You must not be that interested in staying in contact with your family if you’re only willing to use one, specific way to do it and simply refuse to use any other method.

How about texting? Does texting work?

This guy obnoxiouses.

Wait, no, that’s not right.

Uh, instructions unclear, dick stuck in Reddit? How’s that?

Consider that we’re evaluating Firefish vs. Lemmy vs. Kbin

There’s a third one I didn’t know about?

That’s gonna be the one to take off. Put your chips on Firefish. It’s always the one I’m not using.

There are alternatives to Lemmy. Kbin, I’d argue, is superior in most respects. (Kbin is still obviously young and rough around the edges at times, though.)

I try to use both equally, because I’m always on the hook for picking the “doomed” standard in any 50/50 contest. It’s easier to read stuff from other instances in kbin, and that gives it the appearance of more frequent and more current activity; lemmy, even on “All/Active” or “All/Hot”, frequently drops 30 threads from one dude at the top of my feed, or I have three pages of threads with no comments and 6 upvotes. So even though I hate how kbin handles viewing pictures thumbnails (click on the post, wait for everything to load, click on the thumbnail, wait for it to load, chuckle, then x out of the picture to read the comments), I end up spending more time there.

Nobody mentioned the smell? Holy shit, that sounds like the setup to an awful prank.

The smell is an intense sensory experience. We had ferrets for a few years, and at no point did I ever go nose-blind to them. They are the stinkiest things anyone otherwise sane has ever willingly let into their home. Cleaning their litter boxes practically requires a respirator. And that’s after their musk glands have been removed (which, at the time, was standard practice; you couldn’t hardly get ferrets from anywhere with their musk glands intact).

They’re fuckin’ adorable, and playful, and fun, but man, the smell. All the other problems with them being only-just-barely-domesticated wild animals aside, the smell is probably the most important thing to know about them.

My ex had two sun conures.

The thing I would like people to know is that they make the kind of noise that will literally drive you insane if your brain doesn’t adapt to tune it out. It’s loud, high-pitched, and constant.

It’s not about just making phone calls difficult or making it hard to hear what your friends are saying (especially if the parrots decided they hate your friend, which is a whole 'nother parrot problem). It’s so pervasive that it actively changes how your senses perceive your environment.

Years after they both died (at about 20 years old, the female died from getting eggbound and the male died of a broken heart soon after), my brain was still putting parrot noises into the background sounds of my house. I’d be doing my normal daily thing, then stop and be like “Wait, why have I been listening to parrots screeching for the past two hours? They’ve been dead for three years” and my brain would go “Oops, sorry,” and I’d stop hearing it for a while.

I’m guessing they will try to solve this issue with some cheap human labour to review what is being generated.

They already do. These current "AI"s are starting to look more and more like Mechanical Turks, except with a couple hundred third-world wage-slaves inside the box.

It couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of smug, self-satisfied shitheads.

Like today, but worse. We’ll have five-sigma events occurring once a week, but we’ll still insist on calling them “five-sigma” instead of “new normal”, and the denialists will still be denying that it’s any different than it’s ever been, and utopianists will still be screeching about how the technology that will save us is just “a few years” away, and lots of people will die of prosiac, totally preventable things like famines and droughts while the super-rich will have retreated to the bunkers they started building back in 2012 exactly for this scenario.

Dude, look, I’m sorry Firefox killed your dog (or whatever). But please stop spamming your irrational hate-boner for Mozilla all over the thread.

I frequently have to look up whether a term is a misspelling/mistranslation or an actual technical term (or a term in British English, or a British spelling for a technical word). For me, quotes do nothing. It will frequently refuse to look up the term I’m specifically hunting for, just the term it thinks I should be hunting for. Sometimes that means it’s a mistranslation… but not always.

Next time it comes up for me, I’ll keep a note of it and get back to you.

I have an even bigger problem trying to exclude terms from a search. The example I always use is try to look up “Dolphins -football”, and use any version of “-” you’d like (NOT, etc). The first results will always be the latest scores for the Miami Dolphins.

Year 2030 is a global target for renovations in every aspects of societies and countries.

By what method? Is that when the secret computer chip in the vaccine will turn on and kill us? Thereby removing all the people who have shown they’ll do anything the government tells them to do, leaving behind all the staunch and distrustful individualists who are harder to control? Or is this some other global renovation?

Especially since hydrogen as a fuel is a dead-end, so far as I can tell. In addition to the net energy loss that come from separating hydrogen from whatever else it’s attached to in the precursor material (please tell me they’re not using water for this…), who is going to want to drive a 2025 Toyota Hindenburg?

300 miles is just barely under the safe distance between most major towns \cities in parts of the us that means you barely or don’t get to your location on one charge

I’ve never owned a car in my life that gets more than 300 miles on a single tank of gas.

I can’t grasp the whole concept of Discord servers even though I was moderating one. They’re bad as a knowledge base, they’re bad as a discussion platform, so why do people keep creating them?

I mean, as a chat room, it’s fantastic. It’s a massively upgraded IRC (except in terms of the ease of discovering new servers), with QOL features I didn’t even know how badly I wanted back in the old Yahoo! Chat days (such as the ability to spin up a temporary thread to take an in-depth conversation out of the main channel without going to DMs). It’s for discussions that happen right now and are not meant to be conserved forever because, generally speaking, they’re not expected to be that important. I love discord for that, because I miss chat rooms.

But it’s absolutely garbage for being a repository of static knowledge. Releasing patch notes only in discord is ridiculous.

I wish people would stop trying to use Discord as an information repository/hub. It’s a chat program. It’s designed for people to engage in transient, real-time back-and-forth communication, not to store discussions or information for long-term use. I get so cranky at people who insist that Discord can be used like a web forum when it so obviously sucks nuts at it.

A forum has content that can stay up indefinitely, where the message history on narrowly defined subjects is packaged into a convenient container and is visible as far back in time as one cares to go. It’s easily searchable, and old discussions for which a user has new questions can be brought back up to the top of the list, in full. Trying to recreate that kind of functionality on Discord is not only stupid, but also generally futile. It’s the exact opposite of what Discord is intended to be.

The quickest way I’ve found to separate the articles that are going to be meaningless waste-of-time fluff pieces from ones that might be informative is to find the verb in the headline.

Is it something like “claims”, “calls for”, “praises”, “criticizes”, or “expects”? Fluff. If something deserving of a more concrete, direct verb had happened, the headline would have said so. Verbs like “slams” or “attacks” or “demands” are even worse; they’re aggressive and enthusiastic about their content but still can’t make the claim something actually happened or changed.

If the verb is preceded by “could”, “might”, “maybe”, or similar, especially with regard to tech news, it’s also probably an empty slow-news-day article, but those words aren’t necessarily as hollow as the ones mentioned above. Sometimes they’ll contain interesting information about the current state of things, even if they’re just going to lead you on a merry speculation romp about the optimistic/horrifying future.