Somewhere in my neighborhood is some yahoo who shoots off a random firework 2-3 days a week for half of the summer. What's baffling is that they often do it before dark. Guess they need to do it before they send their kid to bed?
Regardless, it's a super obnoxious jolt for everyone besides those expecting it. There's no way for me to figure out who it is, since it's semi-random and often light enough to not really be noticeable. And apparently their immediate neighbors don't care enough to call the cops on them.
Better still would be allowing comments regardless of getting the quiz right, but starting them with an initial mod of +/- 1 based on whether they got the question correct. Or have a user setting where we could set that value as we choose. It fits more in with the/. tradition of allowing open discourse, while providing tools to cultivate the comments into something vaguely functional.
Something like 90% of my browsing gets done through RSS. I'm happily subscribed to INOreader, in the hopes that it will stay alive for a long time. Here is how I use RSS. On one page, I get the following notifications, bundled into the appropriate folders:
* All of my mainstream news from a half dozen different websites, with a headline and 1-2 sentence intro. This allows me to decide which ones are worth reading, and which ones to skip. It is super quick to get through a lot of news this way, and I avoid going to all of the different websites, their shitastic auto-playing videos, poorly laid out pages, etc. * All of my web comics. About 2/3 display right in the reader, the other 1/3 I have to go to. But all in one folder, so no bookmarking, opening in tabs, etc. * The limited social media feeds I follow, both Twitter and Facebook. Just the posts from the creators, none of the reposts, retweets, replies, or any of that shit. It's a minimal way to keep up with asshats who insist on using social media. (Hello local brewery, which only posts their taplist and hours on facebook...) * Stupid shit that I keep around for when I need some lowbrow entertainment. Cat memes and failure gifs. * STEM websites posting content I may or may not be interested in. The posts build up in that folder until I'm feeling sciency, then I can browse through a bunch of different fields and some of the new stuff coming out.
Having all of that in one place limits the mental energy it takes to track down all those disparate things. When I want to read my comics, pop open the comic folder, and I can read a couple of weeks of comics. When I want science, I can do that with science. I don't have to bookmark a thousand pages and open them in different tabs, and try to figure out how long it's been since I've been there.
Most places do a crappy job with archives. RSS lets me save and favorite things for later. And unread things are all in date order, so when I get around to it, I have an idea how old it is.
Trying to take in most modern websites is brain-fuzzing. Graphics and moving shit, boxes of articles, teasers and the like, infinite scrolling, etc. Every one is different, and they all suck. RSS gives me every website in the same format. Small image, title, couple of sentences.
Scrolling past a headline and it's marked as read. Unless I unmark it. And if I go to long and have 500 unread articles, I can just mark ones older than X days, weeks, months as read. It really simplifies how one interacts with content on the web. It's just so easy and organized. I really can't be bothered to do the web without RSS.
Oh, and INOreader has a great mobile app too, so I have the same thing on my browser as on my phone.
I read one of his last lectures, where he postulated about what we can know about the universe prior to the start of time. While I wish he had been able to come up with even more brilliant ideas, it does seem kind-of fitting that he explored the concept of physics of the universe outside of time before he passed. Escaping the bounds of time seems to me the most fitting definition of immortality, and Hawking got there before he died.
I've been blocking those elements with uBlock for a couple of years now. It takes a couple of filters, to get both the popup, frame, and overlay, but once done for a site it's done.
I don't see them often now, unless I'm wandering far outside my normal haunts.
Yep. Ubisoft has been on my "not even if it's free" list for a good decade now. I ran into 1-2 games back then that were unplayable due to their shitastic DRM. Ended up pirating both and they actually ran significantly better. I slipped up with Assassin's Creed 2, and UPlay was just awful. Luckily Assassin's Creed was so shitty that "Don't Buy Ubisoft Games" was well reinforced in my mind.
I spend 20 minutes sneaking around my target, I get directly overhead, and drop silently in for the kill. CUTSCREEN!!!!! I walk through the door, he talks for 10 minutes, then calls his guards, and they kill me.
I find a very large percent of games unplayable at this point in life, because it seems everyone wants to be a movie director rather than let me play the fucking game. I don't play games to sit and watch someone make (or unmake) choices for me. I get especially pissed off when my character is forced to do stupid shit. Ubisoft seems to think this is the greatest invention of all time, and that just doubly reinforces my "Never Again" strategy with them.
