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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I like that someone figured out half assing things can be just as funny or even funnier than putting in the effort to make it look more professional.

    Now I’m curious about who first bottled that lightning.

    Maybe the makers of Aqua Teen Hunger Force? Half the characters in there seemed like they were making it up as they went and is the earliest one I can think of where that was a common theme.

    Home Movies came later but is the earliest where that’s applied to media produced “in-universe” that I can think of.

    Home Improvement was earlier than both and Tim was often out of his league on his show, but that was more of a “ill prepared but at least trying to be professional” act than “making it up as we go and not even trying to hide it”.


  • Back in the day, when I fired up Mortal Kombat 3 for the snes, I’d usually end up spending more time in the space invaders game than playing MK itself, especially since the consoles kept the tuning intended to keep the quarters coming for the arcade version (first fight would be easy, next fight would be hard, then easy after continue, so it wasn’t just pay to play for the arcade but pay to win).

    I’m curious if I’d remember each of the codes required for the secret menus, one of which contained the mini game. Can’t remember them offhand but it might be different with an snes controller in my hand.

    Actually I think I do remember one of them (or maybe it’s the Konami code, or maybe those two are the same code):

    Up, up, down, down, left, right, A, B, A

    Or maybe it was right then left. Lol I also remember usually needing to try several variations before I’d get each code correct.


  • Reviews say it’s adding a giant QR code to downloaded videos to get people to pay a license fee but I do not see that after downloading something just now. Though tbf, they did update it yesterday and might have removed that because of the feedback they were getting.

    Permissions look reasonable to me, based on my understanding of what they need to do for the functionality, though I suppose there is potential for abuse.

    It requires a companion desktop program for some streams, which did seem sketchy at first but I wasn’t able to find any specific claims of it doing anything undesired, just people who noped out when they saw it wanted them to install something and others who said it does function as desired. Again, hard to say if it does anything in addition to enabling some streams to be downloaded, but I haven’t noticed anything out of place on my PC since installing it either from tool-based scans or manual checks of places where malware can put itself to survive restarts.

    There were also claims that it didn’t work with YouTube in the reviews, but that doesn’t seem to be the case for me, since it does light up. Though maybe that was timing-based, too, where Google briefly managed to block it only for them to adjust.

    So I haven’t seen any of those issues but YMMV. I’m going to keep using it but will also keep an eye on it. Either way, thanks for letting me know.




  • Also you can just block elements you right click on in Firefox (though this might be an option added by an add-on). If there’s hidden elements you just need to go through each of those until you can click on the one you want directly (and you can tell by what is highlighted in the inspect element mode).

    You can also hit delete in inspect element mode to remove that element. You can also edit whatever you want in the element. Makes me wish it existed back when I was doing more web dev work, would have made things a lot easier when debugging.







  • Some examples from mine if anyone is curious. I never use the fb sso or any of that shit, nor did I ever explicitly consent to any of these services sharing anything with fb.

    • Spotify
    • bookings .com
    • ebay (haven’t touched my account there in over a decade but they still had data to send this year)
    • windy .com
    • duolingo
    • tinder
    • my bank
    • opera
    • sonos (I can’t think of any time I’ve ever even interacted with this one)
    • samsung wallet (another one I never even set up)
    • Uber eats
    • calorie counter
    • mediacom usa and euro (?)

    Also, if you remove access via messenger app, it will show a confirm message without closing the screen. Clicking x goes back and it’s not on the list anymore. Whether they are actually leaving it disconnected or just hiding it, who knows.

    Some of these services I didn’t use the same email that I used for fb, too, or any email at all.


  • I’m unconvinced holding back our people by 5000 years is a bad thing. If that hadn’t happened, there might not have been a humanity for us to be born into. Or maybe we’d be at Star Trek levels now.

    Though our existence depends on our history, so even if it would have been a better one, we wouldn’t get to see it.




  • How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie should be required reading for everyone. It’s full of things that are so obvious in hindsight but go against our natural instincts so we blunder through attempts to persuade not realizing that we might be increasing resistance rather than decreasing it.

    Like the whole, “you might be right but you’re still an asshole” thing. Being correct just isn’t enough. In some cases you get crucified and then after some time has passed, the point you were trying to convince others of becomes the popular accepted fact. And they might even still hate you after coming around on the point you were trying to make.

    That book won’t turn you into a persuasive guru, but it will help avoid many of the pitfalls that make debates turn ugly or individuals stubborn.

    Or, on the flip side, you can use the inverse of the lessons to become a more effective troll and learn how to act like you’re arguing one thing while really trying to rile people up or convince them of the opposite. I say this not so much to suggest it but because knowing about this can make you less susceptible to it (and it’s already a part of the Russian troll farm MO).


  • Yeah, I was going to mention race conditions as soon as I saw the parent comment. Though I’d guess most cases where the debugger “fixes” the issue while print statements don’t are also race conditions, just the race isn’t tight enough that that extra IO time changes the result.

    Best way to be thorough with concurrency testing IMO involves using synchronization to deliberately check the results of each potential race going either way. Of course, this is an exponential problem if you really want to be thorough (like some races could be based on thread 1 getting one specific instruction in between two specific instructions in thread 2, or maybe a race involves more than 2 threads, which would make it exponentially grow the exponential problem).

    But a trick for print statement debugging race conditions is to keep your message short. Even better if you can just send a dword to some fast logger asynchronously (though be careful to not introduce more race conditions with this!).

    This is one of the reasons why concurrency is hard even for those who understand it well.