I have friends who have actually emigrated to the US who have been begging me to go, telling me I’d love it. Cultural melting pot and all. My English is pretty good and I have a lot of cultural exposure to US things. It’s strange, but even as the US has done stuff I very strongly disagree with, I still have some admiration for a lot of American things. That’s soft power baby!

These repeated calls to move have dried up very suddenly in the past year and some of them have left.

I’m from Lebanon where we’re taught from day one to leave the proverbial crab bucket and go figure out a living somewhere where life is (theoretically) better.

The most realistic big international city with decent pay I can move to is actually Dubai. And I go there a lot for business - just like the US, there’s some good and some bad. There’s a lot of (valid) complaining about such places in communities like Lemmy but frankly Dubai just is the melting pot world city that is accessible in my part of the world. Many of my friends have been rejected for immigration because of financial reasons (or for being from the wrong religious community…), ending years-long processes to move westward. As if it’s their fault their bank savings lost more than 99% of their value in 2020-2021. Compared to those who moved to the Gulf who basically got a work visa in their email after getting the job and flew out the week after. Do you know how hard it is to even briefly visit another country with a passport as weak as ours?

But honestly moving anywhere feels like an impossibly immense decision. My friends in the Gulf are less enthusiastic, they don’t say I’ll love it, they say I’ll be paid enough to afford moving somewhere I’ll love after five years. Sometimes I feel like it’s inevitable that I move there. But that’s how I felt about the US in like 2015. So who knows.

When I was a kid this is what American cities looked like in movies. A completely different world than the one I lived in. It’s almost comforting to see again.

I feel like cities in general are shown less as glamorous places to be now.

Boy have I got news for you.

Look up the Zizians.

(Ok they’re only a tangential offshoot of people who maybe really like the Basilisk thought experiment and mostly don’t believe it. But hey. It’s underway!)

I can’t place why, but the thought of used enterprise SSDs still sketches me out more than HDDs. Maybe it’s just that I only ever think of RAID in terms of hard drives, paired with a decade+ of hearing about SSD reliability issues, which are very different from the more familiar problems HDDs can have.

The power and noise difference makes it more appealing to me, moreso than the speed, personally. Maybe when consumer bottom-barrel SSDs get a little better I could be convinced into RAIDing a bunch of them and hoping one cold spare is enough.

EDIT: I can acquire new ~200$ 4TB Orico branded drives where I am relatively easily. Hm.

Unusually shaped fictional clothes in 2011: oh the designers are having fun with this one

Unusually shaped fictional clothes in 2025: this is either slop or derivative of slop, no thanks

It’s just that the well has been poisoned. There are real unedited photos and pieces of art that retrospectively look like they were prompt fondled into existence. Or worse, there are actual things I’ve taken my time to write that have been accused of being generated.

It’s just how it is now.

“What can you say about Carlton.” 🙂 “He was Carlton.”

Once every few months I remember that there’s virtually no chance my name and information aren’t in these databases, especially now that my country has gone through a recent war phase. Even if I didn’t sign up to Instagram and Facebook when I was a teenager, my family, friends, and whole neighborhood use unscrupulous online services that can be used to map out communities like that. I live far from the border with Palestine but let’s not pretend that makes a difference.

While I don’t think it does us any favors to front-load any plans for the future with “just send <group> to <place>”, it’s also good to point out that a chunk of them are originally from Libya in the first place.

Posy is my spirit animal.

This happened to me too and the Ublock filter fixed it. I dread to think of the day YouTube is made to be completely unfixable.

Been thinking of getting a used Switch Mini exclusively to solder in a chip and use it as a nice emulation handheld. As long as it doesn’t rat itself out over Bluetooth or something to its older brother gathering dust behind the tv (which has never been touched by the light of piracy), I should still be good I guess.

It’s unfortunate, but what I’m actually worried about is that world where different devices will report on each other.

I could maybe see connecting it to Home Assistant to deliver a silent notification, instead of waking everyone up at night for example.

This is the only use case I could possibly think of for networking a microwave. An enhanced mute feature.

I think the Raspberry Pi 4 -> Pi 5 is a very clear demonstration of this.

The power requirements went way up, and therefore the needed cooling, after years of the 1->2->3->4 being pretty similar. And most importantly, the prices for those were similar (35 USD MSRP I think, or usually around 60 USD here). The new one is much more expensive than that and that hasn’t gone down without controversy.

Maybe consoles are more visible to most people but the different versions of Pis are much more apples to apples and are designed to be drop-in upgrades.

I think I’ll still be using Pi 4s for a long time personally.

I’ve been reflecting on this a lot lately, especially after watching a video by an internet funny man I enjoy (Eddie Burback) about him locking his phone away for a month (not a feasible strategy for most people.)

I also enjoy pretty much anything online much more on the desktop. When things started pivoting to app-only it felt very weird at the time - the phone access was always the clunkier secondary backup nice-to-have.

That said, 80% of my browsing happens on my phone. It’s less fun and it’s more mindless, but that’s the truth. I think I’ll hit a point where I find my phone just too magnetic but as a dopamine crutch it’s cripplingly convenient.

I don’t see the humor in it anymore. Whenever it comes to even admitting the crimes happening to/in Palestine, it’s always decent people getting the entire book thrown at them, while others who actually do something evil get off scott free.

You can’t just ask for accountability for crimes. You have to kiss the ring and you have to be made an example of. What we are seeing with the response to student action is actually unprecedented and it’s genuinely unhinged. And it’s not just the US, it’s most of Europe too.

It’s not enough that our brothers and sisters in Palestine are getting rounded up and massacred. You have to support it with every fiber of your being or you’re a terrorist. After planing my whole life to move to the West I’m now genuinely scared I’ll be jailed for thought crime if it keeps getting crazier.

This is a legitimately impressive hoard, but I do wonder if bad actors could theoretically waste seeders’ time and bandwidth. I’m not familiar with torrent sabotage at all.

This is adding more bits of straw on the camel’s back regarding me actually going for it and setting up a seedbox, although these are big big files.

I wish there was more stuff like this for global issues not just US stuff. This affects the world, sure, but it’s so US-forward, I feel like I’d prefer to proliferate more relevant stuff to me.

I learned it maybe this week and I’m now upset that I can’t remember from where.

Edit: I have bikeshedded my way into finding where I heard it instead of doing something else. It’s this Zack Freedman video, and here’s a transcript screenshot.

On one hand, nice to have my country mentioned in a context where we’re not being warcrimed, on the other, I’m somewhat disappointed that our government actually lifted a finger in the investigation of a foreign intellectual property case.

Just count the rings bro

/s

Part of what drew me to the old site in ye olde 2013 was that it was the largest platform that wasn’t shitty about this specific subject.

Funny to see this is now the standard expectation for that place. Look how they massacred my boy

I’ve always been curious about this stuff and I know I need to make some effort soon, ever since we moved our home recordings from VHS to DVD some 15-20 years ago.

My understanding is that SSDs are also likely to lose data when unpowered for a long time, which is why they haven’t been recommended to me for external backup drives.

“Spinning rust” is much cheaper than I thought, even if I have to pay 200$ in shipping to get a bunch of massive used server drives here. And it seems to not have that problem, with the downside of either needing to be completely powered off or wasting a bit of power when it’s not active. I’m still not sure where the HDD parking technology is at.

Of course ripping all the physical media would also be nice. A lot of the original discs I have (most of my discs are straight shitty copies with one file, yay third world) have things like special features and multiple audio tracks, things like that. I wonder how those should be organized.