BuyMyBitcoins

I can’t watch YouTube without an adblocker. On a surface level, I hate the ads. But, the main reason is the fact that I can’t stand how YouTube is fixated on trying to make you watch something else at all times. I need something to hide all the little cards and interstitials that pop up when pausing the video, the badges, all the obnoxious thumbnails, etc..

I also hide all of the videos on the sidebar except for the one that would be recommended next, just so I can know what might play if I leave autoplay on.

It is insane to me that the product got to this place. I get Google is all about advertising, but my goodness, YouTube is just designed to make you not pay attention for more than a few seconds.

I am surprised at common it is for software engineers to not treat booleans properly. I can’t tell you how many times if seen ‘if(IsFoo(X) != false)’

It never used to bug me as a junior dev, but once a peer pointed this out it became impossible for me to ignore.

I was willing to give Edge a chance years ago. I didn’t see a compelling enough reason to switch, so I stuck with Firefox. However, while troubleshooting some problems on a family member’s PC I got to see what a ‘default’/‘opt in to everything’ Edge experience is like in 2025.

It’s horrifying. Edge is jam-packed with bloat and the entire browser is geared towards monitoring and hoarding every scrap of user interaction that passes through it. The worst part is that the average person likely has no idea just how pervasive Microsoft’s spying and ad-targeting is.

I envy the fact that EU Citizens have the right to decline all of these intrusive “features” foisted upon them by Microsoft. I doubt Congress would ever come close to affording us a fraction of these same consumer rights. Sigh.

Microsoft will clarify the situation by offering “CoPilot One”.

>”Or just have a police state. Problem solved.”

The you can send the copper thieves to work in the copper mines. That’s killing two birds with one stone right there!

The company I work for was “coerced” into forcing more people back into the office due to pressure from the city and the local chamber of commerce.

I say coerce, because there are absolutely people in middle and upper management who feel the need to preside over their little fiefdoms and were more than happy to relay this info as a convenient way to deflect criticism. “Don’t blame us, the city would start making things difficult for us if our occupancy numbers stayed so low. We don’t want our taxes going up.”

I remember a long time ago you’d click on a direct link and it would redirect you to the image’s page. Then, it would superimpose a cat paw beckoning the user to swipe and see other images. I recall people really hating that.

Now the site can’t help but show you some tacked-on TikTok style video or animated gif underneath the image you actually wanted to view.

Modal windows are just popups reborn.

The trouble with rejoining is that the rest of the EU won’t want to let them back in with all of the same privileges and opt-outs they were once afforded. I suspect the single greatest hurdle would be having to adopt the Euro.

While many in the EU may be sympathetic and forgiving, I sense countries like Germany and France want to ensure the UK rejoins as a far more integrated and dedicated member state than they were before. It doesn’t seem like the UK has much bargaining power in any potential application to rejoin.

It’s almost as if these stories come in waves.

Well, the setting is for kilometers, so the metric is metric.

Isn’t it fascinating that life on Earth began and evolved in such a radically different chemical environment? What we consider inhospitable was actually the cradle of life itself.

If they’re trying to measure skill, I can understand the rationale. The competition is more of a spectacle than an attempt at finding the most reliable and best tasting rib making process.

Imagine a glassblowing competition where participants were judged on how consistently they could make a certain piece. The people using moulds would end up winning, and they would do so with a fraction of the skill and effort.

>” But the people with this specific noose prop probably only had good intentions.”

I never said they had good intentions. What I am saying is that that noose and gallows were obviously never intended to be used. The construction and dimensions of it are comical.

Said noose was some poorly tied nylon rope affixed to a rinky-dink prop gallows on the front lawn. It was some protestor’s prop, and a really shoddy one at that.

Most photos don’t convey the actual size of it, because they just focus on the top crossbar, but even so, you can see just how ineffective that “noose” would be. If you search for a photo that shows it in full, you will see that a person could easily stand underneath it. It’s too short, and it is visibly crooked. If you tried to hang someone, it wouldn’t work.

I seriously doubt the people who made it had any connection to the people who stormed the building.

As a native English speaker, I am actually shocked that I didn’t notice the wants/once discrepancy until you mentioned it. My brain must have either autocorrected or it was in ‘phonetic mode?’ when I read it.

This record will be finally be challenged when Nvidia releases the RTX 6090.

>”PhD holding software engineers at the richest company in the world to figure out in 2025.”

Let’s be honest, implementing this would be up to a bunch of offshore contractors because corporate can’t bring itself to pay software engineers to implement this feature thoughtfully and comprehensively.

I suggest that any tax on multiple home purchases should scale, and be different depending on whether or not an individual or a corporation is doing the buying.

The same for every species that has been domesticated. Corn, horses, dogs, even yeast.

This even happens to species we don’t intend to practice “eugenics” on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry

It’s obviously not a free market. You have to bribe someone, which is by definition not free. /s

Any breaking news that is urgent enough for an alert happens to also be something a friend would text me about. Case in point, the assassination attempt in Butler PA last year.

No other “breaking news” has been relevant enough for me to reenable notifications. I check the news periodically enough as it is. That covers me wanting to know about anything interesting.

If you want to get sappy, Bob would probably want you to paint your own version of the piece he made that feel like buying.

I think NFTs have no credibility in the eyes of the public. Something akin to NFTs tracking real world ownership of physical things could work, but we already have that in the form of registries and deeds. Provenance is a solved problem, from a technical and social perspective.

The idea of “owning” a purely digital asset that anyone else can just make copies of (but not “own” according to some blockchain) just seems silly.

Left handedness is sinister.

You’re going to see the most strongly worded letter in the history of human civilization.

Surviving will be a miserable ordeal. That being said, all of my ancestors have survived every major calamity in the history of life on earth. The way I see it, I owe it to them to try surviving whatever comes next. A few select generations lived through much, much worse.

It may sound bizarre, but I don’t believe in an afterlife so I might as well lean into something to give me inspiration. The idea that I exist because my extremely distant ancestors survived every mass extinction gives me a sense of wonder.

I have a mental barrier around giving prompts in natural English. Part of me feels like I should be giving precise information as if I were writing a SQL query or providing arguments to an executable.

It is fascinating that you can give instructions as if you were talking to someone, but part of me feels like doing it this way is imprecise.

Nevertheless, having these tools process natural language for instructions is probably for the best. It does make these tools dramatically more accessible. That being said I still feel silly writing prompts as if I was talking to a person.

Russia has a nuclear triad. Unless all of their submarines were in port and taken out during the attack, there’d be no way to prevent them from losing all three delivery mechanisms simultaneously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_triad

> EDIT: hah, so can your second quote!

;)

Even the wink emoticon includes a semicolon.