I’ve never used Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok. I’m trying to get away from Facebook currently. I’ve successfully dumped Twitter, which I hardly used anyway. I only use YouTube because I can still block all ads, but if they ever force ads into my videos, I’ll drop it in an instant.

I’ve never cared for social media except as a way to stay in touch with friends and family, and maybe a way to meet new friends. But modern social media is just garbage content pumped into your feed constantly for clicks and reacts.

The only reason I haven’t let go of Facebook is because almost everyone I know is still there. If I dump it, I lose contact with 90% of my social group. I don’t really use Facebook anymore though, except to contact people.

EDIT: On a related note, I don’t believe children should have electronic devices. Maybe around 10 years old, they should be allowed to carry a locked down phone or something, so their parents can reach them, but they can’t browse the Internet or send photos to people, etc.

It was around 2010 or so when I first saw a friend hand their iPad to their 1-yr old to keep them distracted. That was a $600 device! Which was a lot of money for a personal electronic device back then.

As an IT professional who had to fix electronic devices all the time, I mentioned to my friend that a child probably shouldn’t have unsupervised access to an iPad, and they told me that’s why it has a thick padded case; a lesson they learned when their first iPad got cracked by the child. So the baby broke a $600 iPad and they bought another and handed it back to the kid?! Sheesh…

I don’t know why this Fifth Element comparison is always shared when this specific picture of Musk looks more like Roger from the show Doug.

I always attempt to play a game the way the developers intended the first time through. If I decide to give it another playthrough and I don’t want to put up with the extra grindy parts of the game, I’ll look for legitimate cheats to help me fast-forward through the rough parts.

I mean “legitimate” as in, cheats the developers put in the game, not outside hacks or mods that alter the game itself. I’m not big on mods in general, and I don’t usually use cheats, but I will in rare situations.

Back in the day, Warcraft III had cheats that let you power through each level with stuff like infinite resources, invulnerability, or just letting you automatically complete a level. I used those on recurring playthroughs because each level could easily take 30 mins to an hour to beat, and it was very grindy.

In Satisfactory, there’s a cheat where you can add a single stack of a resource into the back of a factory cart, then deconstruct the cart. You’ll get all the resources of the factory cart in your inventory, plus double the resource you put into the cart.

Do this dozens of times and you can exponentially grow resources without having to wait on factories to make them. I’m pretty sure the developers are aware of this “glitch” because it’s never been patched out, even after a bunch of people started pointing it out on official Satisfactory forums.

I played hundreds of hours of the game and made some pretty massive continent-stretching factories. Upon building a new world, I started to implement this “strategy” to hurry up and acquire rare resources so I could get factories off the ground. Saved me from hundreds of hours of gameplay, waiting on production lines to make basic resources into more advanced resources so I could get to the next step.

A buddy of mine asked to be part of my Steam Family so he could have access to my 4,000+ game library. He regularly streams games online and figured it’d save him tons of money buying games to play.

But he’s also completed all achievements on almost every game he’s played on console and uses some website to automatically complete all the achievements for his Steam games, so he doesn’t need to redo them on PC.

The thing about Steam Family is… if someone’s caught cheating and earns a vac ban, the owner of the family account receives the ban, not the individual player. I told him I was worried that cheating of any kind might affect my immaculate record and/or library of games and he decided to just buy his own games instead of risking my account. Good friend; he didn’t even argue. I was still willing to let him have access as long as he was careful, but he chose another route.

[…] we have so many things wrong PlanetSide that it makes the stars almost irrelevant.

Yeah, this has been my fear lately. As a kid in the '80s/'90s, I had high hopes for humanity. I loved space travel stories; read so many science fiction books, watched Star Trek/Star Wars, loved space films of all genres…

But lately, I’ll be happy if we ever make it to Mars. The one person who had a dedicated mission to get a man on Mars turned out to be a self-destructing billionaire sociopath who seems to have abandoned that dream for political meddling aspirations instead.

If we can get capitalism out of the way, humanity might have a chance at bouncing back. But as long as a few powerful elites maintain control over society, our hopes and dreams will forever be redirected toward financial gains until the collapse of society.

On the plus side, even Rome, the most stable and advanced civilization outside of our own, eventually collapsed. Humanity survived and eventually went on to thrive once again, doing even better this time. By the historical timeline of the birth and death of civilizations, America is long overdue for a collapse. Maybe we’re about to see a global change that will reset our predicament and give us another chance to succeed. If we can learn from our past.

I can’t vouch for all East Asian countries, but in Japan, it’s a matter of formality. When you meet someone, you always refer to them by their family name and an honorific. (Like we would say, “Mr. Smith.”)

