dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Decades of the Catholic church demonizing birth control methods and claiming condoms cause AIDS will do that do a continent.

No points for guessing. The Irish and the Spanish have already been considered “not white” at points in recent history. So have the Italians.

Christ.

You reminded me that I had to waste like an entire hour of my day a couple of weeks ago convincing my boss that yes, we absolutely can eBay off the four or five unopened toner cartridges we have lying around here for a printer we no longer have. It’s fine. Just let them go. We can use the money for some other operational expense. “But already paid for them and that means we’ll take a loss on them.”

Sure, genius. Versus what, exactly? Leaving them mouldering on the supply room shelf until the day the sun burns out? An 80% return is better than 0% return.

Lately (no doubt due to getting back into prosumer photography stuff) I’ve been using B&H Photo and Video. I kinda-sorta forgot I bought my drone from them several years ago and at the time they were cheaper than Amazon and also offered next day shipping for free for an order of that magnitude. Since I’m not using Amazon anymore I’ve been getting my stuff from there again.

Everything I’ve been interested in has been the same price as on Amazon or cheaper. I think they’re hamstrung by their name by this point since they seem to have a pretty wide swath of general electronics and not just camera gear.

Just don’t try to order on the Shabbat (i.e. Saturday), because you can’t. Their web site literally disables its checkout during that time.

If you specifically need yum-cha generic Chinese garbage (for instance, if you have a particular brand related to bizarre knockoff knives you need to maintain) I find going straight to the source and just getting that crap from Aliexpress is the best plan. It’s the same bullshit that litters most of Amazon and sure, maybe you don’t get it quite as fast. But at least they’re broadly honest about the inherent crappiness of what you’re getting, and the same stuff is significantly less expensive.

There probably is, but this is what I mainly use:

https://fsymbols.com/generators/smallcaps/

BoOkMaRkEd, ʀɪɢʜᴛ ᴀʟᴏɴɢsɪᴅᴇ ᴀʟʟ ᴏғ ᴍʏ ᴏᴛʜᴇʀ 𝕤𝕥𝕦𝕡𝕚𝕕 f̴͎̠͕̈́̐͠o̸̡̪̼̿͐͐n̴̞͖̒̚̚͜ț̸̺͉̔̐̐ 𝖌𝖊𝖓𝖊𝖗𝖆𝖙𝖔𝖗𝖘!

Or JuSt UsE SpOnGeBoB CaPs!!!

…That’s actually really annoying to type, though.

Reading.

Or rather, how so many people seem fear and avoid it, or can’t do it. Something like 21% of adults in the US are illiterate, and the majority – 54% – read at or below a 6th grade level.

I’ve been a sight reader probably since I was about six years old. I absolutely cannot look at any words legibly written in my native language and not understand them. You couldn’t force me to look at words written in English and not digest them if you held a gun to my head. I fear no wall of text, no matter how tall it is.

It takes some effort to wrap your head around the notion that not only can most people not do this, but statistically speaking most or at least a plurality of people have to struggle or exert conscious effort to read and many of them are loathe to do so. And roughly one in five people simply can’t. This did not sink in for me when I was younger.

I can’t imagine having to live my life that way. You nerds have seen how much bullshit I write in a day; I’d go absolutely bats.

One wonders how much of this is down to the proportion of people on here for whom English is not their first language. I know that I struggle enough to comprehend any other languages which aren’t my native one to begin with (i.e. English, in my case) so a lot of subtlety surely flies over my head in those. Can’t imagine that situation is much different for others.

It did however at least lead to the pun in the Funimation dub about a “fishfull of dollars,”, since they baited Oolong with a wad of cash on a fishhook rather than Bulma’s panties.

when a calculator from the 80s can do the same thing.

1970’s! The little blighters are even older than most people think.

Which is why I find it extra hilarious / extra infuriating that we’ve gone through all of these contortions and huge wastes of computing power and electricity to ultimately just make a computer worse at math.

Math is the one thing that computers are inherently good at. It’s what they’re for. Trying to use LLM’s to perform it halfassedly is a completely braindead endeavor.

I already do. Flip a coin: Heads, the car is operating itself and is therefore being operated by a moron. Tails, the owner is driving it manually and therefore it is being operated by a moron.

Just be sure to carefully watch your six when you’re sitting at a stoplight. I’ve gotten out of the habit of sitting right in the center of the lane, because the odds are getting ever higher that I’ll have to scoot out of the way of some imbecile who’s coming in hot. That’s hard to do when your front tire is 24" away from the license plate of the car in front of you.

A metric ton, anyway, and provided whatever you want is water.

The obvious answer: Use your replicator to replicate more replicators.

The correct answer: The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.

The clever dick corollary: 1m³ is actually quite a large volume, and ain’t no rule says you can only replicate one object at a time. If whatever luxury item or commodity you want is small in volume, which it probably is, don’t forget you can replicate a whole bunch of it within a meter cube.

I have absolutely no idea what I’d do with this but I want one.

There you go.

And the Greeks were reportedly setting ships on fire with sunlight and mirrors millennia ago.

I’m positive competent nerds make up none of their earnings, because we’ve all been pirating Microsoft software ever since we were tall enough to reach the keyboard.

He did what?

Nature really is out of balance lately.

Photovalic solar was invented in 1954 and has been readily available since the 1960’s. In 1963 Japan was powering a lighthouse with it. And Solar One was operational in 1982.

If we gave a rat’s ass about solar at the time we easily could have done it also.