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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I transferred to a new college and learned the first week of class that they required a few vaccinations I was missing. No problem, the on campus health center can provide them. I confirm with them that they accept my insurance, so I go get the shots.

    A few months later, I get a bill in the mail for over $3000. Apparently the health center wasn’t in-network, so I have no idea what they meant by “we accept your insurance.” I layer learned that if I had driven 10 minutes west across the state border, there was an in-network office where those two vaccinations would’ve been completely covered.

    I still haven’t paid a penny towards that bill, fuck them. I get daily phone calls from an unknown number, it’s probably collections, but I don’t know for sure since I never answer it. This was years ago and my credit score never took a hit. I’d rather die than reward these parasites with my money.

    I’m pretty sure I have a tumor growing on my hip too. I’d get it checked, but between student loans, insane cost of living, and rising costs of literally everything else, I can’t afford to right now. I’m a childless engineer with “great” health insurance and a roommate, so I’m relatively well off. I have no idea why shit hasn’t boiled over yet. Makes me want to depose some CEOs too.



  • Right, BattleEye is hit or miss depending on the game developer.

    Another significant drawback I have is OBS compatibility. It technically works, but just having it open drops my framerate by ~30%, and having it record drops it by ~50%. I haven’t found a fix for it yet, so I’m effectively unable to stream or record gameplay on Linux. The same settings used in Windows hardly impacts my framerate.

    I’ll continue using Linux, but I haven’t deleted my Windows partition yet.



  • Sure, but only fourth grade logic is required to see why that’s wrong.

    Trump: 50,000,000 votes

    Kamala: 50,000,000 votes

    Other candidates: 1,000 votes + 3,000 votes + 7,000 votes + …

    When an primitive voting scheme is used that says “winner takes all and you can only vote for one candidate,” a vote for any other candidate is essentially the same as not voting unless the masses gather behind a single third party (which will never happen, especially with the internet).

    A voting scheme more sophisticated that allows people to pick multiple candidates, in something like a ranked list for example, would make third party votes worth something. But that disrupts the status quo and doesn’t help career politicians, so we’ll never see that unless heads start rolling.




  • Not necessarily. Buttons and switches introduce contact resistance, which in the case of the mushy Duracell buttons, is relatively high and also dependent on how hard they’re pressed.

    Ideally, the buttons are pressed very hard to ensure the entire contact area is closed, minimizing the contact resistance from the buttons. A good switch should have little resistance.

    Poorly closing the contacts by not pressing the Duracell buttons very hard would result in higher contact resistance (because there’s physically less contact between both halves of the switch), which means less current flows through the strip and less heat is generated. This would look identical to a deader battery with the buttons pressed well.







  • More than just “ripcord likes to have lights on at 6:00 pm,” surprisingly.

    It knows what brand lights you have, who’s interacting with it, who you might be with if anyone speaks in the background, what times and days you’re typically home… it’ll even infer your mood based on how your voice sounds.

    Unfortunately, Amazon isn’t required to disclose every bit of personal data they take from you, so only so much is known about it. If you consider though that data collection is a new, multi-billion dollar industry, and how effective hundreds of PhDs in data science and social-engineering can be with near infinite resources to develop tools to extract as much information from these devices as possible, it starts becoming more believable.

    Here’s a good paper I found: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.10920





  • I know you mean well, but when wins are this small and infrequent, I’d refrain from giving praise and instead demand more. Really though, has the current administration done anything else to improve the prison system besides this?

    Our prison system is such a far cry from functioning well and ethically that capping phone call charges is truly, barely scraping the surface. I understand celebrating small wins, but if we celebrate this one and continue making improvements at this rate, it would take literally thousands of years for our prison system to reach reform. That’s not a win, that’s stagnation disguised as a win.

    And this isn’t mentioning how nearly every facet of this dysfunctional, worthless excuse of a society is designed to serve the rich at the expense of the poor, and our government has made it crystal clear that they don’t intend on fixing any of it. I have incredibly good health insurance and I can’t even see a damn allergist, my wife and I are two working professionals who will never afford a home (let alone kids), etc. You can make more money in this country reselling sneakers than you can by getting a degree in education and teaching children. Seriously though, what the fuck?

    We won’t see any meaningful social reform in our lives unless things boil over and heads start to roll. Until then, the government will continue making our lives tangibly worse in two dozen different ways for each micro-win, like this prison phone call change.