rudyharrelson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkNqNYkwhlg

Celery man. Everyone tells me it has no taste, but to me it tastes like an entire lawn’s worth of grass clippings compressed into a stick. Extremely pungent.

Same with cucumbers. They taste awfully strong and bitter to me.

Not that guy, but I have one kid who I love to bits. Got a vasectomy when he was 2 years old cause we would explode if we had a second kid, lol. One is enough for us. We’ve been incredibly fortunate so we decided we didn’t need any more surprises.

The doc who did mine was a military vet who went into urology after serving. I remember reading the pamphlet on the operation and it said the vasectomy only took 15 minutes. I asked him, “It only takes 15 minutes??” and he responded, “Eight.”

I like a good speedrun as much as the next guy, but I told him to take his sweet time lol. Ain’t in no rush, doc.

Recovery was super chill. Couldn’t roughhouse with my son for a week or two, and that’s about it. I’ve got some fun titanium clamps chilling in my junk now, so that’s fun. I’m basically Wolverine.

Birth control and STD protection are two wildly different things. Imagine, if you will, a married couple who doesn’t want any more kids. They want the former and don’t need the latter.

Based on the thumbnail I thought it was gonna say “and here’s where I’d put the documentation… if they gave me time to write it!”

I would prefer for crypto to be gone. Based on my understanding of blockchain, I don’t see how it can be used as currency ever. Blockchains can be extremely useful, just not as currency.

Hm, my understanding was that blockchain was the technology that handles the distributed ledger rather than the currency itself. Blockchain seems useful to a point in this realm, but is, like we both know, extremely energy inefficient and unsustainable.

The only thing you can really do about stolen tokens is have some authority de-list them and re-issue new token to the victim. That’s hardly a solution. It also extremely centralizes control, which runs antithetical to the purported benefits of crypto.

No arguments here. Though I think there could be better solutions out aside from using some centralized authority to delist stolen tokens. Blacklisting certain wallet IDs could be a crowd-sourced project, much like how blocklists for adblockers are largely community-driven.

Crypto also doesn’t take power away from institutions. […]

Gotta disagree with “crypto doesn’t take power away from institutions”. Exactly as you said, if institutions leverage their pre-existing power in the crypto space, it becomes centralized because a small pool of wealthy players control the majority of the currency. The currency itself is not centralized, but it can be exploited by bad actors who wish to manipulate its value (or just profit off of it, either way). If existing institutions weren’t using their massively accumulated wealth to affect the crypto space, they would be losing power over the people who decided to avail themselves of it and bypass conventional banks. I consider this a weakness in cryptocurrency that needs to be addressed, but is this weakness any different from any other currency?

Crypto is also incredibly power inefficient. Even with proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-work, it is still factors less efficient than normal FIAT transactions, and as of yet I see no solution to that. One may pop up in some hypothetical future, but I have no faith in that.

Zero arguments from me. It’s an environmental disaster.

Additionally, crypto will also always reward those who engage with it disingenuously, as it is not linked to one’s real identity and, again, is inflexible and impossible to truly regulate. In a mass-adoption scenario, scammers would become enormously more successful.

Depends on how you intereact with crypto. In the US, most states require crypto brokers to verify the identity of those trading on their platforms. No different from opening a checking account with a bank. Sure, one could get into crypto anonymously but it’s considerably harder. Some crypto ATMs exist, but I think virtually all of them have cameras and require you to show photo ID to use them (at least in the US).

Most importantly, crypto is a digital asset whose store of value is implicitly tied to the belief that it can be sold for FIAT. It is almost exclusively a speculative vehicle, and always had been since its inception. Actual crypto purchases are disincentivized by how slow, inefficient, unwieldy, and volatile it is. Not to mention high transaction fees for the most popular coins. It is also deflationary, meaning one is disincentivized from spending it, which is extremely bad for the economy in a mass-adoption scenario. Gentle inflation is one of the core principles underpinning our economy. Having currency also be an asset that appreciates in value is objectively a bad thing.

I disagree that it’s been a speculative vehicle since its inception. It’s undeniably a speculative investment now, and has been for years, but when it first started out, it was basically worthless and adopted by a handful of businesses who were understandably pissed off after the 2008 market crash. People naturally speculated as to whether or not it would take off, and I think it’s unfortunate that it became a speculative investment by those who weren’t really interested in its use as a currency.

I’m no economist, but I don’t see much difference between “crypto’s value is implicitly tied to the belief that it can be sold for FIAT” and “FIAT’s value is implicitly tied to the belief that the issuing government values it”

I feel like I could keep going for a while but hopefully you at least understand why I feel this way now lol.

Oh believe me, none of this is news to me. I just wanted to see what you thought. I’ve found the cryptocurrency conversation interesting as the years have passed and enjoy asking people for their thoughts when they appear to be engaging in good faith. Most people I see are very unpleasantly hardline for or against crypto and don’t care to take time to discuss any of the nuance.

