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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Let me share my Xbox experience? I’m mid-40s. Owned Xboxes since literally the OG Xbox 1.

    I originally bought this thing to play with my brother split screen. Nowadays I want to play split screen with my son.

    Yet somehow there’s no fucking split screen games anymore. The last two or three AAA games I purchased I played for a few hours and then never loaded again.

    And the other day when I loaded up call of duty Black ops 3 to play zombies (this is like a 10 year old game now) I found that because I let my Xbox Gold live whatever the fuck subscription expire, I can’t play “online” and use my unlocked items even though I’m doing local play.

    So from this guy what in the fucking fuck xbox. This is some kind of device designed to clean out my wallet for eternity and not deliver what I actually want.

    I pretty much exclusively use my Xbox as a YouTube player now.


  • Thailand. Private pay.

    Take a ride share car to the private hospital.

    Greeted by concierge when I walk in. She asks why I’m here and then directs me to another desk on another floor.

    Entering the next room feels a bit like a hotel lobby. There are big sofas and comfortable lighting. It feels cozy even though it’s a large space. There’s a Starbucks. Another concierge approaches me. I explain why I’m here and I’m sat down and handed an iPad where I can fill in some medical background. They have my record from a previous visit so it’s quick. I confirm that I will pay with a credit card instead of using any insurance.

    In about 10 minutes I’m brought to a room where a nurse catches my weight and blood pressure. Then I’m brought to the patient exam room.

    A few minutes later the doctor comes in and performs his examination. He makes his diagnosis types some notes into his computer. He asks me to come back for a follow-up in one week and pick up my prescription on the way out.

    Leaving the exam room, another nurse catches me to hand me the diagnosis paperwork and points me to the pharmacy.

    I walk to the pharmacy and hand them my paperwork. They collect my payment for the whole visit and ask me to wait until my name is called to pick up the prescription.

    About 10 minutes later the prescription is ready and I’m out the door with a small bag of drugs and about $125 out of my wallet.

    The service is comprehensive and everything is available in one building. For this country it’s a bit expensive but you feel like you’re very well taken care of and it’s instant.





  • nucleative@lemmy.worldtoMental Health@lemmy.worldAh pointless advice...
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    5 days ago

    I’m on board with this way of thinking too. Your opener is poignant - you mean you tried everything already and absolutely nothing works? Well I guess there’s no point in this conversation then, is there. Unless you’re in need of a complaining session, in which case I can handle that for about 5 minutes until we move to a new topic.


  • Yeah it matters a lot how the conversation is set up.

    Is it “you and I versus the facts”?

    Or “you vs me”?

    Competent people can disagree and also identify where the facts are missing and the assumptions begin that lead to this. It doesn’t have to be a fight if they look at the data as something to discover together.


  • UBI is probably a good idea but it’s coming too slowly for anyone to rely on. Even if UBI is fully implemented, I suspect it will be life sustaining but not a life fulfilling. So humanity still needs to find purpose.

    It’s hard to imagine a scenario where someone cannot be trained to do something new. Isn’t that a core feature of humans?

    Next, how shall we define value? I argue that humans can always create some kind of value that machines cannot, even if only because a human is involved.

    We still value actual art over AI generated art. We value uniqueness and rarity. We value the faults that are inherent from things that are natural and organic.

    Tons of the jobs people did a hundred years ago in developed countries are now gone or have been streamlined down to require fewer people. Yet there are more people on earth now than there ever have been before and arguably worldwide hunger is at its lowest point. So somehow we have figured out how to survive despite vast amounts of automation already. It seems unlikely that our new “AI” tools are going to somehow dramatically disrupt this balance.







  • I’m American but live outside the US in a developing country.

    Here, the situation on the roads is wildly unstandardized. Every turn, road sign, curb size, lane width, bridge height, traffic signal duration, etc may or may not be consistent with anything else. Not to mention drivers going the wrong way, motorcycles on the sidewalks, people stopping in the road and more.

    Because of the weirdness drivers know they have to pay attention or else death and injury awaits.

    The fact that the 11’ 8" bridge still takes so many casualties suggests drivers confidently think they can drive all over the USA and the road is engineered to an exacting standard. Except for this one bridge.

    I think it’s actually time for the city to just properly fix this bridge and bring it up to standard.






  • I remember that IBM was famously missing the trend in the late 80s/90s and couldn’t understand why regular consumers would ever want to buy a PC. It’s why they gave the PC clone market away, never seriously approached their OS/2 thing, and never really marketed directly to anybody except businesses.

    Microsoft really pushed the idea that regular people needed a home PC which laid the foundation for so many people already having the hardware in place to jump on the internet as soon as it became accessible.

    For a brief moment it looked like a toss up between Microsoft IIS webservers serving up .asp files (or coldfusion .cf - RIP) vs Apache pushing CGI but in the end the Linux solution was more baked and flexible when it was time to launch and scale an internet startup in that era.

    Somebody else would have done what Microsoft did for sure, had they not been there, and I suppose we could be paying AT&T for Unix licenses these days too. But yeah, ultimately both Gates and Torvalds were right in terms of operating systems and well timed.