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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • It took me until the early 2020s to realize that men even have body washes in the first place.

    Keep in mind that I abandoned broadcast TV around 2001 or 2002, so I completely cut all commercials out of my life.

    Then when the first adblocker became available for Phoenix (later Firebird, then Firefox) around 2004, I was all over that like white on rice. So since 2004 the only ads I have had to suffer were when I set up a new system whose browsers needed configuring, and later once my browser protections became too strict and I needed a “naked” web browser for user-hostile sites that tied spyware and near-malware into site-critical functionality.

    So I have been “out of the advertising loop” for a very long time, and always saw bodywash as a female thing. I quite literally never “got the memo” that body washes came for men.

    And I’m not likely to get any, either. And not for any stupidly sexist reasons - after five decades on this rock, I am just habituated on bars of soap. I just don’t like the showering/soaping-up experience without bar soap.


  • Something like host over half of all Americans cannot read above a 5th grade level. Almost a third are functionally illiterate.

    It’s not that they don’t have critical thinking skills. It’s that the entire lower-90% have been so badly nerfed that it is increasingly difficult for anyone in that cohort to get to a point where they can educate themselves without copious assistance.

    And that’s exactly how Republicans prefer the population - uneducated, illiterate, ignorant and gullible. The better with which to scam them for their votes.




  • run an install script for either Mac or Linux (we do not support Windows as an installation platform at this time.)

    I always find it deeply ironic that valuable tools that are meant to protect people are released in forms that exclude an overwhelming proportion of the people who could use it.

    It was the same issue with Ladybird browser up until a month or so ago - they were projecting Windows support only some time in 2027 to 2029. Like, how the hell are you supposed to achieve a critical mass of eyeballs when the vast majority of people who would love to test the product just don’t have the platform to run it on? It’s ideological shortsightedness at its kindest characterization. And I wouldn’t be kind.

    Plus, DotNet is almost trivially cross-platform these days and almost ridiculously easy to develop with… for something like an install script you really don’t have an excuse to not hit all three platforms anymore.


  • I don’t like it, but it’s a pragmatic decision.

    Hosting for a simple website can be as little as a few bucks a month. That’s easy for any project to absorb, even if they are open-source with no one pulling a paycheque.

    Streaming requires high-performance, high-bandwidth machines that cost anywhere from several dozen dollars to several hundred dollars a month. You build a resilient high-availability network, and you could easily be looking at several tens of thousands of dollars a month.

    That isn’t easy to absorb, even for a for-profit company with clearly-defined revenue streams.

    Some people want everything for free, but free doesn’t pay the bills.

    Full disclosure: I don’t use the streaming feature. I prefer to grab actual copies to drop onto my NAS. I also don’t share to friends and family, as I am the only one I know of who uses Plex.


  • Don’t have the link, but in America at least, the prevalence of partisanship has been in lockstep with economic inequality.

    As in, the greater the economic inequality, the greater that people have voted in Republicans that refused to cooperate with democrats on things like bills and initiatives, and who were further and further to the right. It’s also why those states with the biggest economic gaps between poor and wealthy also have the most batshite-crazy Republican governors and other elected members.

    So it’s not resources that are encouraging fascism - it’s a failure to tax the Parasite Class appropriately such that wealth trickles back down to the working class. Because with obscene wealth comes obscene opportunities to tilt the political landscape in ways that encourages corporatism (the original name for fascism) and greases the system towards even more wealth accumulation by the Parasite Class. And now with almost all social services getting dismantled by DOGE, it’s going to get a hell of a lot worse in America.

    Yes, ignorance and stupidly account for a majority of Republican voters who are not multi-millionaires many times over. But poor people are too busy surviving to have any energy to think critically. So many of them just reach out for those exceedingly simple answers to complex problems that also promise to solve all of their problems, but never actually do.



  • Let’s hope the mobile apps become real mobile apps instead of web page wrappers.

    I can understand if you build a site that allows itself to be pinned to your device as if it were an app. That’s a great way to get a product onto devices before you have time+effort to build a native app.

    It’s quite another thing to have an actual app with a highly visible GUI wrapper whose only purpose is to connect to and display a specific website.

    Like, c’mon.





  • We don’t have anyone actively working on Windows support, […] We would like to do Windows eventually, but it’s not a priority at the moment.

    As much as I applaud this focus on just one broad OS architecture, as it will greatly speed development, leaving out Windows is likely to cut off 85-90% of all early adopters. I just hope that the benefit of a simplified target will outweigh ignoring the vast majority of the market.

    And honestly, methinks they should focus on Haiku OS before Windows, as it is closer to a Unix heritage than Windows is. And Haiku OS desperately needs a native modern web browser with all the bells and whistles.


  • Unless a company is an employee-owned socialist-style worker’s collective, employees generally have no say in that decision. A company can be every bit as evil as their owners want to be. Just look at Google or Facebook or Twitter.

    And the problem in America is that for anyone making less than six figures (and many making below seven or even eight figures), their ability to protest any decision made by their employer is heavily constrained by a combination of the employer’s ability to fire them at a moment’s notice and the medical insurance that is tied to their job. Thanks to these two pincer-like forces, employee’s free choices in America are heavily constrained in the interests of capitalism and the Parasite Class.

    And even if the “owners” want to be less evil, they themselves are often constrained by their investors, who force them to either toe the line or hurt all of their employees with unemployment and likely destitution and extreme hardship.

    Because why bring needless suffering to those (the employees) who cannot do anything to avoid it, when they desperately need their jobs to survive in this capitalistic hellhole? Why punish the innocent employees who are just wanting to successfully put one financial foot in front of the other?

    As any sort of CEO, your decisions should be for the financial well-being of your employees, first, which means knuckling under to the political demands of your current investor overlords. After all, if your decisions just put your entire workforce out of work because your investors pulled all of their money, your decision was a horrible one.

    Granted, investors with odious ideologies should have been avoided from the start, but hindsight is always 20/20. Sometimes stuff like that isn’t just a known unknown, but even a complete unknown unknown.

    And once you have an uncontrollably influential investor, your only choice might be to protect the economic welfare of your employees over an ideological stance that could easily make many of them homeless or even dead.


  • Or, they back him and acknowledge that they supported genocide but have since realised how wrong they were?

    And then they all lose their jobs when the investor(s) pulls out. Did you not read the comment you were replying to?

    If it’s a choice between one person losing their job and everyone losing their jobs, you are either rationally pragmatic to just one person or you are ideologically scorched-earth to everyone else.

    I mean, if you are someone in a manglement position who has to pull that particular trigger you could also resign in protest, but at least that only torpedos your own career, and not the jobs of dozens of other people who work alongside you.


  • Passing cables through existing walls nearly always involves taking part of the drywall off to gain access to the core of the wall. If you need to feed a wire across an entire wall, you typically have to cut an entire strip of drywall off along the entire length of the wall.

    If you have access to the beams beneath the floor or in the ceiling, you may want to do most of the run there, then drill into the desired wall through the sill or header plate. That allows you to get the cable into a specific stud gap to limit the amount of drywall affected.

    But unless your house was built with cable pipes/runs built into it (and I can’t imagine this being done outside of commercial buildings), you have lots of futzing around to do, and no small amount of drywall work.