Ding ding ding. Capitalists are seeing the inevitable lack of blood for the blood god, and are starting to panic. Infinite growth in a finite system, after all.

Out of curiosity, which book?

Yeah, my ratios skyrocketed when I finally got access to fiber. Went from struggling to hit 1.0, to easily hitting 150.0. My highest ratio is nearly 1000.

I suggest you read the article you actually posted, because it supports what I said. Whoever wins the state gets all 38 electoral votes. It’s not like a 51/49 split has the votes split. Whoever gets 51% wins all of the electoral college votes. The congressional districts are gerrymandered to hell, but that’s because they determine house reps. Just like I said.

Gerrymandering doesn’t factor into presidential elections, because presidential elections don’t use districts. Gerrymandering only affects local and state elections. It’s how all of the crazy house reps have rock solid seats, for instance. But on the presidential scale, it’s voter suppression and swing voters, combined with presidential candidates focusing their time in expected swing states to reach that magic 270 electoral college votes.

Our local and state elections are 100% gerrymandered, but the presidential doesn’t use districts. Instead, republicans have focused on suppressing blue votes. Things like shutting down voting locations in blue areas, so people in blue areas need to travel farther, and wait times at the remaining locations are 6-8 hours, instead of minutes. Making it illegal to hand out water to people waiting in line. Voter ID laws, to bar people who can’t afford the fees+time off work to get an ID. Plenty of others too, but those are the big ones. Usually they use the “ensuring the integrity of the election” messaging to justify it, but it’s really about eliminating blue votes.

Texas had more votes for Kamala than New York; Texas had 4.8M democrat voters, while New York only had 4.6M. Believe it or not, most states are fairly purple, and the elections largely depend on a small amount (less than 10%) of swing voters. Republican states have also largely relied on voter suppression to disenfranchise blue voters, rather than trying to grab the swing votes.

When you do frequent midnight alerts for missing elderly, people disable the alerts on their phone entirely.

I’m reminded of the time cops woke up the entire state of Texas at 5AM, to say a dude named Sam Altman shot at a cop near Amarillo. They issued a Blue Alert for the entire state. For reference, many Texans were more than an 8 hour drive away from where it happened. Yeah, shit like that gets emergency notifications muted.

For real, I remember when Solitaire was added to Windows to teach people how to use a mouse. It wasn’t just some fun little thing they added on a whim. The goal was to provide an entertaining way for users to naturally learn mouse controls like clicking and dragging.

Before then, you had to use the keyboard to navigate text, because you literally didn’t have a mouse.

Yeah, I understand the mindset behind “if I tell people Linux is easy, they might actually switch.” Getting people to switch means overcoming a lot of social inertia. But the issue is that this makes you an unreliable source when a newbie inevitably runs into issues. They’ll be more likely to go “eh I was told it was easy but this isn’t. I guess it’s just not for me.”

Providing a realistic outlook may make Linux sound less appealing, but it will mean those who do try it are more likely to stick with it.

There’s a setting in windows that opens snipping tool when print screen is pressed. This allows to select a screen, window or a rectangle. More than that, it also has screen recording functionality. Very good for quick screen grabs with no additional software required.

Win+Shift+S is the keyboard shortcut. You can even do screen recordings. I use that shit all the time at work, to send bug reports when the useless fucking software we’re forced to use has a repeatable crash that the dev team can’t replicate with text reports alone.

Yeah, dB is a measure of difference, not an absolute value. Every increase of 10dB represents twice as much volume, but that means 0dB is essentially just a reference point. Going from 0 to 10dB means you have doubled the volume. 20 is twice of 10, 30 is twice of 20, etc… But what is twice of 0? If 0 were an absolute value, the entire scale would break down because 0x2 is still 0.

People have a really hard time wrapping their minds around the logarithmic growth of the dB scale… For reference, a rock concert can easily hit 120dB, but the loudest sound that earth’s atmosphere can support is ~194dB. Because sound is a pressure wave with a compression and expansion. After 194dB, the atmospheric pressure isn’t enough to fully expand into the void after the compression. Once you get above that ~194dB threshold, it stops being a sound wave with a distinct push-pull, and becomes a solid shockwave that is all push. Above 194dB, it’s essentially an explosive wave.

And to briefly touch on what you mentioned about perception, there’s also the fact that different frequencies require different amounts of power to produce the same volume. Lower bass frequencies require more power to produce the same volume, because the bass waves are physically larger and require more motion from the speakers to produce. If you want a demonstration, go look up the difference between white noise and pink noise.

