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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • You can thank Rupert Murdoch, but yes, it is.

    Workers who are heavily exploited, underpaid, and lose their job to this type of political nonsense are usually at best suspicious and at worst hostile to unions. They bathe in right-wing propaganda about “right to work” and greedy/corrupt unions just being another layer of bureaucracy that siphons off their wages.


  • No, they worked for me between 15-10 years ago, but I get it - by all accounts now they’re so enshittified that it’s just Match parasitically turning loneliness into profit at ever greater efficiency. They would have failed immediately if they didn’t work long enough to capture enough market and attention.

    As others mentioned OK Cupid, and it’s a great example. It was originally very good at matching people, and they took pride in it. I remember when Match bought it, as I had recently (just in time) found my person. I was able to see it go from “No, we’re leaving it alone, just tweaking a few things” to ending the interesting data-exploration articles, dumbing down the experience, adding micro-pay-gating, and fully gutting the experience and staff. Nobody should have trusted Match to not destroy what it was, and if they hadn’t sold and remained a useable app, maybe the market would have abandoned Match. Instead, here we are.

    I don’t envy those people still looking, I assume best case is still using apps but you just have to waste a lot more time.




  • It’s strange because we also have an extreme culture of litigation, and so much as an unwelcome or aggressive touch (without injury) could technically support a civil lawsuit or criminal charges for assault/battery.

    The difference is that we apply justice differently depending on your political belief, so the acceptable violence is usually one-directional. Any violence by left protestors will be treated akin to terrorism. If you’re a right wing crazy harassing people protesting for a left cause, police will look the other way and you may not even be convicted for murder (e.g., Rittenhouse). Worse, the police are usually the ones being irrationally violent - like the George Floyd protests in which nonviolent civil protest was suppressed with military-level equipment, tactics and violence.



  • I was a crisp pixel diehard for like 20 years even despite growing up with CRT, because I remember in the 80s-00s trying hard to get the clearest picture (RF->SRGB->S-video->Composite) and it felt like, “what’s clearer than exact pixels?”

    And then I tried a good CRT filter that emulates not just scanlines and noise, but subpixel effects, and it really changed my mind. The graphics really were designed to be displayed with those analog “imperfections,” and if you lived in that era, you kind of took for granted the things that worked well with the natural CRT blur while pursuing image clarity. Bringing back the CRT effects was a revelation.

    Like, even handheld emulation filters that mimic how those particular LCD screens functioned often give a better experience since game designers took that into account.

    I don’t know if someone growing up with only emulated square LCD memories would feel the same, and I’ll always take pixely LCD over bad CRT emulation, but I’d suggest to give it a try with good filters.



  • Probably an unpopular opinion, but I’d swap Inglorious Basterds, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight and Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown as blocks.

    Pulp Fiction at the time was perfectly calibrated and groundbreaking, but I don’t think it holds up as well as actual film-making and feels gimmicky re-watching it - lots of needledrop moments but not a ton of character development. Jackie Brown is better but the pacing and script aren’t very tight. Reservoir Dogs was a few setpieces and filler. On the other hand, Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained are I think much more mature, tightly written and directed, and re-watchable. The Hateful Eight I think gets a bad rap because it seems like a small scope, but it’s again tightly written and reveals/develops characters in constantly interesting ways.

    Agree on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood being at the bottom, though. That’s my reaction to most Hollywood-focused movies.


  • There are three practical reasons Trump does this:

    1. Deflection: Trump doesn’t have an affirmative platform. As a populist strongman, Trump’s platform is situational and entirely based on what his supporters want to hear in any given moment. If health care is in the news, Trump will say his plan is coming in two weeks (it won’t ever come). If immigration is in the news, Trump will say he will build a wall and get Mexico to pay for it (he won’t). But what’s even easier? Focusing on the shortcomings of the opponent’s platform. Any time this works, Trump saves himself an opportunity to be put under the microscope.
    2. Deflection: Manipulating the media works. Trump knows that the more ludicrous things he says about Kamala, even if the media then starts to talk about how he’s wrong or fact-check him, the focus is still on the thing he said rather than Kamala’s platform. It’s subtle, but it really does focus the media effectively on whatever he says, and use his frame of that issue as the media’s frame.
    3. Filling the echo chambers and other spaces. We’re in our own echo chambers like never before. Trump says these things so that the people in the right-wing echo chambers have a plausible response to Kamala’s policies, or even just need filler for their broadcast/websites/Facebook groups. Ultimately there is only so much media people can consume every day. If Trump has filled all relevant supporter spaces with his own opinions & framing, there is no time or energy left to explore other opinions and framing.


  • Just for fun: this would have worked so much better if they price dropped the PS5 and introduced the PS5 Pro at the old price.

    People are anchored into thinking the PS5 is a certain value, and if they did that, it would instantly make the PS5 Pro and the PS5 appear to be a bargain, and so much of the PS5-owning public would have bought another system because it would be “such a good deal,” while PS5 fence-sitters would jump at the core system. I’m not trained to say for sure, but I think while their profit margin would be lower they’d be making much more money.




  • I wish I knew as well. I’ve been using Chromecast Audio myself, which works with PlexAmp self-hosting my music.

    The problem is Chromecast Audio has been discontinued for years of course - Google did their Google thing, and unfortunately I never found anything else like it on the market. But you can connect those devices to any speakers and sync multi-room high quality audio very easily. I managed to pick up 4 of them when they did their fire sale, and I think you can find them on eBay for now still.


  • The practical answer is 3-4% above to counteract the right-wing effect of the electoral college. Yes, it all matters on what states she wins.

    The theoretical answer is that Kamala could get less votes, just like Trump did in 2016, and still “win.” It’s not practical because the swing states are more conservative than the median population of the country as a whole, which means it’s extremely unlikely those swing states will vote for Kamala while Trump gets more votes elsewhere.

    The places you need to watch are Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and to a lesser extent Ohio, Minnesota and Florida. The 538 polls will give you a sense of where those states are leading, and you can see different maps here. polling is imperfect, and frankly I can’t take the anxiety of watching that data day-to-day.