Pizzasgood

Yup! The ones I clicked with genuine motives were all Project Wonderful ads. Project Wonderful was an ad service that catered specifically to creative projects, mainly webcomics. People running webcomics would host a Project Wonderful ad widget on their site to make a little extra money, and when they had some money to burn they’d pay to have ads for their own comic run on other people’s sites. I often discovered fun new comics this way. It’s the only ad service I’ve ever actually appreciated. I was sad when they shut down.

I’ve also clicked some other ads in an un-genuine manner. These were all advertisements for dresses, swimsuits, skirts, etc. The purpose here was to convince the advertising agencies to stop plastering random shit all over the internet and instead decorate it with a bunch of pretty clothes and sometimes pretty models wearing those clothes. Worked pretty well, as long as I remembered to click an ad or two every few months.

I haven’t done this in a while though. I wound up house-sitting for family members a lot in the last couple years, meaning I’d end up stuck using my laptop for a few days or a week instead of my real computer. The laptop has a lot less ram and runs into problems browsing the web sometimes due to ad company programmers being incompetent fuckwits who write leaky code. I finally got fed up with this and installed uBlock Origin on my laptop to make it more usable while away from home.

That was all I’d intended to do; I was fine coexisting with most ads on my desktop and just using custom scripting to nuke individual specific ad slots that were being nuisances (e.g. jerking the page around on wikis I frequented). But since I have Firefox set up to synchronize between my laptop and desktop, I incidentally wound up with uBlock Origin on my desktop as well. I’m not sure if there’s a way to have that be asymmetric while still having all the other browser extensions continue to synchronize (because I would prefer if websites kept getting paid for my traffic when I browse on PC, especially webcomics), but for now I’ve just happily enjoyed not having ads anymore. The internet is so much more peaceful this way. Though I do sometimes miss all the pretty dresses.

I did not define the word magic. Society did that. My choice is to communicate effectively, which means largely respecting the established consensus on which words mean what. If you’d rather render yourself ineffectual by using your own personal alternate definitions for established words, that is your choice, but it’s not a choice that aligns with my or most other people’s priorities.

Besides, “magic” only has whimsy associated with it because we restrict it to fake things. If we’d been calling electricity “magic” all along, “magic” would be mundane and you’d be over here complaining that we don’t use a more whimsical term like “etherics” or “thaumaturgy” or “electricity.”

As for wonder… what the flippity floppity fuck are you even talking about? The scientific world is full of wonder. Wonder is what drives science in the first place, and it has nothing at all to do with terminology. If you look up at the night sky and are too distracted by vocabulary to feel wonder at the pretty lights shining across unfathomable temporal and spatial distances, well, that seems more like a deficiency in you than any sort of flaw in which arbitrary sounds and squiggles we’ve picked out to describe things with.

Look in /var/log/Xorg.0.log for Xorg errors.

Check if OpenGL is okay by running glxinfo (from the package mesa-utils) and checking in the first few lines for “direct rendering: Yes”.

Check if Vulkan is okay by running vulkaninfo (from the package vulkan-tools) and seeing… if it throws errors at you, I guess. There are probably some specific things you could look for but I’m not familiar enough with Vulkan yet.

You could sudo dmesg and read through looking for problems, but there might be a lot of noise to sift through. I’d start by piping it through grep -i nvidia to look for driver-specific stuff.

Might be worth running nvidia-settings and poking around to see if anything seems amiss. Not sure what you’d actually be looking for, but yeah.

Sometimes switching from linux and nvidia to linux-lts and nvidia-lts can help if the problem is in the kernel or driver. Remember to switch both of these at the same time, since drivers need to match the kernel.

You could also try switching from the nvidia drivers to nouveau. Might offer temporary relief and help narrow down where the problem is, at the expense of probably worse performance in heavy games. Ought to be fine for 2D gaming and general desktopping.

Trying a different window manager is always an option. Don’t know how much hassle that is when you use a full DE; I’ve always been the “just grab individual lightweight pieces and slap 'em together” sort so I don’t have any real experience with KDE. But yeah. Find out what the right way to change WM is for your system, then try swapping over to Openbox or something minimal like that and see what happens.

Related to WM/DE, it could be an issue with the compositor maybe. Look up whatever KDE’s compositor is and see if you can turn it off and run a different one?

My limited skills: I taught myself SQL, once set up a Minecraft server, use vpns, comfortable in the ocean, can do basic VBA.

Yeah, you’ll be fine.

If I buy a new laptop would it be okay to just have Linux on it or I would I come into an eventual big problem?

There are some things to be aware of, but they’re mostly not big problems.

