Carrot

Does this mean that my insurance company won’t consider them acts of god anymore and will actually cover them?

This game works flawlessly on the Steam Deck, which, in almost all cases, means it will work on Steam for Linux through Proton, which is an emulation layer built-in to Steam

I have a similar background, and I actually am automating my home. However, what Google/Alexa tote as automation isn’t actually automation; I still would have to say something/press a button.

I have a pretty healthy home assistant setup, with stuff like electrochromic film on my windows that will dim the windows if someone is sitting near them and the sun is at the right angle to be in their eyes because I hate when I have to hold my head in a position to keep the sun out of my eyes.

I picked an extreme example, but I’ve also got things like reminders when my laundry or dishes are done (running off of a metered plug, so it just detects power spikes from the machines), presence detectors in rooms to automate lights on/off, and a whole slough of things that will happen when I click the play button on Plex (lights go out, curtains close, windows dim). I’ve got humidity sensors in the bathroom for starting/stopping the vent fan, I’ve got particulate/heat/humidity sensors for starting and stopping the hood vent in the kitchen.

Obviously these things save a few seconds here and there but it is nice to not have to think about these things anymore.

I have this. I have zero visualization, in the little visual on the wiki I’m a 5. For the most part, I don’t really notice any downsides. These are the things that I’ve noticed are difficult for me that I have attributed to it.

1. I can’t remember directions based on visual landmarks.
2. A mild case of face blindness. I recognize people with distinct features pretty well, but it’s common for folks to be going for a handful of trendy looks, and anyone with the same trendy look might as well be the same person to me.
3. A pretty strong case of “out of sight, out of mind.” Like, I kind of forget about people, including family and loved ones, if I haven’t seen them in a while. Kind of a hard one to explain.
4. I can’t see my wife’s face in my head, which makes me sad.
5. I have to be the jerk tourist who takes pictures of all the cool stuff I see, because if I don’t I won’t remember them in a few months. My travel memories are mostly tied to how I felt in the area.
6. Not sure if it’s actually tied to aphantasia, but I don’t dream. Like, not just visually but at all. When I sleep there is nothing. I can still tell that time has passed once I wake up, but I don’t have any mental activity that I can even remotely remember happening while asleep. I’m sure there is some, it just doesn’t make itself known to me.

There are a handful of perks that it comes with as well though:

1. I can watch scary movies and then sleep immediately as no images of scary things can haunt me
2. In that same vein, I am able to deal with gruesome stuff, and bounce back quickly since there is no “image burned into my head”
3. Along with no dreams, I have no nightmares, so that’s also a plus
4. It appears to aid in an understanding of abstract logic; I have attributed my success in the software engineering field to it, at least partially.

Yep. No one is going to McDonalds for a delicious burger, just a cheap and fast one. Now that prices are above $10 if you want a meal, and the restaurants are understaffed so even the drive through takes > 15 minutes, there’s really no reason to eat there

I think it’s important to not give certain things the benefit of the doubt. This clock stuff is just plain stupid to get bent out of shape about, but the other two are serious concerns.

This is just anecdotal, but I was a late 90’s kid that had as much screen time as I wanted growing up. I played an absurd amount of videogames, and had to be dragged outside by my siblings or I could comfortably stay indoors in front of a game or the internet for hours on end. I spent most of my early years (age 3 to age 15) in front of a screen. Yet, I did just fine in school, got a degree, and now work as a software engineer. I fell in love with my highschool sweetheart, and after waiting until I had my degree, we got married at 23, almost 10 years after we started dating. It felt like my obsessive amounts of screen time as a kid didn’t have any negative side effects to my life as a whole (outside of being a quiet and reserved person, and some could argue that that’s not a negative) and led me down a successful career path.

However, I don’t think kids these days have the luxury of doing that anymore. The content put in front of me as a kid was games made by teams that were passionate about the thing they were working on. Forums and early YouTube videos were created by some no name person with the hope of sharing something they openly cared about. Social Media didn’t exist yet and once it did, I never really got into it.

The content put in front of children these days is one of three or so things:

1. Mindless dribble. (looking at you, Youtube Kids)
2. Rushed, broken games made barely finished enough to get people to buy them just to make a quick buck, and the ones that are finished are so heavily tied into marketing it’s like the game is basically one big ad. (looking at you, Fortnite and Rocket League)
3. Content made with the express purpose to either gain influencer status, or to use that influencer status to market something, primarily to children who are especially vulnerable to the scummy marketing practices they are using.

Obviously there are exceptions to these everywhere, but I’m talking about the things that are actively being shoved down kids’ throats. It’s not that I think that the content I consumed was better than what I see kids consuming now, but I think that the motivations behind the content can just as easily influence children as much as the content itself. I think that in a lot of ways, this kind of content is actively degrading kids’ brains, and from my experience, it’s not the screen time, it’s what’s being shown on screen that’s the issue.

Thankfully I’m tech savvy enough that I can make the internet for my children what it was for me as a kid, without all the marketing and money making schemes that pass as content these days, but a lot of people just toss a tablet in front of their kids and call it parenting.

I was going to rant about privacy as well, but this is getting way too long. Just know that I think digital privacy is really important, and think that we’ve paid the price for not considering it earlier, and there are ways we can save our kids from the same fate.

Sorry, I tend to write way too much on topics I care about, thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

tl;dr - The clock thing is stupid, but please approach the constant exposure to the modern day internet and the digital privacy topics with a bit more scrutiny.

Donnie Darko

Big companies do this on purpose. They want their earnings and their expenses to match up as close as possible, because companies don’t pay any taxes on money spent on making money, only on profits. So if a giant company is in the red, the vast majority of operating expenses are tax deductible

That’s not a low end payout per view. Typically it’s a fraction of a cent (USD) per view. Typically ads pay out per 1000 views, and the average of that is $0.38. To make the math easier, we’ll call it $0.50 per 1000 views, or $0.0005 per view. On top of this, YouTube takes their 45% cut, which means you’re looking at more like $0.00025 per view. Of course, that’s the average, and for a larger channel with the right audience you’re more likely to see a CPM (cost per mille, mille being 1000 in French) of a few dollars. Let’s call it $5.00, which would come to a CPM of $0.005, or roughly $0.0025 after YouTube takes their cut. That’s still $25,000 for 10 million views, which is a ton of money, but I think people have a tendency to overinflate how much money comes from Youtube ads.

I mean, I found it in two pretty substantial dictionaries after a quick search: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/sike https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=sike

Along with countless other dictionaries that cover slang and alternate spellings, but I figured you wouldn’t think that those counted.

But I will say that if being in a dictionary is a requirement for a word being part of the English language, you’re not accounting for a large portion of modern American/Internet vernacular. People who actually study language would never have this take, as languages are made up of the words people actually use, not the words that a board of folks decide to put into a list.