Cost cutting and designing for the lowest common denominator. Suits are afraid to take risks, because they want to sell to the widest possible audience. So they end up playing it safe and making bland milquetoast games that all feel exactly the same.

Also making a comeback because of things like Elsagate and YouTube Kids’ weird algorithms. Parents need to have reliable kid-friendly media that they can put on, without constantly needing to monitor it… And a DVD box set of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood won’t end up showing your kid softcore fetish content disguised as children’s videos, as soon as you walk away from the screen to make dinner.

I run a small Plex/Jellyfin server, and have a library specifically for kids’ shows. And my users can lock their kids’ accounts down so they can only access that library. So my various friends and relatives can put something on via Plex, and trust that it will stay safe for their kids.

Housing is also a sort of money pit in Japan because abandoned houses often aren’t considered worth repairing. Old Japanese houses tend to end up with lots of issues, to the point that it is often cheaper to bulldoze and build new. There are plenty of stories of people buying an abandoned house for like $50… But that’s only the initial property cost. It was so cheap because everyone knows that they have to actually invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in bulldozing and rebuilding before the property will be habitable again.

Was this in a radio station (or was someone nearby acting as a radio operator, like a police station or dispatch center), by chance? Or maybe in a lab setting where they may have gear that is affected by interference? They tend to be picky about RF interference, and Ethernet can be fairly noisy on certain RF bands. In that case, the ferrite bead was likely to do the exact opposite; They wanted to stop the Ethernet cables from acting as an antenna and broadcasting RF interference.

Yup, there is a lot of snake oil in the audiophile world. The worst instance I saw was someone posting about an intermittent buzz in their system. Multiple people were recommending a full rebuild, (which would cost thousands of dollars). From what they described, it was pretty obvious that OP just needed a ~10¢ ferrite bead on a power cable, to make it stop acting as an antenna.

I was like “okay, you could try rebuilding your entire system like everyone else is suggesting… But maybe start with a ferrite bead. Here is a link for a multipack on Amazon. Worst case scenario, you’re only out like $5. And even if it doesn’t fix this specific case, the multipack is handy to have around anyways, because manufacturers often cheap out and skip adding them when their devices really do need them.” Like three days later, I got a “holy shit this actually worked. You just saved me thousands of dollars (and a ton of time) on a complete rebuild.”

Yes and no… Women do complain about a lack of pockets, while simultaneously buying pants that physically don’t have room for pockets.

But on the other side of the same coin, women’s heavy duty cargo pants have smaller interior pockets too. Like the exterior pouch pockets may be the same/equivalent size, but the main front and back pockets are often still tiny. There’s no real way to rationalize that or blame women for it, because that’s the entire point of the pants, and there is 100% enough room for larger pockets in those baggier pants.

And no, they often can’t just buy men’s pants, because the cut is very different. Guys tend to have narrower hips and wider waists. Women wearing men’s pants will tend to have the waistband fit (but can’t get their hips into them) or be able to get their hips into the pants (but then need to cinch down the waist by a ridiculous and uncomfortable amount). Women’s pants tend to have more hip room and narrow waistbands, to account for that.

FWIW, simply living with an adblocker for a while will inoculate you to a lot of the most predatory BS. My wife had a similar experience. At first she was annoyed by the dual pi-holes I set up, because they broke her sponsored Google search links. Then she learned to skip those first few links and got used to having ads blocked. We recently moved, and I hadn’t had time to set them back up. I have simply been using the new ISP’s modem/router.

Last week, she basically begged me to find some time to set the network stuff back up, because she hated seeing ads now. She got used to the pi-holes, and then they were suddenly gone. She was like “yeah a lot of my favorite sites are basically unusable now. I don’t know how the hell I ever functioned before you set those things up…” What sent her over the edge was when she noticed an ad on our TV’s sleep screen. Not even in the show we were watching. Just on the sleep screen, because the show had been paused for like 15-20 minutes. That one ad was the straw that broke the camel’s back, because even when the device was idle it was still trying to show her ads.

There’s very little disagreement among .ml users because .ml is so heavily moderated. As an insider, it looks like calm waters all around you. But other instances easily see the dissent getting quashed, and only deal with the .ml users spouting insane comments on non-ml communities.

who own land

Let me stop you right there…

Not yet, but that’s the end goal. The tricky part is that they’re only offering bulk downloads for now, which means downloading a single artist or album would be difficult/impossible. You’d need to download the entire compressed file of like 300GB of music, then extract the specific songs/artists/albums you wanted. The goal for now is preservation, meaning they want to make the bulk download as easy as possible, to make sure people can preserve it. Once they’ve got that in a pretty good spot, they may look into allowing more granular downloads.

Yes, and it hasn’t been easy to dig up until recently. There were a few ways to search the “hidden” metadata fields that Spotify uses internally. But it definitely hasn’t been easy or straightforward.

Those hidden fields are how Spotify recommends similar artists. You have a few bands on repeat with specific instruments, chord progressions, and singer vocal range? Gee, maybe you’ll enjoy other bands that are similar to that…

Yup, this is the real answer. Verified vendors’ stock isn’t kept separate from the shitty scammers’ stock. Vendor has 10 good memory cards in stock, and a scammer has 5 fakes? The bin will have all 15 cards… So buying from the vendor doesn’t guarantee you get a real memory card, because the counterfeits are in the same bin.

