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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • You’ve just traded down votes for the report button.

    I say they are two different use cases. There is often a very wide gulf between a comment that I feel does not contribute to good discussion and one that is so heinous that it needs to be removed. Most of your comments for instance: pretty naive and banal adding little good to the discussion overall, but I don’t feel that you’ve said anything hateful, obscene, or aggressive enough to warrant total removal. Usually I just downvote and move on, especially when I don’t want to hear that person’s bad take reply on my own point of view. I’ve made an exception here for you simply because you are trolling all over this thread, seemingly inviting downvotes. But, I’m going to block you and move on because you’ve killed any interest I have in this thread or the larger discussion. I still don’t think your comments rise to the level of reporting.

    Reports and blocks aren’t a replacement for downvotes and if your instances doesn’t federate downvotes you shouldn’t use them that way.


  • I don’t disagree with you. I’m just amused that your example is printers and copiers, the tech that has been notoriously devilish to get working correctly from like the very beginning. New tech has certainly NOT made printing any easier or more convenient. Sometimes they simply require arcane incantations and a blood sacrifice. I still think people should at least try, but I totally understand why their threshold for “I’m over this shit and I want someone else (e.g. a pro like you) to fix it for me.” is so low specifically when it comes to printers and copiers.


  • I prefer to read by reflected light, not emitted light. I used to prefer real books (and I do still throughly enjoy them), but I’ve grown used to the creature comforts like waterproofness, annotations, highlighting, searching, and sheer data density of an ebook reader packed with more books than I could read in a few years. Granted I also highlighted and annotated any books I owned with reckless abandon, but the data hoarder in me loves the other aspects even more. Regarding data density, there is nothing worse than carting along a massive book while traveling only to finish it before you even arrive. If it was a book I didn’t mind leaving behind that might be okay, but now I’ve got to find a new book for the trip home too. I’ve tried to use my phone to read, but it’s uncomfortable given the small size and intense light. Also, reading in full sun on your phone will absolutely cook the internals and drain you battery, not great for something I might rely on for emergencies. So for me I read: new (usually physical) books from Indy authors or graphic heavy books (like baudy poetry from the renn-fest, comic books/graphic novels), previously loved books from thrift stores and used book shops (I absolutely love finding books in which people have left notes in the cover and margins), ebooks read on a cheap e-reader of popular stuff from disreputable sources, and listening to audiobooks from downright shady sources or podcasts on my phone.



  • By spending more on the military and the police than we do on education, science, and journalism.

    Wikipedia still isn’t a reliable source. It is a compendium of reliable sources that one can use to get an overview of a subject. This is also what these chatbots should be, but they rarely cite their sources and most people don’t bother to verify anyway.




  • You seem to have almost completely missed the point of allegory and metaphor in TOS. “Time after humanity has dealt with” as you put it is just a literary device to soften the impact when the show was inevitably confronted or viewed by real racists. It was never a really view of the future. It was always a reflection of our present through the lens of futurism, a clever narrative framing device. That narrative framing device could not possibly remain unchangeable through multiple generations without loosing everything that made it work. Attempting to do so, i.e. keeping the storytelling framework completely unchanged and not adapting to new generations and new social dynamics, would have shown a lack of creativity and imagination.

    The show was from a time when the U.S. thought they had beaten fascism (past tense, done, a part of the past) and would soon beat racism, classism, etc. From a time when imperialism was seen as a fundamentally good social force by most of the imperialist public. Today we (mostly) know better. We will probably never truly erase any of them. They are things we’ll have to remain vigilant for. A show today patronizing us with their perfected utopian society which remains VERY imperialist without shining a light on that contradiction just would not work. A show lacking any interpersonal drama also would not work and it’s not even something that was really true for TOS, just a weird kink Roddenberry got into when producing TNG. That’s the context of the way Star Trek has changed and it matters.












  • That’s a subtly and nuance that will be lost on A LOT of people. Clearly it’s a distinction that OP’s roommate is not ready to confront, which probably tells us something about the attitudes of his family as well. But, in the end, it’s rarely so simple as chucking someone into a bin for convenient stereotyping based on one person’s story about another person’s feelings.


  • Being able to fold down a larger “sheet” display so that it fit in a pocket would be pretty cool. Having extra room for reading things like maps and comic books is so much better than pinching and zooming on a pocket sized display. What you call limited purpose, I call functional design. I’m kind of over all-in-one devices. They’ve turned into Jack of all trades, but master of none.

    Obviously that’s not what this device is, but it got me thinking about why I’d want a device with multiple e-ink displays or a foldable display.