vpilcx

There's already a insulin project where they're trying to open source (or something like that) insulin. They just made headway this year or the year before, but it seems like they're a long way from having any kind of effect.

I think the number one thing, at least for me, that keeps Steam so competitive is its refund policy. Devs, especially indie devs who make short games, hate it, but I don't know any other platform that has something like it.

For those unfamiliar, you can return and refund any game that you've played less than 2 hours. Now this obviously sucks for any games that are less than 2 hours in their entireity. (Maybe they need to adjust it to less than an hour?)

But for someone like who can't afford to waste money on games that they aren't going to play, this is great. I just bought a game (Phantom Doctrine) on Playstation. It was $6 which is a really good price. I'd been wanting to play it for a very long time. I was very disappointed. It's like X-Com with a spycraft theme but much worse gameplay. Played an hour and knew I'd probably never play again.

I've bought four games on Steam and returned all of them. Most because they just didn't run on my computer. The fourth one, I just didn't like very much after about ten minutes.

One thing that does suck, if you're not aware of it, is Early Access games that just get dropped. I can name half a dozen games off the top of my head that I spent good money for and the dev just dropped development halfway through or released a shitty buggy product. But I think as long as you wait at least a year to buy an Early Access game, you should be fine.

I don't think you understand how the GOP operates now. 8ft now, next year, they increase it. It's like what they do with abortions.

You had to take a picture of your face in order to match it with your ID or something like that. We took the picture ten different times in varying light conditions inside and out, and I don't know if the phone was too old or what but it always came back to an error.

It reminds me of the Flappy Bird guy who was making $50K a day or whatever. Its ridiculously privileged and only someone who's already well off would do something like that.

I mean, maybe they'd have a leg to stand on if it was like that guy who didn't patent that vaccine in order to make it more publicly available, but these are games.

I had the exact same experience. A barely smart phone being used to verify ID and we had to do the facial recognition more than 10 ten times, each time having to go through a whole step by step process to get there. And it still didn't work. I think he had to go an entirely different route in order to even do it. If he didn't have someone like me who could think systematically, there's no way he by himself or any non-technically minded person would be able to do it.

That's so weird because I'm currently using the T420. My desktop has basically stopped working so I had to start using this one with Ubuntu 18 something. Pretty disingenuous to say you're using an old Thinkpad when you've upgraded the RAM to max and everything else. I haven't (4gb currently) and it can be pretty frustrating.

YouTube and other video sites will start to freeze up after awhile and forget about multiple tabs of videos because that will just speed up the process. My browser gets too slow on certain web games. Ultimate Paperclip, now that I've progressed to the end, is unplayable.

Otherwise though, outside of gaming, the switch from Windows to Ubuntu has been relatively painless and unnoticeable. I tried doing some music production with LMMS and VMPK. For some reason, the audio just isn't registering even though it works fine for all other applications. But not too bad considering it was my last resort before having to buy a new computer or spend money trying to repair the old one.

To confirm their own assumptions as to how the media operates.

This isn't specific to web3 but more crypto but the idea of having an integrated method of collecting royalties on resale of an item indefinitely is pretty exciting.

That said, the hype seems a little bit overblown. When people are so focused on "overthrowing Big Tech" as to why web3 will be the next wave, it just seems like hype over substance.

I forgot what the name of it was, but I tried to sign up to some web3 social media site. In order to even post, you had to drop $80 on the relevant crypto to post on the site. I understand the justification but that made me immediately just lost interest in the web3 space. Seems kinda like a pyramid scheme. The people who are already in get richer while the newcomers just get magic beans.

It's anecdotal evidence because I was responding to an anecdote someone else was giving with my own personal perspective.

If that were the case though, why wouldn't that apply to credit card debt?

> There are certainly a lot of useless majors. But that doesn't imply all of them are useless.

It's not so much a critique of the majors but rather the professional requirements of the job listing. For jobs that don't have an innate technical (technical in the loosest sense of the term) requirement, they only want a certain class of person working there and college degrees are just how they do that.

> I'm not in the US, but isn't the rationale for that construct to make people more credit worthy? Ultimately you have to convince somebody to give a random person a lot of money on the odd chance that they'll finish their education and earn the money back. I suppose if you don't like "educational debt", you could also try to convince somebody to give you another type of loan.

One rationale that I heard that seems reasonable at face value is since you can't give back your education, that's the justification for not being able to declare bankruptcy.

I mean, I could put it on credit cards or take a personal loan, but that just increases the financial burden (via the interest rate), and if I'm not going to do that for the explicit purpose of purposely declaring bankruptcy, it seems unnecessary.

> You've established that education is a good investment.

My friend often comes to me and says, "Hey, man, how come you don't invest your money in <x>?" Because I'm living in poverty. People who live in poverty don't have money to invest.

> So why not find an affordable college?

So I did a quick calculation. Affordable, meaning junior college and public state college, would come out to roughly $23k for a bachelor. Maybe round it to $30k. When I was paying off my car, which only come out to about a little over $10k. Two years of having to work JUST to pay that off felt really, really uncomfortable. A college infused starting salary would probably only pay about 1 and 1/2 times more than what I was making then and the idea of having to do that for even longer without being able to absolve myself of it through bankruptcy is not something I want to do.

> Can't you just hack this by going to school for pretty much anything you're interested in and being able to work in an unrelated field?

That particular situation doesn't apply to every job. It seems like its mainly tech jobs I see that in and I'm not 100% certain I'd want to work to be forced into a tech job.

So I'm trying to think of the best way to explain this because I feel like I'm going in different directions but it seems like there's two paths:

1) go to college, accrue debt to get a job then work at your job for 5-10 years to pay that debt off

Barring someone making sure I have the proper technical bonafides, I'm philosophically opposed to getting a piece of paper for a job that I could do just as easily without a college education as I could with one. I also feel really uncomfortable with debt in general, especially debt that I cannot choose to have absolved through bankruptcy.