I despise Ubisoft, so the only conclusion I could reach from the title was that Google was buying them and shutting them down. Imagine my disappointment when I read the summary....
Reddit is especially insane with its modding. It's baffling, really, how they never attempted to fix the utterly broken system they started off with.
1) Unlimited up/down modding
2) No meta-modding
3) No sock-puppet control
4) No effective karma of any sort for good posts or good modding
If they had addressed any two of those four, I think it would be a totally different environment. As it is, it's designed to be abused by those with the most time and single-minded focus on their hands, and there's nothing anyone can do about it except fight fire with fire. And for most people, they don't have that sort of time and energy.
Having suffered under a number of modding systems in my life, I attempted to come up with one that deals with gaming the system, prevents echo chambers, rewards positive contributions, and doesn't overly disrupt the flow of communication. And you know what? I don't think it's possible. Sure, you can get most of those things in a modding system, but it's damn hard to get them all. And what I modeled which seemed to be close was so opaque that it would likely lead to tons of censorship and conspiracy complaints./.'s modding system really isn't half bad, compared to all the others out there. And having tried to come up with a better system, I can sort-of see why so many sites just gave up and implemented a known broken and bad system.
Still, Reddit's is about the worst. I think even 4chan's is better.
Best advice I ever heeded was designating the bedroom for sleeping. No TV, no electronic device usage, not even book reading.
If you're up, you go somewhere else. When you're tired, you go to bed. It really, really helps, both with the light issue but also with training your brain that this is where it turns off.
When my wife and I were dating and living apart we had our own rules at our own places. It took her a bit to get used to my strict bedroom is (mostly) for sleeping rule, but when she did, she found that she slept much better at my place than at hers. That was what convinced her.
That's a lot of work. We took the simpler solution and just don't have computers and networking hardware in the bedroom. One cell, on silent, face down so the status light doesn't disturb us is the limit of our technology in the bedroom. There for emergency and for a morning alarm, but that's it.
I did have to tape over the status lights on a couple of things in another room down the hall, and that is fucking ridiculous. What jackass thought that bright blue, always-on LEDs were a good idea? When it's lighting up my bedroom from another room 20' away and around a corner, that's insane.
Where do you find those? I generally have to mess with the doors and windows to get it dark enough to sleep. Spare pillows along the bottom of the door, careful tweaking of the shades, etc.
Your drivers with a garage code is not common, in my experience. For those of us getting by without that sort of service, I think theft is easier addressed by a drone than by a human in a truck.
First, they could possibly do it by delivering when you are home. A guy in a truck doesn't have the scheduling flexibility that a drone has. Set up an app with a window for delivery, and get a notification when the drone is on its way, tracking map, all that jazz.
A second option is that they could drop packages where thieves couldn't easily get to them. I've got a 2nd story balcony that they could drop packages on which would be relatively secure. Well, unless a thief happened to be running around discretely hiding a 20' ladder behind his back. I'm guessing a lot of people have a semi-secure spot around the house that the drone could drop things off at. Back yard, back porch, roof outside of a window, etc.
That might take getting a "drone target mat" or something to help train the drone, but it's definitely a possibility.
I think that there is a very human perception issue here as well. If you're just running a frozen patty through a conveyor, that feels like a factory. If there's a robot emulating a human, that feels much closer to "handmade". It doesn't matter that it's just a less effective way to cook the burger, most humans are going to feel like the human-mimicking activity produces a higher quality burger.
And when the robot fucks up your burger, or you want it made a certain way and can't get the robot to do it, then what do you do?
So, when you go to McDonalds and ask for your burger medium rare, what generally happens?
I'm curious, because you seem to be conflating real food with fast food in your complaint.
At the moment, the robots are coming for fast food. And I'm with you, to a point. When a robot can cook a perfect rare duck breast with crispy skin, I'll have a robot cook for me at restaurants. Because I've had chefs fuck that up. But until a robot can do that consistently, I won't be visiting that restaurant.
I don't care if it's done by a robot or a human, I just want it done right. I don't get why you insist on imperfect, shitty humans being involved in your food prep. The ones hung over, on drugs, bitter about a divorce, working through the flu to make rent, etc. I love my fellow humans, but when I'm looking for something good to eat, I could care less how involved they were in the process. If the result is good, it's good.