One is hardware support. This is rarely an issue these days when it comes to the routine tech most people use, but it can still rear its head with more exotic stuff like VR headsets (no support for Occulus; use Valve) as well as mundane but very new chips. For a newly released laptop it’s a good idea to check that the WiFi and Bluetooth chipsets on the model you want are supported before committing to a purchase, but they probably are.

If there are specific games you want to play, check if they work on Linux. Most games will these days; even Windows-only games will usually work with no more effort than switching on a compatibility setting in Steam. Some games do take a little fiddling though, and there are a few stragglers that just won’t work at all (mostly only if they have really paranoid anti-cheat systems).

Similarly, if there’s any specific software you need for your job or hobbies, make sure that there’s a Linux version, a compatible alternative that runs on Linux, or that the software runs acceptably through Wine. There’s usually a way to get what you need, but the quality may vary. Probably not an issue for you though or you’d have mentioned whatever specialty software you use when you asked the question.

Another small issue is that video streaming services often degrade your quality a little when you’re on Linux due to paranoia about piracy. So if you want to watch movies with absolutely perfect clarity, you may want to keep Windows or another device around for that (e.g. a smart tv, Android tablet, or what have you). That said, I personally do all my video consumption from Linux, and the quality is still high enough that I mostly don’t notice. I’m still on 1920x1080 screens though; I imagine this would be more frustrating on 4K. For a laptop, probably a non-issue.

On a related note, Blu-ray movies are encrypted. I don’t know if this is still an issue since I haven’t tried to watch one in years, but my experience was that watching Blu-ray is hit-and-miss. Basically the longer a given release has been out, the better the odds that somebody has found and published the key you need (which, if your system is set up right, can be automatically downloaded and applied so you don’t have to actually think about it). For a new release, you might have to switch to another OS, commercial video software, a physical Blu-ray player, or resort to “pirating” the content you already paid for. Of course, this is only relevant if you get a laptop that actually has an optical drive in the first place. Many don’t.

If I recall, 40% is the domestic violence coming from either member in the household. Not just the police officer.

You recall incorrectly. The 40% does in fact refer specifically to the officers. You are correct about the definition of violence being vague though, which is why I included the second quotation in my TLDR. The rate of physical violence was around 10% according to the spouses of the officers, with the other 30% apparently consisting of verbal abuse and threatening but non-physical behavior.

The actual document transcribing the hearing I quoted from is here: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED338997.pdf For convenience I will be referencing the page numbers in the pdf file and at the bottoms of pages, not the original numbers at the tops of pages (which are five behind). Dr. Leanor Boulin Johnson’s part of the hearing begins near the end of page 37, and she addresses congress for two and half pages. Then in pages 41-53 her prepared statement is included.

In her oral statement, she said the following (page 39) :

We found that 10 percent of the spouses said they were physically abused by their mates at least once during the last six months prior to our survey. Another 10 percent said that their children were physically abused by their mate in the same last six months.

How these figures compare to the national average is unclear. However, regardless of national data, it is disturbing to note that 40 percent of the officers stated that in the last six months prior to the survey they had gotten out of control and behaved violently against their spouse and children.

The written report says the same thing, with a bit of elaboration (page 47):

Ten percent of the spouses reported being physically abused by their mates at least once; the same percentage claim that their children were physically abused. The officers were asked a less direct question, that is, if they had ever gotten out of control and behaved violently against their spouse and children in the last six months. We did not define the type of violence. Thus, violence could have been interpreted as verbal or physical threats or actual physical abuse.

Approximately, 40 percent said that in the last six months prior to the survey they had behaved violently towards their spouse or children. Given that 20-30 percent of the spouses claimed that their mate frequently became verbally abusive towards them or their children, I suspect that a significant number of police officers defined violent as both verbal and physical abuse. Further analyses showed that years on the force were not associated with violent spouse behavior. However, among male officers violence towards children jumped 12 percent after the first three years (i.e., 28 percent in the first three years and 40 percent in years four to seven); another nine percent leap occurred after eight years of service. Although the relationship between tenure and violence was not statistically significant for females, four to seven years showed the highest frequency of violence toward their spouses and children. However, unlike the males the frequency of reported violence subsided after the seventh year.

TLDR, during a 1983 survey of 728 officers and 479 police spouses, “Approximately, 40 percent [of the officers] said that in the last six months prior to the survey they had behaved violently towards their spouse or children.” Also, “Ten percent of the spouses reported being physically abused by their mates at least once; the same percentage claim that their children were physically abused.”

I heard both growing up. To me they were just synonyms for the same game. Well, almost the same. Duck Duck Gray Duck is a little more fun because you assign colors to all of the ducks, so you have to pay a little more attention. But when not actually playing the game, the two versions live in the same pigeon hole within my brain.

