Huh. A pen and paper little puzzle format that I’ve never seen before.

I wonder what this whole category of games is even called. Used to see them in things like kids magazines mostly.

Here’s the thing. Digital computing fits very neatly in the orderly march of technological progression. So yes the algorithms might be very advanced but advanced algorithms are just part of doing tech.

Jiggling hydrogen atoms of conscious beings and watching what happens is stratospherically more sci-fi than even the coolest signal processing tech. Like on a fundamental level.

How amazing does the average person think “A”I”” is? This is an order of magnitude more impressive than any society-melting party trick.

same species

One of the loose ideas I remember from university was one professor talking about the progress of technology, concluding with something like “every invention is a logical step up from the previous one, built on increasingly intricate understanding of the way the world works and on more refined designs to employ our understanding. Except for MRI machines. If aliens landed tomorrow and we showed them our inventions, they’d be pleased to see how our progression accumulated, but at some point they’ll take one look at the MRI and say what the actual fuck is this.”

Another time he described MRI technology in our current time “like if the Crusaders had microwaves”.

To this day, any time an actually interesting innovation gets described, I still feel like it’s nothing compared to MRI tech. Really. It makes my head hurt just thinking about it. What the actual fuck is this.

"My method is I read an article about something, you know, and I get convinced that, oh, I gotta have this stuff,” he said. “And then I get it and then six months later I’m still taking it. I don’t remember what the article said. So, I end up with a big crate of vitamins that I’m taking, and I don’t even know why.”

I feel like this is a lot of people’s experience, we all know someone like this. I know that’s not the kind of thing the Lemmy demographic would look very kindly at, but this is a type of person. Some of them are batshit and others just had a lot of bad luck with the field of medicine.

I really feel like if this guy had a kinder worldview and wasn’t genuinely fucking bonkers he would be a much-needed voice that could speak reason to people who have lost their trust in medical science. Instead he’s this. So he isn’t that.

That quote could have come from someone who has come to a good realization about their understanding of health. Okay, you got sold a crate of vitamins big boy. Are you fixed yet?

But I really feel like the only ones who talk nicely to those people are industrial suppliers of snake oil and that just makes the world worse. Especially now that they’re at the wheel.

Demoscene, baby. People made things, shared them anonymously, and almost turned their nose at building a reputation or a brand.

The internet I fell in love with years ago is nothing like the pathetic shadow of it we live with today.

Macroblank has a fun compilation of remixed demo music, many of the original tracks are mostly known for being used in keygens. It’s called Keygen, obviously.

CalcKey? FireFish? Developers of Discord alternatives are just a special kind of person. Their efforts are commendable of course.

There was an idea tooted over on Mastodon

It’ll just be called Microsoft Copilot.

None of you are in an abusive relationship with the cruel mistress that is Windows and her accursed family and it shows.

Personally I’m excited for when they rerelease regedit as Windows Copilot, MFS as (Co)Pilot, and Purble Place as Copilot Kids Demo.

I used to refuse change at the bakery when I was a kid and would instead pick something out of the stack of pirated PS2 games. Something like two US dollars? Three? Not an egregious sum for my child self to waste every so often. The death of the on the ground piracy culture of the third world really sucks, although those beautifully dodgy TV boxes give me hope for humanity.

Those were the fucking days eh? You either catch a movie on TV or in the cinema, or you get lucky with whatever they’ve got on random counters in random shops. Remember watching schlock? Was that bad for culture? Was it really that bad?

Has Z Lib just been down for a while? I think I remember using it not that long ago

The fact that they pass a referral link by default even to Lemmy is really funny.

I’m writing Lebanese Arabic so the vowels are all a bit off, mind you. Here is the standard Arabic and the Lebanese dialect equivalents, alongside what I would consider a relatively unambiguous non-IPA transcription.

إمّايَة = /ʔmːaːja/ (MSA) = Immaya(h) (MSA) ≈ /ʔmːeːje/ (LA) = Imméyé (LA)

خِزّانات = /xizːaːnaːt/ (MSA) = Khizzanat (MSA) ≈ /xizːeːneːt/ = Khizzénét

The ء below the ا is basically an ـِ for it, and the ز is easily confused for a ذ. Thanks for playing!

My kidneys hurt just reading this. I guess that makes sense. I knew about the mineral layer and the lead being “fine” if left alone, but it’s really hard to shake off the thought of drinking water having to run through so much surface area being a liability. Shows you how little you know about things you take for granted as just how the world works.

Documentaries and relief programs only show you places that admit they are poor. We are too self-important to acknowledge what we are.

Neither of those would help us more than a sharp, lubricated guillotine at a string of well-timed political summits. We are ~200 heads and a fascist expansionist apartheid ethnostate neighbor away from being a functional country. We live under feudalism and unless all 200 heads go at the same time things get worse and not better. Don’t ignore the neighbor either, it’s hard to have nice civilian bridges if your civilian bridges get bombed every decade.