There's a cause related to your 2nd, and it's been used very effectively since the civil war: "There aren't enough scraps for you poor people to all have some. What do you want to do about it?" And in that case, a solid voting block is willing to screw everyone poor (including themselves!) to benefit the rich. But either they figure that they'll be rich sometime soon and not have to worry about it, or it's just easier to fuck over the poor.
Somehow "eat the rich" doesn't end up as an obvious strategy, and I'm a little baffled by it.
This crazy strategy has created a long-term push against social safety nets, despite them being better for society and in general, more cost effective than "personal responsibility". It's better and cheaper, but it's "a hand-out to lazy folks", so we refuse it! Even if it would benefit us personally!
This has always mystified me, and probably always will. How do you work with reality if you don't accept it? When your decisions are poor because they are based on fallacies, how do you hold tight to those fallacies and create new ones to explain away your poor decision, rather than accept them and make better decisions in the future?
It's closely tied to voting against one's self interest. "It's more important that I identify with and support this group, even if it hurts me, than to be an independent agent."
Anyone who utters the phrase "fake news" instantly loses all credibility to me. If you can't explain what's wrong with it, then there's about a 95% chance you're full of shit.
Tell me what they did wrong, and I'll listen. Loosened the bounds of what's significant? Threw out too many outliers? Let participants self-select with no controls? Sure. That's bullshit.
"FAKE NEWS!!!", "I know you are but what am I?", and "LALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" are not productive ways to communicate.
Slashdot Mirror
Somewhere in my neighborhood is some yahoo who shoots off a random firework 2-3 days a week for half of the summer. What's baffling is that they often do it before dark. Guess they need to do it before they send their kid to bed?
Regardless, it's a super obnoxious jolt for everyone besides those expecting it. There's no way for me to figure out who it is, since it's semi-random and often light enough to not really be noticeable. And apparently their immediate neighbors don't care enough to call the cops on them.
Better still would be allowing comments regardless of getting the quiz right, but starting them with an initial mod of +/- 1 based on whether they got the question correct. Or have a user setting where we could set that value as we choose. It fits more in with the /. tradition of allowing open discourse, while providing tools to cultivate the comments into something vaguely functional.
Well, why don't you block that popup?
Something like 90% of my browsing gets done through RSS. I'm happily subscribed to INOreader, in the hopes that it will stay alive for a long time. Here is how I use RSS. On one page, I get the following notifications, bundled into the appropriate folders:
* All of my mainstream news from a half dozen different websites, with a headline and 1-2 sentence intro. This allows me to decide which ones are worth reading, and which ones to skip. It is super quick to get through a lot of news this way, and I avoid going to all of the different websites, their shitastic auto-playing videos, poorly laid out pages, etc.
* All of my web comics. About 2/3 display right in the reader, the other 1/3 I have to go to. But all in one folder, so no bookmarking, opening in tabs, etc.
* The limited social media feeds I follow, both Twitter and Facebook. Just the posts from the creators, none of the reposts, retweets, replies, or any of that shit. It's a minimal way to keep up with asshats who insist on using social media. (Hello local brewery, which only posts their taplist and hours on facebook...)
* Stupid shit that I keep around for when I need some lowbrow entertainment. Cat memes and failure gifs.
* STEM websites posting content I may or may not be interested in. The posts build up in that folder until I'm feeling sciency, then I can browse through a bunch of different fields and some of the new stuff coming out.
Having all of that in one place limits the mental energy it takes to track down all those disparate things. When I want to read my comics, pop open the comic folder, and I can read a couple of weeks of comics. When I want science, I can do that with science. I don't have to bookmark a thousand pages and open them in different tabs, and try to figure out how long it's been since I've been there.
Most places do a crappy job with archives. RSS lets me save and favorite things for later. And unread things are all in date order, so when I get around to it, I have an idea how old it is.
Trying to take in most modern websites is brain-fuzzing. Graphics and moving shit, boxes of articles, teasers and the like, infinite scrolling, etc. Every one is different, and they all suck. RSS gives me every website in the same format. Small image, title, couple of sentences.