White noise has the same amount of power throughout the entire audio spectrum, but it tends to sound relatively high pitched and tinny. This is because those lower frequencies are quieter. In comparison, pink noise has a curved power distribution, mapped to how much power it takes to produce the same volume. This means it sounds much more “full”, as the low end is actually balanced with the highs. But listening to pink noise will be wildly different on a phone speaker vs a car stereo, because the phone speaker physically isn’t large enough to truly produce those low notes.

It’s playing the game by the rules as written. If the Game Master is upset at a player for using their own rules against them, that’s the GM’s fault. I can’t begrudge a guy manipulating a mega corporation (in this case, manipulating Google/YouTube’s algorithms) for profit. He needs viewer retention to stay at the top of the algorithm, so that’s what he’s doing.

He has literally said that the MS Paint doodles aren’t meant to be super descriptive or helpful. He started doing it in his meetings at Blizzard, because he found that any visual aid was good at keeping executives’ attention. Whenever he had to do a presentation, he’d use MS Paint every few minutes to keep them focused.

And now he does the same with his viewers. He busts out MS Paint every few minutes, just to refocus the viewers and keep them engaged. It’s not to help with whatever he’s describing; it’s just to keep the viewers engaged, so he keeps making money off of them.

To his credit, at least he admits this. It’s not like he’s hiding his strategy. He just does whatever will push him to the top of the algorithms and keep viewers engaged.

That wasn’t the question. It was asking what you want for free for a year. And this would be my answer too. Give me a year to gather as much gold as I can.

I used to work in a theater where the main director had recently died. It was cancer, and was a relatively long battle. The entire cast and crew watched the slow attrition, and her loss hit everyone pretty hard. She always sat in a specific seat during rehearsals. When she died, the theater even had an embroidered ribbon with “Reserved for [Director]” made, to hang on the seat.

About a week after she died, one of the audience lights started acting up. It was the one directly over her favorite seat. It would just randomly come on during rehearsals when the rest of the audience was dark. We all very quickly started calling it “the [director’s name] light.”

Those of you familiar with theatrical lighting may know that this “randomly decides to turn on” phenomenon is colloquially called ghosting. It happens often enough with older lighting systems, so it’s not unheard of. But the fact that it was directly over her seat, (and only ever during rehearsals, never during shows when an audience would have been bothered by it) fueled a lot of superstition. Needless to say, there were a lot of other “this theater is fucking haunted” things that started popping up.

The most memorable one for me happened after a rehearsal. The rehearsal had already ended, and most people had already left for the night. The lighting tech and I were in the booth, going over some of our notes and updating lighting cues. The director’s light was ghosting, but we didn’t think too much of it. Then the wall phone in the booth rang.

The phone ringing was notable for a few reasons… First, it was like 11:30 at night; Who the hell calls that late? Second, to the best of our knowledge, the phone didn’t fucking work. As far as anyone knew, it was just left over from when the theater had a landline patched into the booth. But normally it didn’t have a dial tone or anything, so you couldn’t dial out with it. And nobody knew the phone number for it, so it never got any calls.

The lighting tech and I swap confused/concerned looks, and I reach over to answer it. On the other end is just pure static. Like straight white noise. And no, I know what a fax sounds like. This wasn’t a fax. After answering and a few seconds of trying to hear a response through the static, the line goes dead. Okay, whatever. I hang up.

The very moment the phone returns to the wall hook, the director’s light in the audience flickers out. The lighting tech and I swap another confused/concerned look. She starts to worriedly say “so I think we’re done for now“, and I’m already shutting down my gear and grabbing my bag to leave by the third word in.

Yeah, Samsung TVs don’t have a native Jellyfin app either. You can sideload it, but good luck walking your “you touched my computer six months ago and now it’s broken. This is your fault” grandmother through that over the phone.

honestly every explanation probably just ends at ‘this is what i learned on and it works’.

Yeah, lots of these answers basically boil down to “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

Joke’s on us: The elderly are the MAGA. They’ll just expect their millennial children to support them again, by insisting that they move in.

That still won’t work. Either the forwarded port is getting blocked by Mullvad (which is bad) or you’re bypassing Mullvad to use the forwarded port (which is really bad). You’ve essentially roped yourself into a double-NAT situation, where your router has a forwarded port but the router behind yours (the VPN server, which you have no control over) doesn’t.