It’s an interesting idea. I think it’s just the phrasing. You’re giving someone, socially and conversationally, an instruction. That’s bound to illicit a knee jerk “you’re not the boss of me!” reaction, mentally if not verbally.

Can you give me an example of the first two points? I haven’t encountered that colloquialism yet. I’ve heard “a hot minute,” which is clearly a just a figure of speech and would be absurd to ridicule, but it sounds like you’re talking about something else. I just don’t understand the second. I’m absolutely certain there’s some slang being used in circles I don’t frequent, so I’m not questioning you, I’m just curious. What’s the hip new slang, dog?

I admit to using amaze-balls. So does my wife, sometimes. It’s an amaze-balls term.

That sounds horribly transactional. Like you’re asking people to apply for a job as your friend.

That may just be me, but I wouldn’t react well if someone approached conversation like a job interview.

They don’t mention enshittification - I think Doctorow popularized the term later - but this is a perfect example of a process that contributes to the phenomenon.

I had never thought about it in these terms, but they repeatedly mentioned curation, and it’s so clearly a fundamental topic in today’s online world.

This was an incredible video, thanks for sharing. It gave me a new perspective to consider.

I remember that!

They look way less detailed and fabulous than I remember; that’s imagination for you. I just remember them being nearly as tall as I was, and it was glorious.

Yeah, especially for text files. Hard no.

Databases have their uses, but the trade off between obfuscating the data and making it harder for users to access has to be far more compelling. LogSeq is a really good example that you can do relatively complex note organization with cross references and tree structure without resorting to a database. Using a DB for something like this is user-hostile, smells of vendor lock-in, and seems lazy.

I got one big one and the Lander the same Christmas; we weren’t well-off, and that was an extravagant Christmas, the best I’d ever had, haul-wise.

It was the year before my parents divorced, and that probably had something to do with the largess.

Damn. That’s them. Did you have one? Which part did you lose first? I think the missiles were the first to go; they may not have survived the holiday season. Then I lost the hand. I’m pretty sure mine had switchblade wings and maybe a switchblade sword, too, although I’m not sure about that.

I was 7 or 8, and not great at keeping track of small parts and these things disassembled quite a lot.

But what I really miss is that Eagle Lander. I’d pay good money to find one in good condition; they were the coolest things flying, at the time.

Nothing I had as a kid ran on batteries. It was all springs.

You think I’m doing the “riding dinosaurs” spiel, but I’m not that old. And, yes, there were things that had batteries, but not most kid toys. I had a 3’ tall battle robot from some TV show, pre-transformers, that shot hard little plastic missiles from one fist, and the entire other fist could be spring-launched hard enough to bruise a younger sister’s forehead. Not that I’d ever have done such a thing. I had an Eagle lander from Space 1999 with detachable cockpit, which also must have been 3 or 4’ long. I had fucking lawn darts, perhaps the most incredible and incredibly dangerous weapon sold as a toy, which we would try to launch over the house into a yard we couldn’t see, and compete for who could get their’s stuck most deeply in the earth. When I was 6, I had a full-on pump-action BB gun capable of putting holes in thin plywood.

We didn’t have a lot of batteries, but we also had almost no regulation in the toy industry, and it’s honestly surprising to me today that so few of the neighborhood ended up in the hospital from just the toys.

We got a glimpse of what a true exodus could look like, and I’m with you. As much as I’d love to see Reddit collapse from its own shittiness, for Lemmy’s sake I’d rather see a trickle who have a chance to learn manners and leave their vitriol behind.

Not saying Lemmy’s perfect. I’m not saying I’m perfect: I have bad days and make asshole responses, too. But they get swallowed, or I get a reasonable response and I apologize. In the main, the real, consistent excuses for human beings who resist the opportunity to become better people tend to join instances like Hexbear, and can be blocked en mass.

TBH what I saw first is that you connected a fan to some hard drives and called it a homelab.

It was pretty funny for the half second it lasted.

Rockets are: put a bunch of flammables in a giant tube and light it on fire. That’s my understanding. Well, Ok. I know there are nozzles on gimbals, but… here’s a joke that represents what I’m talking about:

A brain surgeon goes to a party, and the host is introducing him to people.
Host: “John, this is Jack. He’s a software engineer.”
John: “Oh, that’s nice, but it isn’t brain surgery.”
Host: “This is Mary; she worked in industrial inorganic chemistry.”
John: “Oh that’s nice, but it isn’t brain surgery.”
Host (annoyed): “Maude, this is John. He’s a brain surgeon.”
Maude: “Oh, that’s nice, but it isn’t rocket science.”

I think the big picture is deceptively simple. The practice of getting into orbit is far, far more complicated.

As for airplanes, yeah. I understand them well enough; I think with the right equipment and practice I could build something that flies. It’s just, sometimes seeing a behemoth in the air it’s just a bit astonishing, and unintuitive.

See‽ It’s a glitch in the matrix. They added the feature, but failed to work it out in advance and coded themselves into a corner.