Scrolling past a headline and it's marked as read. Unless I unmark it. And if I go to long and have 500 unread articles, I can just mark ones older than X days, weeks, months as read. It really simplifies how one interacts with content on the web. It's just so easy and organized. I really can't be bothered to do the web without RSS.
Oh, and INOreader has a great mobile app too, so I have the same thing on my browser as on my phone.
Here in NJ......Really, this "global " scaremongering is getting tiresome.
That's beautiful. You started and ended your pointless rant with the perfect summary of why it's pointless, and why you don't get it.
We get that NJ seems like the entire world to you. However, you might be shocked to learn that there is more out there than the Jersey Shore and NYC.
I read one of his last lectures, where he postulated about what we can know about the universe prior to the start of time. While I wish he had been able to come up with even more brilliant ideas, it does seem kind-of fitting that he explored the concept of physics of the universe outside of time before he passed. Escaping the bounds of time seems to me the most fitting definition of immortality, and Hawking got there before he died.
In NYC? I have no idea. In major airports and in Miami? Years ago.
I've been blocking those elements with uBlock for a couple of years now. It takes a couple of filters, to get both the popup, frame, and overlay, but once done for a site it's done.
I don't see them often now, unless I'm wandering far outside my normal haunts.
Feel free to put up or STFU with some evidence, guys. Protip: assertions are not evidence.
Oh, the delicious irony.
How awesome is it that you can demand others play by rules that you yourself won't follow? That's gotta feel good, right?
Yep. Ubisoft has been on my "not even if it's free" list for a good decade now. I ran into 1-2 games back then that were unplayable due to their shitastic DRM. Ended up pirating both and they actually ran significantly better. I slipped up with Assassin's Creed 2, and UPlay was just awful. Luckily Assassin's Creed was so shitty that "Don't Buy Ubisoft Games" was well reinforced in my mind.
I spend 20 minutes sneaking around my target, I get directly overhead, and drop silently in for the kill. CUTSCREEN!!!!! I walk through the door, he talks for 10 minutes, then calls his guards, and they kill me.
I find a very large percent of games unplayable at this point in life, because it seems everyone wants to be a movie director rather than let me play the fucking game. I don't play games to sit and watch someone make (or unmake) choices for me. I get especially pissed off when my character is forced to do stupid shit. Ubisoft seems to think this is the greatest invention of all time, and that just doubly reinforces my "Never Again" strategy with them.
I'm sure SAP will consult on that collaboration, since the must be doing it in the Microsoft cloud.
I despise Ubisoft, so the only conclusion I could reach from the title was that Google was buying them and shutting them down. Imagine my disappointment when I read the summary....
Reddit is especially insane with its modding. It's baffling, really, how they never attempted to fix the utterly broken system they started off with.
1) Unlimited up/down modding
2) No meta-modding
3) No sock-puppet control
4) No effective karma of any sort for good posts or good modding
If they had addressed any two of those four, I think it would be a totally different environment. As it is, it's designed to be abused by those with the most time and single-minded focus on their hands, and there's nothing anyone can do about it except fight fire with fire. And for most people, they don't have that sort of time and energy.
Having suffered under a number of modding systems in my life, I attempted to come up with one that deals with gaming the system, prevents echo chambers, rewards positive contributions, and doesn't overly disrupt the flow of communication. And you know what? I don't think it's possible. Sure, you can get most of those things in a modding system, but it's damn hard to get them all. And what I modeled which seemed to be close was so opaque that it would likely lead to tons of censorship and conspiracy complaints. /.'s modding system really isn't half bad, compared to all the others out there. And having tried to come up with a better system, I can sort-of see why so many sites just gave up and implemented a known broken and bad system.
Still, Reddit's is about the worst. I think even 4chan's is better.
Best advice I ever heeded was designating the bedroom for sleeping. No TV, no electronic device usage, not even book reading.
If you're up, you go somewhere else. When you're tired, you go to bed. It really, really helps, both with the light issue but also with training your brain that this is where it turns off.
When my wife and I were dating and living apart we had our own rules at our own places. It took her a bit to get used to my strict bedroom is (mostly) for sleeping rule, but when she did, she found that she slept much better at my place than at hers. That was what convinced her.
