Same, feels very uncomfortable to confront personally. Ooof size: collosal.

And a heavy duty three pack nonetheless! I didn’t realize packing factored into so many genders. Learn something new every day!

Startup times getting down below 20s definitely helps with this. I haven’t had a machine that took over 30s for a few years now… even my phone isn’t that slow.

Was recently asked to look at a laptop because it was “running slower than normal” and “takes a long time to resume from sleep.” Hmm, ok. It’s only a few years old, probably just bloateare.

I powered it on and immediately got served an early-2000s size dose of 10+ minute startup time. This laptop from only a few years ago still came with a spinny disk drive… Ugh. Didn’t even bother trying to optimize it. It’s getting cloned up to an SSD before I even try to work on it.

Honestly I’m shocked at the number of people that stayed on twitter. Like… just why? It’s zero effort to leave and minimal effort to find another platform.

I realize many people choose not to care who owns the companies that make their stuff. And to be fair, sometimes it’s actually worse to throw away the product than keep using it despite the associated image. I still daily drive my Tesla model 3 that I bought in 2019. Throwing away a car creates a shitload of waste, versus just continuing to drive it. I’d never buy another tesla, which solves that issue.

But unlike throwing out a car or even throwing out something with actual value like youtube, ditching Twitter as far as I see has no downside.

Whenever I see “Culture War” in a title I know it’s going to involve a shit take from selfish regressive pricks.

People are so incredibly fucking selfish.

They want them because they’re being lazy/cheap. No, seriously. They’re called widowmaker cords for a reason, but inevitably some muppet with two plugs and some wire will come up with the brilliant idea that one of these will work for.

One really sneaky and dangerous place these get made are generator backfeed cheater cables for houses. You see them in RVs, Xmas lights etc too, but generator backfeeds are super dangerous because they’re also juggling two potential power sources. A backfeed is where a house/building is disconnected from the grid just by flipping off the main panel breaker, then it’s “backfed” by a generator going into another breaker in the panel. Usually, without any type of safety interlock to keep the mains voltage off when the generator is on, or vice versa.

Afaik, this is illegal per housing code almost everywhere that I’ve seen, but still every now and then some yahoo thinks “wait, if I make a two-ended cable and put a receptacle on the house, I can remove the generator easily without any of the expensive safety crap!” And then grabs a live male plug when they fuck up and didn’t shut off the generator or mains voltage…

Electrified double-sided dildo sex, no less!

Seconded. Learned this the hard way. Even using a microfiber to scrub it on won’t help because bkf has grit/grit-like stuff in it that can wear down and flake off the coating.

Fun fact: that domino’s in-box advertisement, in which the box claims to “dream of being another box,” is actually horrible for the recycling stream. Essentially every legitimate recycler explicitly states that grease- and cheese-contaminated cardboard is not allowed to be recycled because it degrades the quality of the recycled product and causes messes at recycling facilities.

So basically, this dream is a manufactured corporate lie and belongs exactly where we see it.

(Well alright fine, if you need good news, the good news is that in some areas while they still don’t belong in recycling bins, pizza boxes can go in your green bin compost. Although this is heavily dependent on where you live and what type of compost stream is used there. Don’t assume it’s ok to recycle or compost without checking, and never trust the packaging labels!)

For those unaware: -196°C (-320°F) is the approximate boiling point of liquid nitrogen. Call it creative marketing I guess!

And yes I used to do lots of charpy impact testing hence that knowledge is engraved in my brain forever. DBTT gaaang

Process affinity for anxiety set to 16/16 cores all days all hours

Process affinity for literally anything else is determined by adhd rolling a d20, the result is your one and only process thread for the next 5 minutes unless it rolls a nat 1 then you get 16 for 5 mins. Also you’d better hope the result isnt 17-20 cause if it is that shits soooo goooone lol

Hmmm, for some reason the first thing I thought of was “www.customgiantdildos would sound better than www.giantcustomdildos because of how the words flow.”

“I’ve got in two fights before”

Excuse me? Over what, having to yield for 10 seconds to someone else? Fucking children.

Try living in an older section of my city, where all residential roads are all effectively narrower than these NIMBY childcare center candidates are whining about. Forget getting in a fight, yielding and learning how to negotiate with cars, bikes, peds, and muni vehicles is called life. If you get upset about it here you’re clearly not a native to city life, and it shows.

Yet another victory for manged ⁠☆queeromacy☆

Ah shit, that reminds me I need to go get killed by the airstrikes of internet randos in helldivers again. 10/10 game

It doesn’t help that carmakers get incentivised to go big by fucked up fuel standards. Here in the US the CAFE standards were gutted during their creation to carve out looser standards for obese pickups and hummer-sized SUVs. The bigger they get even within a given segment, the less stringent the requirements are.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24139147/suvs-trucks-popularity-federal-policy-pollution

Plus people “feel safer” and all that other jazz when they drive them. It’s just… It’s so stupid to have to watch people continuing to chose shit like this.

IMO it’s such a multi-faceted problem that at this point about the only thing that makes sense is to switch lanes (heh) and focus on other transit methods. More people will take transit or bike if it’s easier than parking their mile long farm vehicles in tight urban spaces and being helplessly fumigated by standstill traffic.

Yeah I was going to say, phones are currently growing bigger after hitting a sort of “peak small” lol.

They’re getting so huge that it’s hard to find a small one without ordering an old model. I like to be able to see things and all but at a certain point they don’t fit comfortably in my pockets

“Too broke to play PC” is a vanishing argument IMO. People have been saying that forever, to be fair, but given how bad Xbox and Playstation have gotten I don’t anyone who’s actually into gaming purchasing a new one today. Maybe used, that might make sense if it was really cheap.

A budget gaming PC can check out at slightly over 600 now. PcPartPicker has two recommended builds priced right at 600, though honestly there might be even cheaper ways to arrive at that level of perfromance. Compared to 300-400 for the less garbage Xbox, and there’s not much argument to lock someone into the xbox’s ecosystem vs something you can upgrade for much less.

Now I think it’s a different matter if it’s a hand-me-down or given for free. There’s no reason not to do that.

I gave my last console away and got a friend of mine into gaming, then helped them build a decent PC when they actually wanted something new.

The US Navy hates this one simple trick!

To echo the OP’s reply below, there are a lot of different reasons combining right now to make them popular.

One of the factors that has improved the most over the last 5 years is how much more access people have to safe and cheap optons. Buying a cheaper e-bike even just 5-6 years ago had you gambling on components and hoping your battery and charger were certified and sourced reputably. And, while you could order online, the experience wasn’t always great.

Nowadays it seems like almost everything has certified chargers and batteries, and the overall build quality of cheap bikes and scooters (bikes especially) has improved as well.

Combine that with being able to order a bike or scooter online, ship it to your door in just a week or two, and get going with minimal assembly and adjustment. Boom, that’s an attractive option, even before you hit incentives. E-bikes and scooters are so insanely cheap to own and operate compared to a car (even a super cheap car) so it just makes a ton of sense that people would choose them.

It’s weird here too because states set sales taxes. I live in Oregon, and we don’t have a standard sales tax here. That means what you see is what you pay at the register for most things, and it’s so freaking nice.

About the only thing I regularly see is the bottle tax (0.10/can added at the register). That’s refundable too, at least theoretically, so it’s not that bad.