Once you start to get more friendly and familiar with an individual, you’ll move on to more intimate honorifics, until you’re allowed to call them by their direct first name, no honorifics. That’s a sign that you’re very close with someone.

It allows people to refer to you without being too direct and familiar until you’ve gotten to know them well. And you can tell what relationship two people have by what names they use to call each other. Heck, really close friends will probably make up nicknames for each other too.

When I was in the US military, it was kind of the same mentality. Everyone was referred to by rank and last name only. As you got to know someone of the same rank or lower than yours, you could refer to them by last name alone, no rank required. But only the closest of friends would refer to each other by first name.

I just wish I could see how life goes on without me. How our world changes in the future beyond my limited time on this planet.

I think about people who lived hundreds of years ago. How they couldn’t even imagine the scientific and technological advancements that we have. And then I think about hundreds of years into the future. What changes will be so extreme and advanced that I can’t even imagine it today?

I wish there was some way for me to glimpse into that future and see where society is heading. Will we expand out to the stars? Will we be extinct long before we leave this planet? What’s the ultimate future for humanity? These are questions I want to know, but will never get a chance to find out, unless everyone but me dies out in the next 30-40 years. And I highly doubt that’s gonna happen.

Dude, if you look at Zootopia objectively, remove all the personal connections and relationships to the characters… (spoilers ahead)

Judy was hired through a DEI-type program (assistant mayor Bellweather mentioned something about a “mammal inclusion initiative” that got her hired), which is normally a good thing, but they kind of play it like that’s the only reason she got a shot at being a cop. Bunnies aren’t cops in this world. The police academy was specifically designed for larger, more powerful mammals. Judy had to circumvent traditional training protocol and use her cadets’ power and size to assist her in order to graduate.

She goes off-book on her first day. Chases a supposed criminal, causing all sorts of mayhem and damage across town. Insubordination against her boss. But she doesn’t get fired, thanks to her political connections.

When she’s given a high-profile case to work (again, thanks to connections with the assistant mayor), with no resources to access, she partners with a known shifty scam artist off the street. Blackmails him with tax fraud to cooperate (instead of turning him in). Coerces him to climb a fence so she’d have “probable cause” to investigate the area without a warrant. Basically finding loopholes to circumvent official processes.

She also manages to become part of the family in the local mafia. After a single visit to the mafia, she becomes the godmother of the mob boss’ granddaughter. She even uses them later to intimidate a witness to make him talk. Literally threatens to murder the suspect if he doesn’t talk!

Then there’s the fact that she single-handedly caused the fall of two separate regimes! First, she takes down the mayor for kidnapping predators, then she takes out the next mayor for causing predators to “go savage.”

Then she gets the shifty scam artist hired into the police force as her new partner!

From an outside perspective, she’s an extremely crooked cop that abuses her position, uses political connections to get her way, makes exceptions for criminals to gain access to police resources, and violates the rights of citizens. ACAB definitely applies to Judy.

I keep a wishlist of things I want/need with their regular prices marked. On Black Friday, I check that list to see if anything got discounted. More than likely, nothing is, because discounted products are usually cheaper variants, or already-expensive items marked up in advance, then dropped to regular price for Black Friday.

Nothing on my list was discounted this year. So I bought some games through the Steam Black Friday sale and called it a day.

Depends on how much milk you add to it. Personally, I see it as more of a breakfast stew; more solid food in the bowl than liquid.

I used to exclusively browse Reddit via apps. I retired relatively young, and as such, no longer sit in front of a computer all day. Being able to browse Reddit from my phone or tablet was essential.

Then the whole API thing happened a couple years ago. Reddit started charging app developers for every use of their data, which would cost the larger apps millions of dollars for something that was previously free. It was Reddit’s attempt to squash all mobile apps, so they could push their ad-riddled garbage app. Or make tons of money off any third-party apps that were too stubborn to quit hosting Reddit content. Win/win for Reddit.

I’m extremely anti-advertisement and am not going to be forced to use an app that shoves ads in my face every few posts or comments. I immediately started looking for alternatives, and Lemmy was the most common suggestion for an alternative to Reddit.

I made an account here and spent some time poking around. It was like Reddit, but not as many people, so the content seemed more focused. I could actually comment here and not be drowned out by thousands of other comments. Even if I was late to a thread, I’d still get noticed and be able to share in a conversation, not just shout into the void.

People were generally nicer here too. On Reddit, there were always haters in every thread. Always contrarians who had to argue with everyone. I rarely see people being assholes here. Not to say they don’t exist, but they’re more rare.

I started subscribing to communities here (the Lemmy version of subreddits), but eventually decided to just keep browsing by “All,” since there wasn’t as much regular content. That means I still have a full news feed, but I also don’t get stuck doomscrolling forever.

