satisfying as that would be for me, the practical solution that will just work is to add the bumpers.
I have never seen these things in my life. Apparently they are not a thing where I live. But it’s sad that we need something like that so that idiots learn to park.
It’s only going to save power if you’re using an oled, since for most lcd screens the backlight is on whether you display black or white.
All my websites are jet black, and the black is only really black on my phone which has an oled screen.
Either way, it’s just greenwashing. These companies are only pretending to give a crap so they can get brownie points with people who can’t see what they’re doing.
Most lcds take a tiny bit of current to darken a pixel I think. The ground state would be white and power is used to get the lcd in the state where it changes the lights polarization to get it blocked by the polarization filter in front of it
Yes, I think it’s this way around because precision is higher at higher power, so the minor deviations close to no voltage applied are hidden in minute white variations, while near blacks are way more precise. But don’t quote me on that
Back in CRT days, the difference between full white and full black could be as much as 100W. Before dark mode existed, people developed sites like Blackle to reduce the power usage of Googling.
The rule is pretty simple: you have to be able to cancel a subscription the same way you signed up for it. If you used the Internet to sign up there better be a fucking button that allows you to cancel.
I cancelled my mobile contract in Germany last month, and I had to submit in their web portal that I wished to cancel, and then call them to confirm the cancellation.
Yes, Drillisch is one of the companies currently simply ignoring the law. They will probably continue to do so until they get successfully sued and/or fined into compliance.
Here in Paraná there’s a rather old law against that too, from 2007. Back then the concern was phone companies and credit card companies doing it, but the law was worded in a surprisingly sensible way, so it protects customers against online roach motels too. I’ll coarsely translate it from Portuguese, (sourced from p203):
Law #15627, 18/Sep/2007*Enforces that providers of continued services are required to ensure to customers the ability to request the cancellation of the service through the same means which the acquisition was requested, as specified. * Article #1 - Providers of continued services are required to offer to customers the ability to request the cancellation of services through the same means which the acquisition [of said services] was requested. * Article #2 - Furthermore they should provide cancellation means through phone, internet, or mail. * Article #3 - For the effects of this law, as “continued services”, without implying exclusion of similar [services]: * I - subscription of newspapers, magazines, and other periodic publications; * II - paid television, internet providers, landed or mobile telephone lines, data transmission and aggregated services; * III - gym academies and open courses; * IV - capitalisation titles and insurance bonds; * V - credit cards and “discount cards”.
It seems that the governor back then was already expecting companies to rule-lawyer and say “ackshyually we aren’t offering [service], we’re offering [same service under different name], so it doesn’t apply to us”, so the way that article #3 was worded basically lists examples, not an exhaustive list. As much as I hate that specific governor I can’t help but think that he did a good job with this law.
Also just getting a bottom banner asking if you want to use the app. I only ever get there from searches so, no I don’t want the app. One of the only websites deliberately making their mobile site unusable to push an app.
I’m trans and have surgery coming up so I’m often trying to research a lot of stuff related to that. Seems half the useful info out there is on Reddit and I have to get around the fucking NSFW wall all the time. I’m so frustrated that so much of that information got tied up there and in discord channels
As an iced tea enjoyer, who has been to almost 40 states that is absolutely untrue. I’ve never been to any restaurant that serves sweet tea but does not serve unsweetened as well. Some places especially in the north don’t consistently have either, but in my experience, if they have one they always have the other
Nope. Plenty of places in the midwest only carry unsweet and “flavored”, not regular sweet tea. The flavor is usually extra sweet fruit flavored syrup like raspberry or peach.
Okay fair enough, I haven’t been to many Midwestern states, especially rural areas of those states. I was more referring to places carrying only sweet tea and not unsweet
I have been all over the continental United States of America, except California, Washington, Arizona, Nevada, and that other state up there between California and Washington that I always think is Vermont, driving a truck and have literally never been to a place that had sweet tea but not unsweet.
I’ve seen a few the other way around, but that was in New England, about as far from sweet tea culture as you can get.