Every professional photographer knows that good SD cards are Sandisk branded and come from B&H Photo Supply… While bad SD cards are Sandisk branded and come from Amazon.

I had it happen to me at MicroCenter. Got a mechanical keyboard, in a seemingly-new box. No return sticker on it. Opened it up, and the damned thing was missing like six keys and absolutely covered in gamer chud. Someone very obviously bought it, put their old keyboard in the box, and “returned” it. And whoever took the return didn’t bother checking, or mark it as an open box.

They didn’t disclose it because there was no AI in the final product. The AI was for placeholder textures, which were replaced by real artists’ work as they were made. Some of the AI textures slipped through the cracks on release day, but a week 1 patch removed all traces of the AI before anyone even realized it was AI.

IMO this looks bad on the awards show, because the final product didn’t have any AI. And the production team was proactive in ensuring it didn’t have any AI before any kind of public backlash ever happened. Once they realized the issue, they issued a patch to fix it on their own, without needing to be pushed into it by public pressure. That’s what a company should do, and it shows that the devs really cared about their game.

Tax productivity, not work. Worker productivity has skyrocketed in the past few decades, but taxes have remained constant. So the rich have been able to extract increasing amounts of productivity, while paying proportionally less and less in taxes. Meanwhile, worker wages have remained stagnant, meaning their productivity has gone up but they’re still being paid (and taxed) the same.

Wealth taxes should still absolutely be a thing, but they should be entirely divorced from a work (productivity) tax.

Yeah, my smart TVs are the noisiest devices on my network, by far. In a day of heavy usage where I’m doomscrolling and constantly scrolling past ads, my phone may log ~2500 blocked requests. My Roku and Samsung TVs both average around 7000 blocked requests per day, even when we haven’t used them at all. That’s a request to their data-harvesting and ad servers getting blocked every ~12 seconds, even when they’ve been turned “off” all day.

A squatter is why Valve used steampowered.com instead of steam.com. The owner of steam.com (who has owned the domain since the early 90s!) has consistently refused to sell to anyone, and has never stated a specific reason why.

I have a similar story… But first off, you can do that directly through the pihole’s UI. No need to set up custom DNS stuff just for her. Just create an empty blocklist, and assign her devices to only use that list. Multiple blocklists are also handy if you have kids, because you can set things like porn blocklists, and only assign them to the kids’ devices. So you can still jork it when you want, without the kids being able to accidentally stumble across anything.

I have a basic blocklist for guests as well, which is the default list for any new device that connects to my guest network. It selectively blocks some of the more invasive BS but doesn’t block some of the more “this will make things on your device stop working” trackers, like how some Google devices refuse to work unless you allow their trackers.

I’m pretty sure you can even set lists to default based on an IP range? Like if you have multiple subnets for different VLANs, you can set a default list (or lists) for each VLAN. So like you can have an IoT VLAN with a default “stop phoning home, I just want to be able to cast to you” type of blocklist. Then your guest VLAN can have its own default list. And your personal devices can have their own list as well. I haven’t personally dug into that yet, but it’s on my list of future projects.

My wife was annoyed with my dual piholes until I got some basic whitelists dialed in for her. She’s a stock Android user, and my Google blocklist broke basically all of her phone’s native apps… Because Google’s invasive tracking is fully wormed through all of them.

It basically took an evening of us hunt-and-peck’ing our way through her phone’s blocked requests, whitelisting one thing at a time to see what was necessary and what was just tracking BS. I set her up with an automatic VPN that connected whenever she was away from the house, so she was always connected to the home network, and always protected by the pihole. Once we got that figured out, (and she learned to stop clicking the damned sponsored Google search results, which fail to connect with the pihole), she basically stopped noticing it. She got used to having it. She started taking it for granted…

We recently moved, and I haven’t had time to set my media/server stuff back up yet. I’m just running the basic ISP modem/router for the time being. And now that she got used to the pihole, she has been hit with whiplash because she’s suddenly seeing ads again. She visited her usual World of Warcraft site, and was like “what the fuck is this? The damned site is basically unusable…” She insists on using Chrome, (because it’s what her phone uses, and she wants to sync between the two), so I was only able to install the lite version of uBlock Origins as a stopgap, because Google intentionally broke the full version.

What really got her was when she noticed our Roku TV’s idle screen suddenly had ads. She was like “what the hell do you mean the goddamned TV has built-in ads? We aren’t even watching anything right now! It’s just the fucking sleep screen!”

Yes dear, why do you think I insisted on setting the pihole up years ago? Ads are invasive, and you don’t even realize how bad it is until you’re out. Once you get used to living without them, going back is rough.

I’ve literally heard coworkers mention the whole “I actually don’t want a raise because my taxes would go up and I’d make less” bullshit before. I do what I can to redirect them when I hear it, but some people are extremely dug into their worldview and don’t want to be helped. Like acknowledging a progressive tax rate would require acknowledging that their entire concept of income and taxation is built on a lie.

That just means you’re not paying taxes on the income. It’s not like you get the entire $700 back in taxes, because your tax rate probably isn’t 100%. If you pay 30% in taxes, (no clue what you actually pay), writing off the $700 would simply mean you pay $210 less on your taxes.