It seems jumping to Lemmy was a good choice because soon after I left, subreddits started losing their mods if they spoke out against the CEO or fought against site-wide changes. They were replaced by Reddit admins or bots, who did a terrible job moderating. Lots of communities started crumbling, especially the popular subreddits whose mods were replaced by bots.

I’ve fully abandoned Reddit now. I wouldn’t be surprised if my account got auto banned from a bunch of subreddits at some point for some innocuous comment I made years ago. I still get emails every now and then stating that someone found an old comment and replied, but besides people asking for help or advice, I just ignore it. Reddit is dead to me.

Ah dammit… Curiosity Stream was the only streaming service I’m still actually paying for. I dumped everything else for raising prices and enshittifying their services.

Meh, it’s a deal to get more subscribers. I’m not mad at them for not extending it to all users. It is a little shady that they didn’t make it clear it’s for new subscribers, though. If that’s their target audience, they should make it a little more apparent.

The way I was taught growing up, brackets are [these]. Parenthesis are (these).

Yes, technically the latter are also brackets. But they can also be called parenthesis, whereas the former is exclusively a bracket. So we were taught to call them separate words to differentiate while doing equations.

I have a Google phone, which has YouTube embedded on it. I can’t remove it. I had to disable it, then tell my phone to redirect all YouTube links to my browser. Now I can block ads again!

My uncle retired from the US Air Force in the '90s and got full medical and dental benefits for life for himself and his civilian wife, simply because he made it to retirement.

I retired from the US Air Force in 2022 and I had to qualify for 100% disability through the VA before they gave me the same deal. And that was only for me; my wife had to serve and get her own 100% disability rating to also qualify for those benefits.

Crazy how much things can change in 30 years.

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The first Mad Max movie is literally just a cop (Max) fighting against a deadly biker gang in a small town. The second movie didn’t say anything about an apocalypse, it was just set in a desert wasteland.

It was the American (maybe international?) version of Mad Max 2 that added a prologue about an apocalyptic world event.

So yeah, in the original Australian version, this may just be some lawless hicks surviving in the Australian desert, while the rest of the world continues on like normal.

Lot of good explanations here, but here’s another to help understand the basic idea of DNS. I’m gonna use a lot of technical explanations, but I’ll break it down into an ELI5 format for you.

Computers communicate using computer jargon; codes and numbers and math, etc. that process data immediately. Computers do these calculations incredibly quickly, so they don’t need any fluff to get to the point.

Humans, on the other hand, can’t process raw data like computers. We need contextual clues to help us understand and relay information. So we build in translations for everything our computers do, to help us understand the raw data that our computers are processing.

Every website on the Internet is assigned an address, which computers use to locate them. Kind of like street addresses to find a person’s house. But this address is in computer code. In this case, we call it an IP address (Internet Protocol address). A string of numbers if you’re using the old standard IPv4, or a string of even longer letters and numbers if you’re using the new standard, IPv6.

Mini-tangent: Why do we have two standards for IP addresses? Because the original version 4 standard was too limited. The IP address range was from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255, which allowed up to 4,294,967,296 unique addresses. But with the boom of the Internet age in the past 3 decades, we quickly used up all those addresses and couldn’t make any more without seriously disrupting the way computers process IP addresses.

So we added a hexadecimal version 6 IP address scheme that allows for up to 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 (2¹²⁸) unique IP addresses. Those addresses are written from 0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000 to FFFF.FFFF.FFFF.FFFF.FFFF.FFFF.FFFF.FFFF. (Hexadecimal counts from 0-9, then A-F before starting over at 0, so base-16 counting (0-F) instead of our standard base-10 counting (0-9)). I highly doubt we’ll ever run out of addresses with this new standard.

So our computers use IP addresses to find a website, but how are humans going to remember that? If I wanted to go to Google, I could type 64.233.170.139 into the address bar and find Google, but who’s gonna remember that string of numbers? And that’s only one website. Imagine all the other sites you browse every day. You gonna remember all those IP addresses? It’s gets even more difficult when you mix in IPv6 addresses. You’d have to remember 2404:6800:4003:c00::71 to find Google’s website! And most browsers don’t let you use IPv6 to connect directly to a website, so good luck getting there with only that string of numbers and letters.

So DNS (Domain Name Service) is a program designed to translate IP addresses into domain names that make sense to the human brain. Instead of remembering the IP address for Google, I can just type google.com into the address bar and DNS knows to translate that domain into an IP address for the computer to find. Now I can remember a simple word or two to find a website! Much easier for our human brains to process, while still allowing for a specific and calculable IP address for computers to process and find an exact host.