Maybe a gas station or a fast food joint that use the syrups instead of brewed, but you don’t want to drink that shit
I live in GA, where if you order tea it will be defaulted to sweet tea. However, I have never seen a place that doesn’t have unsweet - you just have to order it that way.
They usually have the milk on hand for cooking, or just the kids menu. If my family of 4 can easily go through 2 gallons a week, I can’t imagine a resteraunt having problems using up milk before it goes bad unless they over-purchase
I think it’s a high fructose corn syrup joke, but that’s more like squeezing all the sugar out of a cob of corn and pretending it’s juice concentrate in my mind.
What’s wrong with water? I usually just get water and ask for lemon slices to squeeze into it. Which is a game changer and they always have on hand because of the alcoholic drinks lmao
Afaik, the only other options besides what you listed for beverages anywhere is milk, coffee and tea. And depending where you get them, the coffee and tea may as well just be sugar (or aspartame) too.
Well, coming from a tropical country to the US was a disappointment there. I used to be able to get a variety of freshly squeezed juices almost anywhere, and the only thing they serve around here are bottled OJ’s that barely taste like orange. It’s not even like there’s a limited variety at the grocery store, it’s just not a thing…
Most juice has a lot of sugar. The ones that don’t don’t generally taste that good.
But bottle OJ tasting like shit is a real thing, they have to do so much to it to get it to last for more than a week on the shelf that all the flavor is sucked out of it.
Yeah no added sugar. The juice generally contains enough sugar on it’s own. Fruit juice is about as nutritious as a soda. You’re taking the sweet part of the fruit and leaving behind the fiber and other nutrients.
Sugar is sugar, HFCS found in sodas and juice with added sugars is more concentrated, but your body still sees it and treats it as sugar.
Which it also just happens to see as something to hoard because for our entire evolutionary timeline sugar was a rare resource to be had. It wasn’t until the industrial revolution that we began being able to have sugar whenever and however we wanted. Which on the timeline of evolution is nothing but a blimp, a speck of sand.
Different kinds of sugar are all sugar when they get to your gut. Anything beyond “the body treats this like sugar” is just a pissing contest.
When you juice something, you’re leaving 95% of the nutrients in the fruit, extracting the sugar water, and telling yourself you’re drinking healthy. That’s just not the case. The meat of the fruit is where that stuff is at. The fact that some of it makes it in to the juice is incidental. It would be better to drink a glass of water and eat the orange, than to juice the orange. Unless you then throw the juice away and just eat what’s left of the orange. That’s probably the best thing.
Different kinds of sugar are all sugar when they get to your gut.
Nope fruits are high in fructose while sucrose, aka table sugar, is 50:50 glucose and fructose. Fruit has the same or even worse makeup sugar-wise as HFCS, glucose can be used pretty much directly by the body while fructose needs to be processed by the liver, into fat. Evolutionary speaking that makes a lot of sense as when there’s a lot of fruit around it’s summer and you need to fatten up.
Real fruit vs. juice is a matter of fibre and satisfaction from chewing, it’s way easier to overdrink than to overeat fruit.
Where I come from we just take the meat of the fruit and blend it with milk or water (and yes, we call that juice), I you have never try it, go get a ripe mango, blend it with milk and you’ll have a delicious smootie, you can use water but imh milk is superior for that use case.
Of cours that is no possible with oranges for example, but there a aloooooot mor fruits than oranges.
If you ever have the oportunity to have some guayaba-milk-juice, don’t pass it up, the shit is the nectar of the gods.
You’re trading HFCS for plain old sugar. Most fruits are approximately 50/50 fructose and glucose, while HFCS is between 42% and 55% fructose, with the balance being glucose.
Chemically and biologically, they are basically the same.
Juice is still pretty sugary, even fresh squeezed. They naturally have sugars in them which is why they are sweet. While a lot of premade juice also includes added sugars. There was a study posted somewhere on Lemmy not too long ago that showed most American’s sugar intake came from fruit juices and not sodas as previously thought.
’ll have a number 6 with extra dip. Big Smoke: I’ll have two number 9s, a number 9 large, a number 6 with extra dip, a number 7, two number 45s, one with cheese, and a large soda. Make that diet, I’m trying to watch my weight.
mildlyinfuriating
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