I’m curious if you would prefer crypto disappear entirely, or if you would prefer it be properly regulated so it has all the same, or greater, protections so that it can be part of the economy without being as risky for consumers.

I can only assume the early internet had little to no consumer protections on purchases (compared to the protections they have today, that is), but I could be wrong on that. Laws and regulations tend to always lag behind technology.

I like the idea of taking power away from big banks. Crypto is no silver bullet, but I’d like to think it could get there one day. But since capitalism always protects itself, I doubt any wealthy lobbies are going to be asking congress to pass common sense regulation for a currency that takes power away from institutional banks.

Definitely not a stupid question! Networking infrastructure is complex. I’ve been working in IT for years and still find myself scratching my head at times going, “Wait, how does the OSI model work again?”

Connecting to a VPN on your phone while using mobile data basically means the cell phone tower handling your data only sees encrypted data. Whoever your VPN provider is will see your traffic instead of the cell tower.

However, in modern times it’s fair to be wary of backdoors and exploits that can compromise your device and render the VPN encryption moot. There’s not much that regular people can really do to mitigate that possibility other than not use a phone.

If you’re interested in learning more networking fundamentals, I’d recommend starting with the OSI model and its layers.

A handy mnemonic I whipped up with ChatGPT last year for better remembering the order of the layers:

Precise Data Navigation Takes Some Planning Ahead

I run my own wireguard VPN at home and connect to it from my phone when I’m traveling.

Grants me privacy (but not anonymity) from my mobile carrier. Sure, my home ISP still sees my VPN’s traffic, but that’s still one less company able to monitor my web traffic when I’m mobile.

Why

Why not? Nothing wrong with research and development as long as everyone participating in the test is an informed, consenting adult IMO. The advancements could make current accessibility tech even better. For one reason or another, a quadriplegic person decided they were willing to take the risk, so maybe they consider current accessibility tech for quadriplegics to be insufficient and wanted to try for something better?

Please dude I promise you this is near universally hated by disabled people 😭

Well damn, I didn’t know.

Agreed. I was flippant after reading the headline, since I don’t like Musk, but once I read the story I was like "oh yeah this tech does have big potential for the differently abled. "

A quadriplegic being able to control a cursor on a screen with the implant for 100 days seems like a legit first attempt.

Could be great for the accessibility movement in the long run. But I could be naive or too optimistic.

I migrated from Plex to Jellyfin maybe a year and a half ago and haven’t looked back. Great user experience and works so well out of the box IMO. Good Android app, too. Works with Chromecast, too (though I’ve been trying to ditch Chromecast in favor of just a laptop connected to the TV via HDMI).

I started digitizing old home movies that were on VHS and created a “Home Movies” library for my family; none of us had watched them in ages since none of us have a VCR anymore, lol. Great mother’s/father’s day gift for one’s parent if you’ve got the time and equipment. It’s nice having the whole family able to easily stream our home movies.

And “driver crash”

“You made a valid point and have changed my mind.”

Clearly you aren’t doing it right. Me buying shares is a death knell for companies. I’d be surprised if my broker doesn’t give companies a courtesy call when I’ve bought a few shares to let 'em know the company’s about to go under.

I enjoyed playing around with it for a few weeks last year. I liked that they had voice acting and context-sensitive dialogue like Velma saying, “Let’s see who’s really the world’s greatest detective” when Batman was on the enemy team.

It’s also just fun to speculate about all the characters that could show up (but probably won’t). I’m still rooting for Granddad “Bitches” Freeman to join the roster.

For me, it’s Dragon Ball. Across 3 mangas, 4 shows, and like 25 movies, the latest content is still enjoyable. Dragon Ball Super, both the anime and manga, are just super fun successors to the originals. It’s the only comic book I actually read when a new issue comes out.

where’s the pleasure in watching a story you’ve just created with prompts?

I imagine (some of) the fanfic/fanvid community might love something like this for making fanvids. Some of my friends are big into the fanfic/fanvid scene and would probably love writing/directing their own videos to share with fellow fans in the community.

A few of my favorites that I follow:

Open Culture - https://toot.community/@openculture
George Takei - https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei
Endless Screaming - https://botsin.space/@scream
The New Oil - https://mastodon.thenewoil.org/@thenewoil
Space Telescope Science Institute - https://astrodon.social/@spacetelescope
Linux on Mobile - https://fosstodon.org/@linmob

Agreed. I was recently prepping a laptop to give to my mom, and planned to put Ubuntu on it since, y’know, it’s “linux for human beings”. I hadn’t used Ubuntu Desktop in years, and was blown away by how unintuitive everything felt in the GUI. nothing behaved how I expected (this isn’t to say it is inherently bad; this is just my experience).

Tried Linux Mint XFCE instead and was instantly relieved that it was a similar user experience to Windows (since that’s typically going to make things easier for beginners).

It’s also my go-to distro if I have a machine lying around that’s in-between tasks and just needs a general-purpose OS for the moment.