True. However, thanks to the magic of virtual machines you can run multiple instances of arch on each device! Just be careful you don’t run too many overlapping arches or they’ll transform into domelinux and the HOA will fine you for architectural mismatch.

That does rule out the creators, yeah.

When you say it happens instantly, do you mean that you instantly get a “Post deleted” notification of some sort, or just that you hit “Reply” and the post never shows up?

I ask because there’s a blog I comment on sometimes that occasionally pretends like it’s posting my comment, but then the comment doesn’t appear. My first assumption was that I was encountering some kind of moderation filter, but it turns out I wasn’t. That blog just has poorly designed error handling. If I take too long to write my comment, the session expires. That’s fine and normal, but the problem is that the blog software doesn’t bother to warn me before posting, and it doesn’t explain itself after the post fails, so it creates confusion. Once I realized what was going on though, I realized I could just hit “Back” to recover and copy the comment I wrote, reload the page to get a fresh session, paste the comment, and hit “Reply.” Works totally fine that way.

Maybe YouTube is doing something similar and dropping attempted comments due to expired tokens or shoddy networking? It would explain why it seems so random and nonsensical.

If it really is bad auto-mod systems, there probably isn’t much you can do about it besides complain to YouTube. Any workaround that would be easy for you to use would be equally easy for the spammers and trolls to use, and is therefor not likely to remain a usable workaround for long.

As far as I know, none of my (very few) comments have been deleted yet, so I’m curious how that works and how you know who was responsible. Do they notify you when it happens and explain who made the decision?

No. Thinking about the panda is involuntary in that scenario. Typing up and submitting an explicitly unwanted response is not involuntary. It’s a thing a person chooses to do expressly against the wishes of the person making the request.

Don’t ease into it at all. Wait for a moment where it would be funny, then go whole hog with it. Treat it like a joke… but then just keep going. Never go back. Don’t even acknowledge there is a back. Pretend this is how you’ve always talked and they’re insane if they think otherwise.

The article’s title presents this in a misleading way. The bill in question wouldn’t prevent people from using their preferred names and pronouns. What it would do is prohibit the government from spending federal funds to implement or enforce any rules or recommendations encouraging its employees and contractors to respect those names and pronouns.

So in other words this is an attempt at protecting hate-speech, not at restricting free-speech. Shitty, but probably not unconstitutional.

Twas a tubular time.

Plus it’s not just about total time between “I want food” and “Nom nom”. There’s also the matter of how usable that time is. On a good day it might only take me a few minutes longer to get fast food, but all of that time is spent behind the wheel and most of it is spent driving. Making a sandwich at home, on the other hand, only about a minute is spent actively handling food. The other seventeen minutes while the patty cooks are free; I can it spend doing anything I please. So instead of comparing twenty minutes for fast food vs. eighteen minutes for DIY, it’s really more like twenty minutes vs. one minute.

He sees you when you’re crashing,
He knows you’ve locked your brakes.
He’s there when you back into folks
And when your lead fuel gives you shakes.

So, until you buckle up,
Until you burn clean,
Until you limit drunks
And embrace the green:

Grandpa Clause is saving your Ford

It’s a fun show. The ending didn’t quite land right, but whatever; it’s not the kind of series where that matters. Also, I didn’t have any problem with the CGI and don’t understand why so many people are complaining about it; probably they’re just the CGI equivalent of audiophiles and should be ignored by any who don’t share that particular affliction.

I don’t know if this is the case for other people, but I have to be careful about using slurs in any context because the more I see or use a word the more likely it is to slip out in other situations. I’d never purposefully use a slur on somebody, but my word-choices are largely running on automatic when I’m angry. I just push intent at my mouth and then my subconscious picks out words matching that intent and feeds them into my tongue. If I push the intent “strong targeted insult” into that system, a slur could match those parameters and make it out my mouth before my conscious mind can catch and filter it. Entirely avoiding using slurs, and ideally avoiding even thinking slurs helps to avoid this happening (both by avoiding them entering my vocabulary-supply in the first place, and by building the mental reflex to immediately drop them like they’re hot if they do pop into my brain).

A more society-level reason to discourage people from publicly using slurs even in discussions about them is to make it harder for bigots to stage “discussions” as excuses to loudly use slurs while in earshot of the people they’d like to use those slurs at.

People also get paranoid about automated (or braindead) moderation, or trolls who shame people based purely on the fact that a quick and context-free search of their post history turns up N uses of a slur. It’s often easier to just dodge these kinds of problems than to fight them.

Wrap it in the wire, then spin one of them. That part’s important! Won’t do anything if you don’t spin it.

My guess is that it was meant to prevent the use of initials.