I think what happened is that they spent all the budget up front, really nailing stuff like Physics and Evolution, and then came to a crunch and Management said, “just throw something in there! We’ll polish it later,” only it’s so self contradicting, they can’t.

Yeah. This fantastic woman married me. I have no idea why.

Also, I really don’t understand rockets at more than a superficial level, but I saw one launch once.

I’m quite uncertain about jet airplanes, especially when you’re, like, driving in the same direction and there’s a strong headwind, and it almost looks like you’re going faster than them? They’re just hanging there, god knows how many tons of metal and 300 people. It’s creepy.

And I really think economics is proof that we’re in the Matrix, because the more I think about it, the less (functional, not ethical) sense capitalism makes, and everybody who talks like they know about it just sounds like stringing together a bunch of buzzwords. Also, there’s that truism that if you ask four economists a question, you’ll get five opinions. Plus nobody can reliably predict the stock market; weather - a highly chaotic system - is more predictable than the stock market. It’s like the programmers put it in, but when it got to the point where they had to make it explainable, they couldn’t without introducing recursive conflicting rules, so it’s just hand-waving, and people pretending or misleading themselves that they know how it all works.

What’s weird is how everyone reacts differently. Someone talked about spinning out in a car; once, my girlfriend was driving, in the winter, and we tried to pass someone on the freeway, going near freeway speeds. The roads were icy, and we spun around multiple times, and ended up coming to a stop on the other side of the freeway facing oncoming traffic. Throughout the entire episode, I remember only thinking, “Ok, this is happening.” I wasn’t afraid, my heart rate was normal, I was completely calm. I think I may have put my hand on the dashboard, as if that’d do anything. I think, for me, it was the utter inability to do anything about the situation that made me calm. I’ve lost control on ice while I’ve been driving, and that’s nerve-wracking. But that one time was the worst, and yet I had no fear. It’s really strange, isn’t it?

So, my answer is being up on the town hall tower in Rothenburg, Germany.

I know I’m acrophobic, but not pathologically, but I figured I’d be a little scared and that would be it, and I wanted to do it. So we climb about 800 floors of stairs and crawl through this little submarine-like hatch onto a mayor walkway around the tower literally wide enough for one person, as long as they’re not too fat. The railing is a metal bar about waist-high, and I am not joking, you didn’t have enough room to turn around. So you shuffle around the entire spire - there’s just a column behind you - until you make the circuit and can climb back in the man-hole. It was not great; I was already anxious, except that after I got out, people just kept coming out of the hole. It was literally impossible to go back - you had to make the circuit, and there were people on both sides of you. You shuffled as fast as everyone else was, which was slow, because you’d stop when someone would finish and climb back in the hole.

I was about three people out of the hole, and thinking about the warning sign about the walkway being rated for only 4 people at a time, and how by my count there were at least a dozen, and I panicked. It was one of two or three times in my life when I felt like my brain had run off and was doing its own thing, and I had no control. I didn’t make a scene, but internally, I was completely terrified, and probably wouldn’t have been able to move if I hadn’t been part of a press of people on both sides inexorably shifting around the walkway. I don’t think that utter loss of any rational control can be adequately described unless you’ve experienced it.

The view was, apparently, beautiful, but I have no memory of it; all I remember is that it took 6 hours and all I could think of the entire time was getting back inside.

Sucks. Sorry to hear that.

What is CIDP?

Crowdsourcing medical assistance is entirely valid, as long as you’re also seeking professional help. Medicine just doesn’t have all the answers, and sometimes “this works for me” is the best advice you can get when there’s nowhere else to turn.

I’m reminded of that old joke:

What do you someone who graduated bottom of their class at medical school?

“Doctor.”

This is a really good idea. Someone in my family has a rare autoimmune disease (relapsing polychondritis), for which the only treatment is a drug (Methotrexate) which has lymphoma as a side effect. It’s a fairly rare disease, with only a small percent of sufferers. I should start a community for it.

Since methotrexate is the only tool allopathic doctors have, and since homeopathy is a snake oil industry, there’s a lot of “word of mouth” suggestions from people who’ve had success from a variety of approaches, some of which work for some people, others not. Low dose Naltrexone (off label), Plaquenil, and avoiding food allergies are things doctors aren’t going to recommend because there are few scientific studies in them - because, again, nobody fucking studies the rare diseases.

Communities are really valuable for sufferers of more rare diseases. I think many people casually downvote such off-label approaches because they think it’s some sort of anti-science, anti-allopathic medicine wackadoo, when in fact the diseases are so uncommon they’re practically unresearched and certainly no pharmaceutical companies are researching cures.

For my CLI homies, there’s syncedlyrics.

Be advised: several Subsonic servers (including gonic and Navidrome) do not support lyric files unless they’re embedded, and syncedlyrics will only put the lyrics in .lrc files. So getting lyrics in clients can be a two-step process: download the .lrc’s, then run a script to embed them in the song files. I’ve seen a script to do the latter, but I haven’t tried it. I’ll send a patch to gonic to read lrc files, during the Christmas holiday most likely.