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Cake day: Jul 25, 2023

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Yeah, shocking… People will use substances until they want to quit. Unless and until the addict makes that choice for themselves, nothing is going to change. The best you can do is change their circumstances so that they want to change their lives.


IIRC, there are ongoing experiments with organs are being grown in cloned animals; the animal is slaughtered, and the organ is harvested. Maybe someday they’ll be more readily available and renewable than they are now.

…At least for the wealthy that can afford to have farms of cloned animals.


As someone else already pointed out, if the transplant from the living donor failed or had complications, now you have two people that need livers. It puts a healthy person at risk for a very low chance of a positive outcome. If they were paying out of their own pocket, then I’d say sure, go ahead, blow your own money on it, risk your own life and health. But they aren’t.


I’ve known entirely too many alcoholics that have had too many wake-up and come-to-Jesus moments, only to go back to drinking as soon as the immediate crisis is over. Change only comes when the alcoholic wants to change for their own reasons, not due to external factors.

Livers are a limited resource. Wasting a donor’s liver on a person that us is unlikely to stop drinking–despite their protestations–means that another person doesn’t get one. It may seem like a cruel calculus, but it’s the only reasonable way to ration a scarce resource. It doesn’t matter if alcoholism is a disease, or you think that it’s a moral failing; the end result is the same.


That’s not entirely accurate. Yes, it was more than the GDP of the entire planet at the time, but that’s not the value of the entire planet. Unless they meant the amount of physical currency that existed, in which case the amount was considerably less than the 62T that the article cites, since most money is never physical.

It’s still patently ridiculous though.


These leaks frustrate labels and artists and not just for financial reasons. Many musicians work months if not years on their tracks; seeing these being paraded on pirate sites, before their official release, stings.

I dunno about this. Most of the artists I give a shit about have their music up for free on Bandcamp. The ones I’ve asked point-blank about it have said that they don’t care about piracy; they see it as free advertisement for their live shows, which is where they make most of their money (and on merch sales). This might be true of some of the largest acts, where sales might make up more than a few hundred dollars in total annual revenue, but probably a lot less true for most mid-sized or smaller acts.

OTOH, given that the labels are the ones making money off sales of music, they probably care quite a lot.


I’ve personally found that I can hear a sound difference in 320kpbs .mp3s, depending on whether or not it was encoded with a constant bit rate, or a variable bit rate.


You really need a critical mass to break Adobe’s stranglehold. I hope that someone can, because I hate their software-as-a-service model. But for now, I have to suck it up and deal with it.

Their refusal to pay to integrate PANTONE colors has really fucked up my workflow. :(


Nothing is going to effectively hurt their bottom line, because they own the market. There are no other viable alternatives to Adobe if you are working in the graphics profession. Everyone, and I mean everyone, in graphic design/visual communication uses Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat. If you do any work with designers and receive files from them, you’ll need to use Adobe products in order to access the files and all the information in the files.

This is the sector I work in. There is absolutely no getting away from it, and until someone comes up with a product suite that is better right out of the gate, and is completely compatible with Adobe, no one is going to switch.


When you look at her voting record in the Senate, she’s fairly progressive (as far as US politics goes). IIRC, she’s a little to the right of Sanders, and a little to the left of Warren, but pretty close overall to both of them. That said, she’s more of a pragmatist, and Sanders is an idealist.


I’m a reliable voter. I vote in ever state and national election (but not local ones, because my residence is weird; my address is technically in one county, but the town my address is in is in a different county, so I wouldn’t have any political connection with the local races that I can vote in).

It would take a very unique ® for me to vote ®. Given their traditional policy positions that are pro-business, anti-choice, etc., I’m not sure who could even go that way. I suppose I could be convinced to vote for a libertarian running as an ® if they were able to make a case that they stood for strong individual liberty protections while also supporting strong regulations on businesses.

On the other hand, there are definitely (D) candidates that I would simply not vote for at all, like any (D) that was anti-choice.

Prior to 2016, my parents were 100% ®; they’ve switched almost entirely to (D) after seeing how radically the party shifted.


Create a multi-part archive (…probably about 250 parts…) with a strong password, upload each part to whatever the current equivalent to Megaupload is, and let them download it at their leisure.

With no accounts on either end, should only take about three months for each to be complete.

Alternatively, you could put it on a thumb drive and drive it over if they live fairly close.


It is, yes. They do a ton of really small updates all the fucking time now, sometimes breaking critical shit, sometimes fixing things. (I don’t remember which version it was that ended support for PANTONE; now you have to pay for a subscription to PANTONE also, and the plug-in is trash and buggy as hell.) Since it wants to be always connected to the internet now, it’s more of a pain in the ass to pirate, although it’s likely still possible.

I have to use it for my job, so my company pays for it. But TBH, if you’re an industry professional, there’s really not any viable options on the market. Half the stuff clients send to me are in proprietary formats.


when people google that they want immediate relief, not fucking oh go for a walk every day,

The problem is that there is no immediate relief that isn’t either a) suicide, or b) won’t make things worse in the long run. Even something like ECT doesn’t work instantly; it takes several treatments. Transcranial magnetic stimulation seems promising, but it’s not a frontline treatment. The generic shit is the stuff that actually works in the long run, things like getting therapy, exercising, going outside more, interacting with people in a positive way, and so on. “Self care”–isolating and doing easy, comfortable things–will make things worse in the long run.


720p? Pfffft. 240i. Rip them in ‘2014 YouTube over 2G’ quality.


When I open Tor browser on my desktop–not in Tails–that site doesn’t even load. So either it is fooling it, or it requires javascript to run, which I have turned off by default in Tor.

I’m going to leave it at that.


Requires a log-in. That means that there’s absolutely no way to anonymize your searches. At least if I want to do an anonymous search, I can open my laptop, boot up in Tails, and search DDG on Tor. With a required log-in (and billing that presumably doesn’t include a Monero option), you can’t make that work.

Pass.


Microsoft Edge is actually good, so I sure hope the team building it isn’t about to resort to more tricks to get Chrome users to use it.

No. No it is not.


Technically you can cook a hamburger to medium and have it be safe to eat, but I really don’t see most restaurants doing sous vide for hamburgers.


It’s super-complicated to figure out how much revenue each stream earns musicians, but unless they’re already one of the biggest names in music, it ain’t much. Which means that, either way, pirating the music isn’t harming them to any significant degree, unless everyone was pirating their music, and no one was attending their live performances.


I think you missed the point. If you’re talking about survival information, you want it as low-tech as possible, i.e., hard copy only.

And remember: two is one, one is none.


First, the fact that I have to download the whole blockchain to use it. I’m not on a super fast connection, so that took like a day. The difficulty and expense of getting Monero was also an issue; I had to buy Bitcoins, then move Bitcoins to an exchange that would let me buy Monero, because the exchange I could buy Bitcoin on didn’t work with Monero (due to the perception that it’s only used for criminal activity). At every step, there’s a transaction fee, and that fee isn’t entirely transparent up front, so it’s harder to estimate what the final price (in fiat currency) will be.

At the tiem I was trying to use it, there weren’t any user-friendly wallets, and I don’t think there was any capability to use it from a mobile phone; that makes it more difficult to use than other crypto.

I’m not sure how well it plays with Tails of Qubes; I never got far enough to give it a shot.

I’m not saying that any of these thigns are bad, but they do make it harder for a typical person to start using, and until more regular people are using privacy-focused crypto and operating systems, they’re always going to have the appearance of being used for crime only.