• 0 Posts
  • 155 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle

  • I’ve only been to another country once in my life. In 2018 I was invited to present at a scientific conference held in Sicily, and my workplace sponsored my travel and accommodation costs.

    After 6 days there, my takeaway was an unfavorable view of the local Sicilian people. This is obviously not representative of every person in Sicily, or Italians in general (Italy is a big place with lots of different regions), but I’m not in a hurry to go back to Palermo.


  • I get your point of view, and I personally use Jellyfin with my own library. But I have a different perspective about people complaining about shows disappearing from services.

    People like complaining about things, it’s cathartic, and it doesn’t necessarily mean they have to do anything about it.

    Imagine you have a favourite restaurant. One day you go in and that thing you really love isn’t in the menu anymore. You can grumble about it to the staff, complain to your friends, but you’ll just order a different item.

    If next week your next favourite thing disappears from the menu, you’ll complain some more, or maybe just start going to a different restaurant. Yes, there is always the option to get the ingredients and make it yourself at home, but that’s a whole extra level of effort. For most people, the effort to complain a bit and choose a different thing from the menu is far less effort than making it yourself at home.



  • When I first read about Bitcoins, my takeaway was it was some kind of credits you could earn by using your unused use CPU cycles, but it wasn’t a sure thing, it’s a lottery, you have a chance to earn a credit (a “coin”) every few minutes, as long as you keep donating your CPU cycles. (This was before gpu mining was a thing). I tried it, and after 3 days I had earned 3 coins, but then I looked into the value, and they were only worth about 10c each. That’s less than the electricity it took to earn them. And you couldn’t spend them anywhere, except that one pizza place, where it cost a few thousand coins for a pizza. There weren’t even any exchanges to convert them to real currency if you wanted to.

    I tried to find my coins years later, (when Bitcoins got to $2000 each), but I couldn’t find the old hard drive the wallet was on.





  • Same. My AHI was 59. And during my sleep study there was on event where I didn’t breathe for more than a minute. My oxygen saturation got down to 81, that’s pretty scary. And that was likely happening to me every night for the last 15 years or more.

    Since starting on my CPAP two months ago, my life has massively improved. I wake up feeling great most mornings. I still sometimes feel tired in the afternoons, but not on the level as before.










  • +1 for Signal. It’s already on my phone, and already on my PC and laptop. It is a simple Flatpak install on Linux. It’s end-to-end encrypted. I use that for one-off notes and files between my phone and my PC or between my laptop and PC.

    For notes and small files that I know I’ll want to save to reference at another time, I put them in my KeePassXC database because that’s already set to sync between devices.


  • That’s so true. I studied Ba. Information Technology for two years in 2004-2005 and dropped out due to family reasons, then I went back 10 years later and did Ba. Software Engineering in 2013-2016.

    In both instances, it was clear about half those enrolled in the programme were only in it for the money, you could tell that some people were just not excited about software. They were the ones who had dropped out by the end of first year.

    The other lot were those who did find it exciting, but severely underestimated the difficulty of the discipline. These were the kind of people who have can edit game config files to add a bunch of mods to Skyrim, they consider themselves a tech wiz want to study to be a game developer. But they barely pass intro to Web programming with html and JS in the first year and fail the first oracle database course in second year. I had some good friends who failed out hard in second year of software engineering for that reason.