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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • On the other side of the same coin: When I mass edited my comments before quitting Reddit, I got site-banned. Basically, my first account’s automated edit got me auto-banned from several subs with pro-spez mods. Some subs had set their automod to detect when people were using the more popular methods of auto-editing, and set the automod to ban for using them. Then when I did the same with my second (and third, and fourth, and fifth, etc…) account, it almost immediately got site-banned for ban evasion.

    Basically, account 1 was banned from a sub, so when account 2 started doing the same thing on the same IP address, it was flagged as ban evasion. And ban evasion is one of the few things that will get you banned site-wide instead of just from a specific sub.

    I went back and checked a few months ago, and all of those site bans were lifted and the edits were undone. Likely because a site ban prevents the comments from showing up (which hurts Reddit’s bottom line, because they show up as a bunch of [removed] comments instead,) but also prevented any of the edits from actually being published. So when they lifted the site ban (to get those old comments to show back up again) it was as if I had never edited them at all. I had probably a million karma spread across my various accounts. I was extremely active at one point, so Reddit had a direct incentive to unban those accounts with literal thousands of comments.


  • There’s a huge difference between a game featuring politics as a sandbox for players to play around with, and featuring political themes as a main story driver.

    Civ is a good example of the former; It has politics present in the game, but the politics aren’t presented in a hero/villain way. They’re presented as potential advantages for the player, potential disadvantages for opponents, etc, but the actual policies themselves aren’t central to the system.

    The game pulls from historical political systems as a way to present them to the player, but it could just as easily forego that and call the system some made up word besides “political systems”. Because the politics and policies aren’t actually important to the gameplay; All that matters to the player is what potential benefits and drawbacks they provide. You don’t actually care if a particular civ is “democratic” or “totalitarian”, because those titles could just as easily be replaced with “A” and “B”. The only thing that matters to the player is how that particular civ’s political affiliation will affect their actions.

    But if a game heavily features political themes and messages as part of a plot line, then it’s not something the player can avoid or ignore. If it’s central to the story, one side (likely the side helping the player) is inevitably going to be presented as the hero, and another side (likely the side working against the player) is going to be presented as a villain. Final Fantasy X, for instance, is a good example of the latter. It heavily features anti-religion themes and messages. It’s impossible to play through the game without receiving “religion bad” messaging, because they’re central to the game’s plot line, with religious leaders as the main villains. We can draw direct parallels to real-world examples. And if you’re someone who is religious, those parallels may make you deeply uncomfortable, because religion is being portrayed negatively no matter how you play the game.


  • Typically speaking, you’d want to cut instead of boost. Cutting is easy; You just reduce the volume. Boosting is much more complicated, because you need to “add” signal where none exists. So boosts tend to be noisy and/or outright distorted, while cuts will maintain a clean audio signal.

    Need to boost around 2KHz? Try cutting everything else instead.



  • I’ve used it for basic coding stuff a few times, to great success. Nothing over a few dozen lines, but it’s great when you don’t want to bother looking up the specific functions and syntax for a particular language. For instance, you can have it write basic batch files for you. Then you simply double check it to make sure it’s accurate, (which is much easier than starting from scratch,) and you’re golden.




  • He explains why it’s unlisted in the first few minutes. Basically, he knows it’s too long for the regular viewer, and plans to release a condensed version later. But for the people who may be interested in a deep dive, he made the much longer unlisted version where he has the freedom to ramble and fully explain things.

    As for why it’s unlisted, it’s probably so he doesn’t get dinged by the YouTube algorithm for incomplete views. If the algorithm sees that his regular viewers are only watching the first 5 minutes of his hour long video, it’ll stop recommending his videos to them. Unlisting the video is an easy way to get around that, because only the people who are interested in it will seek it out.



  • Tesla routes pretty much everything through the center console. I’m surprised they haven’t tried to route the blinkers through it.

    It’s because their wiring system basically just daisy chains everything together with network cable. So it’s a lot less cabling, because they aren’t running six wires for six different systems. But it also means that when one system fails, they all fail in a cascade because everything behind that system in the chain is also affected.

    That’s why automakers have traditionally used individual wires for each system, because they have prioritized safety over easier wiring; You don’t want your airbags to fail just because your wipers are having an issue, for instance. So each system is essentially isolated to its own wiring.

    Tesla is a good example of people not understanding why things are done a certain way. Elon just saw modern wiring harnesses and went “lol that’s dumb just use network cables.” And on the surface it sounds fine, because it’s less wiring. But it fails to understand why each system is wired independently. And now Teslas have frequent issues with cascading system failures.



  • the arbitration companies are usually fairly friendly towards whatever corporation is being challenged being paid directly by the company they’re arbitrating for, and therefore have a direct financial incentive to rule in favor of the corporation.

    FTFY. It’s way worse than just “being friendly” with corps. They’re on the corps’ payroll (indirectly, because the corp is paying for the arbitration,) and they know that if they continue to rule in the corps’ favor then the corp will continue calling them for future arbitration. There’s a tacit understanding between the arbiter and corporation, where if the arbiter favors the plaintiff then the arbiter won’t get called when the corporation goes to arbitration the next time.


  • Just never connect it to the internet, or (even better) set up a PiHole and block the TV’s telemetry requests. I say the PiHole is better because then you still get all of the benefits of a smart TV (like native streaming apps) without all of the horribly invasive data mining.

    If you want the benefits of a smart TV without connecting it to the internet, then maybe a connected PC would be a better solution. Something like an Nvidia shield connected to the TV, while the TV remains offline. That way you can maintain control over the computer, instead of trying to control what the TV collects and sends.





  • He was definitely odd, but even a broken clock is right twice a day; He hated what his old company has become, and at least owned up to the fact that he had a lady shit on his chest. When asked about it in interviews, he basically said something along the lines of “when you’re richer than God and have had sex with gorgeous women every day, things start to get stale and you look for more and more extreme things to get you going.”

    He also 100% predicted that he was going to be Epstein’ed in a prison cell. He was very outspoken about the fact that he wasn’t suicidal and if he was ever found to have committed suicide, that it was a hit job. He specifically tweeted something along the lines of “if I’m ever found to have hanged myself, it wasn’t a suicide. It was a whack job.” He was found dead in a prison cell, with the death ruled a suicide by hanging. Which is either prophetic (he believed the US had a bounty on him, so he was very paranoid about getting murdered with the government covering it up,) or the best troll ever.



  • My guess is another CSAM attack. In case you weren’t aware, there are some bad actors who will occasionally use AI to generate CSAM, then post it on any servers they can find using bots to get things to the /All front page.

    And since instances are usually just run by one or two people, response times can be long. Because the instance owner won’t even know anything is wrong until they log on.

    Many instances defaulted to disabling image posts to stop attacks in the short term, so the admins can work on scrubbing the existing posts and banning any users that posted it.


  • I mean, there are sex-averse asexuals. People who are disgusted by the idea of sex. Like it’s just another gross biological function.

    They tend to view the relief from sex the same way using the restroom provides relief. And most people don’t enjoy using the restroom; They just enjoy the relief they feel afterwards.