Why don’t we just tell computers to use domain names instead of IP addresses? Well, because computers operate on number operations, not words. Every word we program into a computer needs to be translated into math for the computer to process anyway. If computers just use domain names, they’ll still need to translate it into a number that it can process. Creating a DNS program allows you to set those calculations to the side and process them separately from the computers’ other functions.

In large corporations, they usually build an entire DNS server just to process all the address translations that the business and its customers will be doing through the course of their daily operations. It puts that work on another machine entirely so you’re not slowing down your regular computers with additional processing power.

Also… domain names might change. Say you buy twitter.com, but decide to rename it to x.com. It’s still the same website, with the same physical server location. But now with a different, simpler domain for people to remember. The IP address doesn’t change; computers still know exactly where to go to find the website. But now people have a different domain name they can type to find it. It makes it easier to rebrand your site on a whim without creating a whole new address for computers to find.

You don’t need to ask your local town to give you a new street address simply because you tore down and rebuilt a house on your property; the address is still the same. You just have a new building for people to visit.

I am surely not the first person to have thought of this.

The day the Steam Machine was announced, there were at least 3 Borg Cube memes at the top of my news feed. It’s a common association, but I gladly welcome more memes about it.

As a kid in the '80s/'90s, my hair looked exactly like Will’s from Stranger Things. When my peers pressured me to change my hairstyle in 7th grade, I tried a bowl cut. It was the same, just the bottom half was shaved. Looked super ugly.

In 8th grade, I tried a buzz cut, which seemed to be pretty popular with my peers. A little longer on top, tight on the sides, tapered in back. Back then, I think I asked barbers to cut it as a #4 on top, #2 on the sides. It was extremely low maintenance; I could just shower and towel dry and my hair was immediately dry and perfect for the day. My hair was so extremely thick and soft, people joked that I had fur instead of hair. I had a lot of comments that touching my head was like petting a puppy, or a bear pelt. My hair also grows straight out of my scalp, so if I took too long to get a haircut, I started getting a bit of a mini-'fro.

Then I joined the US military at 18 and got the buzz cut professionally trimmed every couple weeks. My hair grows extremely fast and we had military hair regulations that had to be maintained, so I constantly needed to touch it up. I changed my cut to a #2 on top, #1 on the sides, with a little extra length in the front. Of course, still tapered in the back. The military doesn’t allow block cuts, you have to taper the ends.

I spent 13 years with a buzz cut in the military. My wife spent most of those years begging me to grow my hair out, but I kept telling her I can’t; military regs prevent me from having long hair. Finally, she showed me a picture of Captain America from the Avengers movie. Claimed he was technically military, but he had longer hair styled in a way that was still within regs. So I agreed to grow out my hair like Captain America.

Unfortunately, I had started balding a bit in my late 20s. My hair was getting thinner and my hairline was receding. I didn’t have enough hair in the front to style it like Captain America’s, so I combed the front back and over to a side, giving a bit more lift in the front with what thinning hair I had left. I grew out all the hair on top of my head and parted it to one side. On the short side, I buzzed it right up to the part, then kept the sides buzzed short with a taper in the back. I would tell barbers to buzz with a #1 up to the part, then go “skin” on the sides and back, tapered on the back.

It worked fine for the last 7 years of my military service. Then I retired and spent nearly 3 years struggling to figure out a civilian haircut. I had spent so long adhering to military regulations that every time my hair got a little shaggy, I’d panic and get a military haircut again. But I also didn’t want people to immediately look at me as a military guy when they met me. Short hair made me look much older, and as I was just starting my 40s, looking older is not what I wanted anymore.

Finally, I just shaved my head. A complete reset on my hair. I figured, if I’m completely bald, I’m going to have to go through an awkward regrowth period, so I’ll be forced to deal with it instead of being able to fix it on a whim. I was fully retired after my military service, so I didn’t have to worry about looking presentable for anyone. I basically just holed myself up at home; no one saw my bald head except my wife. I should note that I have a wrinkly scalp that looks like a scrotum, so the bald look is really ugly on me.

After nearly 6 months of letting it grow wild, I finally got a trim. I parted my hair to one side and cleaned up around my neck and ears, but left the rest. My hair is still growing straight out of my scalp, so I need a little hair product to comb it down and hold it, but otherwise, it’s been holding a side part pretty well.

I also grew out a beard for about the past 4 months. When I retired a few years ago, my chin had a white spot to one side, and in the 3+ years since then, it’s spread to my whole chin. So my beard is salt-and-pepper with a solidly white chin now. I don’t really care for the beard, but my wife likes it and I get compliments on it from others, so I keep it trimmed neat and maybe an inch long. It definitely helps to hide the fact I was former military, since we couldn’t grow beards while serving. And it adds a unique character to my look.