We pay like 20 USD per month for 24L water dispenser things of drinking water, delivered straight to the front door. Not ideal, but not a disaster on its own.

My entire country is built on individual little compromises that add up to a disaster. So much of my daily concerns are just worrying about the water supply. Who needs bullshit culture war nonsense when your populace is busy stealing their neighbors’ water in the dead of night for the decadent criminal luxury of not smelling like shit over Christmas lunch?

Fixing the water network is extraordinarily expensive and won’t enrich the twenty odd feudal lords who stand to profit from it so it’s not happening soon.

I’m in Lebanon. Your comment is reminding me how unusually flat the ground is where most of you live lol.

Most of us live on mountains with very messy elevation changes. Water towers are extremely uncommon. Generally, water is poorly filtered by the public water companies, then pumped uphill by dirty old pumps through dirty old pipes. Lebanon generates something like a third of its electricity demand, so… pumping is not constant.

Also single family homes are much rarer, most of us live in buildings that are 3-6 floors high. Water happens on the building level.

The water usually fills into a sort of well, a بير (pronounced like “beer”), not all buildings have that. Where I live, that’s the main bulk storage for water split among all the neighbors in the building. The water then gets pumped up to a large central holding tank on the roof (إمّاية ≈ “mother” tank), from which it then trickles it down to the individual apartments’ tanks (خزّانات = tanks) on the roof. Top floors need a pressure pump if they’re too close to the roof. Keep in mind that pumps need electricity, which we don’t always have. Floater valves everywhere. In my own building, my family and I have set up a rudimentary rainwater collection system. It’s not much, it’s not exceptionally clean, but it wasn’t ever either of those things. You can call a cistern man to fill your بير (“beer”).

We’ve had a main pop on our street before. It was a pathetic dribble of water seeping through cracks in the asphalt.

Re: wells, we used to be able to drink from the old town wells, but years of neglect and improper sewage handling means that you really really should not drink from them. I remember drinking from them as a kid, although my parents disapproved. Situation is worse now, I don’t drink well water anymore. The bad part is that well water was only drinkable in pretty rural towns, the worse part is that climate change has wrecked our groundwater supply and the wells I drank from as a kid have run dry. There’s less gentle rains and melting snow, and more summery Decembers with catastrophic, sudden storms. There are rivers I’ve swam in that are now stagnant little green spots. Cisterns are getting more expensive and more essential, and they’re struggling to fill them.

When my parents were kids they claim they could drink tap water. 15 years of brutal civil war and twice as much crony neoliberal “reconstruction” years later and nobody has dreamed up a contrived enough profit incentive to reliably deliver water and electricity. There are tribes warring in Sub-Saharan Africa with better basic utilities than we do because we live in an utterly dysfunctional feudal society. We’re technically in a continuous drought, but we have no mechanism to declare a drought season with drought measures.

That can’t be thaaaaaaaaat uncommon, riiiiiiiiight?

Here’s a funny story: when I was a kid, we got a dishwasher, and one of the first things you do is use the water hardness test strips and configure something in the machine. We rapidly learned that each cisternful of water was completely different and the only way around it was to underfill the salt tank and inshallah. Worked fine and still does.

Now you know why we pay 2-3 water bills per month. Come back tomorrow for the two power bills (power company and power mafia) and two Internet bills (it’s complicated). Surely I can bang out a few more manic 5 am comments this Christmas season.

I’m aware of how the system works, just not how common it is. Although I don’t see how boiling would help if some pesticides or industrial chemicals get into the water supply.

To me it looks like you’re all washing floors and filling toilets and watering golf courses with precious drinking water.

These threads are always a sad look past the curtain. Is drinkable tap water really that common around the world? I thought that was a rich people thing when I saw it in cartoons as a kid.

Knowing vaguely how municipal plumbing works I find the idea that so many pipes and fittings could be clean enough to drink from to be utopian fan fiction. We have storage for water since there’s really only pressure a few hours per week, at its best. I have the contact info of over ten water cistern drivers in case it’s out for too long - and it very often is.

Our tap water’s good enough to shower and wash dishes and clothes in, but not nearly enough to drink. It even doesn’t taste like the smell of diesel 300 days out of the year. Yeah we have filters, no sand is crusting up my washing machine’s valves anytime soon, but it won’t keep the bacteria out.

Drinking from plastic containers of various sizes between 300ml and 24L is the only fucking option for most people on the planet right now. It’s cheap in these places too, obviously.

That all looks good, but I wanted to specifically mention the most simple barebones and decent option that’s already included in software more of us use. I’d think if we’re installing more things we would be looking at something more powerful.

For simple things, the local translation in Firefox has been more than enough. Go to about:translations. It’s pretty limited compared to Google’s frankly impressive language list but I’ve used it almost exclusively since it’s added the languages I need to translate most frequently.