2) live at the lowest possible means necessary and eke out a living as best you can

As it stands now, my current expenses are no more than $500 a month (including rent). My biggest challenge, currently, to maintaining that type of lifestyle is getting remote work that I can do on an ad-hoc basis that will allow me to stay under the income necessary for government subsidies.

In another discussion, someone tried to make the argument that Buffet was a real-life rags to riches story. Like, my guy, his father worked as a stock broker, and he used to hang out at his dad's office when he was a kid, and his dad eventually became a Congressman. I don't know why people think that's "rags to riches".

I might be misinterpreting the facts but Gates got the deal to sell DOS to IBM because his Mom knew someone or was on the board. Bezos went from a successful career in finance to start Amazon. Zuckerberg started Facebook at -Harvard- and partly, the success of Facebook was predicated on Harvard's social prestige.

I just don't understand where people come up with these weird bootstrap narratives from.

I don't think it will except for maybe a trickle down effect from making rich people in their countries slightly richer. People who are working remotely aren't poor or living in poverty.

Most work done by people in poverty can't be done remotely. You can do mechanical turk type shit, but that doesn't seem be sustainable. As a person, myself, living in poverty in America, my best hope would probably be some kind of virtual assistant work? Not really sure how that would go, but I don't know if that's for everyone. And that's basically just white collar (read: not-poverty-orienty / blue collar) work.

I'm one of those people living in poverty that distrusts school institutions. My main philosophical gripe is that it doesn't seem to really matter what your major is. "Oh, you got a bachelors in Biology? Well, I guess that's fine. Come work at my tech company in a way that is completely unrelated to Biology." In this particular situation, it seems like the only purpose of college is to create arbitrary classist hurdles for poor people to jump through.

Now, obviously, that's not the case with all education, but my next gripe with it is the seemingly insurmountable debt that said education brings. Literally, all of my friends that have gone to college are no where near paying their debt off and I'm in my late 30s.

Finally, that in of itself, ya know, maybe that's like the licks you gotta take when you're trying to rise up in the world, but the fact that educational debt in America can never be voided through bankruptcy seems like a conscious systemic decision to create debt slaves.

And, while my parents, have been relatively ambivalent about education, almost everyone else in my family has gone out of their way to emphasize the importance of education. I just can't get over the previously mentioned hurdles.

Thanks a lot for posting this. I've been meaning to take some audio from my grandpa to resurrect my grandpa's voice before my grandma dies, so maybe I'll finally get around to doing it now.

How does it work to be able to legally kick someone off their property like this?

Because I've been working on a hypothetical idea for a while now that's kind of weird version of a commune. A facility that is autonomous and self-sustaining in which the facility and its infrastructure is owned and run by one person, but the community that it houses is governs itself.

The person who runs the facility has the authority (only in very, very extreme cases) to evict people but mainly, the ideal is that the community would police and govern itself, evicting problematic members of their community.

I just have no idea what the legal feasibility evicting someone is in this hypothetical situation.

I'm being pretty clear with my expectations. I didn't expect to pay for a service I wasn't using and I didn't expect to be charged after the fact without being informed ahead of time, when I signed up for new service.

For me, I had a bad experience that soured me on them. I signed up for service and forgot to change over my credit card or something and the service lapsed. So a few months later, I signed back up for another six months of service and it said I had only 3 months of service. So I double check and I did sign up for the six months of service. So I contact customer service and they say that they were giving me service when I wasn't signed up so they're going to charge me for that even though I wasn't even using it then. So I ended up only getting half of the service that I paid for in the end and they were just like tough luck when I contacted them.

Wouldn't that just kill a f2p userbased and just have cheaters go to gift cards?

For me, it's already ruined the game. There's a type of player that every time they take a bad beat, they'll be like, "Oh, we've got a cheater!" I am not like that. At all. It requires an enormous amount of evidence to accuse someone of cheating.

But with Warzone, it was happening so often, I no longer give anyone the benefit of the doubt. I used to run into more than one blatant cheater per day. And now all my bad beats, I assume half of them are cheating, even if it's not exactly clear. It's ruined the game for me. I genuinely don't even bother to play anymore unless I'm playing with one of my friends.

If they weren't bluffing and you're in the same county, it could just be the dispatcher remembered you from last time.

I had something analogous to this where the local PD left a voicemail saying my brother had gone missing and left a name with the same last name and a name similar to mine.

When I called back, I told the dispatcher and they refused to leave it there and wanted to transfer me to the cop in question which I thought was really weird. He took it down but it seemed like there was something else there. And I realized he was probably fishing to serve an arrest warrant or something.

To see if I would go, "No, my brother isn't missing. That's my cousin and he's at <address>." Cops do that type of shit all the time.

It's a decade since this was created. Is QuakeNet still the biggest? Because it feels like FreeNode is now the only place left.

I've always been searching for another MMO experience. Eve Online was close but not quite the same. While not exactly an MMO experience, Rust is the closet modern approximation that I've experienced.

> The younger generation has no concept of listening to a song you "don't like" 50 times, simply because you listened to the album you purchased 100 times.

I'm not below the age of 25 but this seems like a really archaic statement. This is basically equivalent to "Kids these days have no idea what it means to have to watch commercials and shows you didn't want to watch to get to that show you were really looking forward to."

Who's the author? There's three different books with that title on Amazon.

That was actually the entire comedic premise of an I Love Lucy episode. The gang is in Italy and wants to call back to the states so they have to wait for a long distance operator to call them back with an open line.

They, unfortunately, are on a higher floor with no elevator. So every time they have to talk on the phone they have to get 3+ flights of stairs.