That's a lot of work. We took the simpler solution and just don't have computers and networking hardware in the bedroom. One cell, on silent, face down so the status light doesn't disturb us is the limit of our technology in the bedroom. There for emergency and for a morning alarm, but that's it.
I did have to tape over the status lights on a couple of things in another room down the hall, and that is fucking ridiculous. What jackass thought that bright blue, always-on LEDs were a good idea? When it's lighting up my bedroom from another room 20' away and around a corner, that's insane.
Where do you find those? I generally have to mess with the doors and windows to get it dark enough to sleep. Spare pillows along the bottom of the door, careful tweaking of the shades, etc.
Your drivers with a garage code is not common, in my experience. For those of us getting by without that sort of service, I think theft is easier addressed by a drone than by a human in a truck.
First, they could possibly do it by delivering when you are home. A guy in a truck doesn't have the scheduling flexibility that a drone has. Set up an app with a window for delivery, and get a notification when the drone is on its way, tracking map, all that jazz.
A second option is that they could drop packages where thieves couldn't easily get to them. I've got a 2nd story balcony that they could drop packages on which would be relatively secure. Well, unless a thief happened to be running around discretely hiding a 20' ladder behind his back. I'm guessing a lot of people have a semi-secure spot around the house that the drone could drop things off at. Back yard, back porch, roof outside of a window, etc.
That might take getting a "drone target mat" or something to help train the drone, but it's definitely a possibility.
Why in hell is this on /.?
I think that there is a very human perception issue here as well. If you're just running a frozen patty through a conveyor, that feels like a factory. If there's a robot emulating a human, that feels much closer to "handmade". It doesn't matter that it's just a less effective way to cook the burger, most humans are going to feel like the human-mimicking activity produces a higher quality burger.
Yeah, because there is no way that we'll invent cleaning robots. No. Way.
And when the robot fucks up your burger, or you want it made a certain way and can't get the robot to do it, then what do you do?
So, when you go to McDonalds and ask for your burger medium rare, what generally happens?
I'm curious, because you seem to be conflating real food with fast food in your complaint.
At the moment, the robots are coming for fast food. And I'm with you, to a point. When a robot can cook a perfect rare duck breast with crispy skin, I'll have a robot cook for me at restaurants. Because I've had chefs fuck that up. But until a robot can do that consistently, I won't be visiting that restaurant.
I don't care if it's done by a robot or a human, I just want it done right. I don't get why you insist on imperfect, shitty humans being involved in your food prep. The ones hung over, on drugs, bitter about a divorce, working through the flu to make rent, etc. I love my fellow humans, but when I'm looking for something good to eat, I could care less how involved they were in the process. If the result is good, it's good.
There's a cause related to your 2nd, and it's been used very effectively since the civil war: "There aren't enough scraps for you poor people to all have some. What do you want to do about it?" And in that case, a solid voting block is willing to screw everyone poor (including themselves!) to benefit the rich. But either they figure that they'll be rich sometime soon and not have to worry about it, or it's just easier to fuck over the poor.
Somehow "eat the rich" doesn't end up as an obvious strategy, and I'm a little baffled by it.
This crazy strategy has created a long-term push against social safety nets, despite them being better for society and in general, more cost effective than "personal responsibility". It's better and cheaper, but it's "a hand-out to lazy folks", so we refuse it! Even if it would benefit us personally!
This has always mystified me, and probably always will. How do you work with reality if you don't accept it? When your decisions are poor because they are based on fallacies, how do you hold tight to those fallacies and create new ones to explain away your poor decision, rather than accept them and make better decisions in the future?
It's closely tied to voting against one's self interest. "It's more important that I identify with and support this group, even if it hurts me, than to be an independent agent."
I just can't wrap my head around it.
Anyone who utters the phrase "fake news" instantly loses all credibility to me. If you can't explain what's wrong with it, then there's about a 95% chance you're full of shit.
Tell me what they did wrong, and I'll listen. Loosened the bounds of what's significant? Threw out too many outliers? Let participants self-select with no controls? Sure. That's bullshit.
"FAKE NEWS!!!", "I know you are but what am I?", and "LALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" are not productive ways to communicate.
2. Quiet creepy giggling, also while people are out of the room sometimes while in the room.
No, it's got to stop the creepy giggling when it hears someone come into the room. And when asked about it, deny doing it.