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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: April 17th, 2024

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  • I have friends who have actually emigrated to the US who have been begging me to go, telling me I’d love it. Cultural melting pot and all. My English is pretty good and I have a lot of cultural exposure to US things. It’s strange, but even as the US has done stuff I very strongly disagree with, I still have some admiration for a lot of American things. That’s soft power baby!

    These repeated calls to move have dried up very suddenly in the past year and some of them have left.

    I’m from Lebanon where we’re taught from day one to leave the proverbial crab bucket and go figure out a living somewhere where life is (theoretically) better.

    The most realistic big international city with decent pay I can move to is actually Dubai. And I go there a lot for business - just like the US, there’s some good and some bad. There’s a lot of (valid) complaining about such places in communities like Lemmy but frankly Dubai just is the melting pot world city that is accessible in my part of the world. Many of my friends have been rejected for immigration because of financial reasons (or for being from the wrong religious community…), ending years-long processes to move westward. As if it’s their fault their bank savings lost more than 99% of their value in 2020-2021. Compared to those who moved to the Gulf who basically got a work visa in their email after getting the job and flew out the week after. Do you know how hard it is to even briefly visit another country with a passport as weak as ours?

    But honestly moving anywhere feels like an impossibly immense decision. My friends in the Gulf are less enthusiastic, they don’t say I’ll love it, they say I’ll be paid enough to afford moving somewhere I’ll love after five years. Sometimes I feel like it’s inevitable that I move there. But that’s how I felt about the US in like 2015. So who knows.



  • Driving leisurely through a nice lush valley? God what a marvel of engineering this crumbling manual 1994 Kia shitbox is. Driving is so calming. Radio off, windows down, I want to hear the birds and the terrible engine. I don’t even care that second gear doesn’t bite anymore. This is nice.

    Driving in start stop traffic? God I hate how we’ve defaced our planet, our home, just to enrich these blood sucking oil companies. The Ottomans and the French built railroads and streetcars here during our servitude. And what did we do with that silver lining? Tore it all out to sell more cars and petrol. For shame. All of these people’s lives are measurably worse from wasting their lives on the road.

    Driving at a normal speed in a normal area with people driving around me at normal speed, pedestrians, street lights, traffic cops, nobody is crashing, I’m not crashing, I’m barely even thinking about doing it? bro what tHE FUCK WHAT



  • I can’t place why, but the thought of used enterprise SSDs still sketches me out more than HDDs. Maybe it’s just that I only ever think of RAID in terms of hard drives, paired with a decade+ of hearing about SSD reliability issues, which are very different from the more familiar problems HDDs can have.

    The power and noise difference makes it more appealing to me, moreso than the speed, personally. Maybe when consumer bottom-barrel SSDs get a little better I could be convinced into RAIDing a bunch of them and hoping one cold spare is enough.

    EDIT: I can acquire new ~200$ 4TB Orico branded drives where I am relatively easily. Hm.


  • Unusually shaped fictional clothes in 2011: oh the designers are having fun with this one

    Unusually shaped fictional clothes in 2025: this is either slop or derivative of slop, no thanks

    It’s just that the well has been poisoned. There are real unedited photos and pieces of art that retrospectively look like they were prompt fondled into existence. Or worse, there are actual things I’ve taken my time to write that have been accused of being generated.

    It’s just how it is now.




  • Again, I just mean literally running Ethernet cables into standard conduits, terminating them, and sticking a HDMI over Ethernet box on either side. In order not to modify the conduits. I don’t know what the bandwidth is for that kind of solution. I’m not presenting it as the only and best option.

    Your solution is cool. My own conduits are surrounded on four sides by concrete, so pulling connectors through is something that I only have to do very very rarely. And more often than not I find myself having to change one thing to wireless or use something that can make use of multiplexing just so I can free up a bit of space in there to do something else.

    My own network is still an absolutely atrocious 200kB/s DSL through decaying, water-damaged copper lines. And those aren’t going through conduits, those have had concrete poured right over them. Over the 2x1mm thick flat two-strand “cable” that was obsolete when the building was built decades ago. RJ11. Plastic sheath that disintegrates into asbestos or some shit when exposed to sunlight. I’m not describing an ideal data transmission environment here.





  • Extremely underrated game, even after it received popular sequels. I’m shocked nobody talks about the original Witcher game. I played it way after it was released in around 2017 and found it refreshing, like a slightly more modern classic RPG with actual classic game design, plus a few quirks (combat stances and so on).

    The enhanced edition looks perfectly fine. I think I’ve hit the stage in my life where I care more about graphics looking cohesive and how the art style serves the game’s vibe than I care about garish post-processing and needlessly complex models and textures.

    TW1, visually, has a sort of dreamy fantastical blandness with bursts of really cool visual interest. Isn’t that enough? Doesn’t that serve the concept of a video game well?




  • I’m now suddenly suspecting that 7 seater compact cars are not a thing in places like the US. We got 7 seater Avanzas here in the third world, but come to think of it, there might be some regulatory thing preventing this format of car from being sold in some places.

    It’s good. We used taxis like that a lot in HS before anyone in the friend group was 18 (yes yes you let your kids drive at 16 in the US how open minded of you to create more car customers like that), it came out to very little per person when you had like 6-7 people sharing essentially one small economy car.

    I think it wouldn’t be the most convenient since you can’t put much cargo with all the seats up, but like there are more formats out there right? First gen Honda Odyssey size is what I would have in mind - surely some manufacturer is still making something similar?

    Tank-on-wheels is a ridiculous default design


  • I’m now thinking of that classic post from the old site that shows someone’s painstakingly cursive-written note of the entire text of a bluescreen (the old bluescreen with a lot of characters on screen) for tech support.

    And thinking of a slightly more tech inclined grandma who doesn’t quite get all of it having a problem with a torrent and just reading the infohash/magnet link to the ISP’s support call center.