No, that’s “predestination.” You’re thinking of a medical condition one had before they signed up for an insurance policy and then got denied coverage for.

I can’t remember what it was specifically, but friend basically ruined a major plot point in Witcher 3 for me fully knowing I was a good ways out from discovering it on my own. As a kneejerk reaction and knowing he was about 20 or 30 hours into Fallout 4, I told him who runs the Institute and what relation that individual has to the protagonist.

He was angrier than I was because I had assumed Witcher 3 turned out the way he revealed, but my spoiler absolutely blindsided him. He never ruined anything for me again.

If you’re envisioning a sloppily torn scrap of paper with “KILL EVERY1” scrawled on it with crayon, I could see where you’re coming from, but paper battle maps with points of interest/focus being used by a pretty primitive (comparable to who they’re up against) fighting force makes more sense, though.

If this was planned so tightly that they didn’t let the bulk of their fighters (or large swaths of lower rung leadership) know details until days (or less) before the attack, then it stands to reason they’d hand out infosheets. That seems to be what happened here.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-israel-was-duped-hamas-planned-devastating-assault-2023-10-08/

How do they account for a service like privacy.com which allows you to generate multiple dummy card numbers for a single card?

If the cost of subscription is, instead, the barrier to entry then all we’ll end up seeing is parties who have the resources for wide spanning scams or propaganda or whatever it is - and if they’re paying then they expect to profit or score gains in some way that justify their costs, which likely means they’re effective at what they do

Edgy teenager shit, probably.

Like drawing an anarchy symbol on stuff.

PSA: At every Exxon Mobil I’ve been to, when the screen on the pump starts vomiting up ads as you’re pumping your gas, if you tap the 2nd button from the top on the right side of the screen, it mutes it.

Enjoy your peaceful gas station visit.

Instant red flag. Double red flag if it seems like they’re getting something out of it

Alcoholism will do crazy things to people and their brains.

I keep going back to how the guy who wielded RICO so cleverly to wreck the mob, ran an effective “PR campaign” post 9/11 that dubbed him the “Mayor of America,” and was a serious potential presidential candidate ended up leaking oil out of his scalp in front of a landscaping place, being the mouthpiece for a sort-of wannabe mafia-esque organization and eventually getting bitchslapped with RICO charges himself as a result.

I think it’s one part alcoholism, one part grasping wildly for the glory days, and possibly one part dude just getting wackier with age. You can see the glory days stuff in action during his time trying to get the GOP nomination in 2008 and how everything with him was about 9/11. There’s probably a feeling of invincibility he has from the highest highs he reached in his life and maybe even a bit of smug “I know what’s best for this country, I was it’s goddamn Mayor for the love of fuck!”

Whatever it is, fuck that guy. Time to piss off, Rudy. You’re embarrassing yourself and the rest of us by extension.

My background is not on STEM and I was always passed the notion that without roots in hard math I can’t go far in programming.

I swear this is some BS repeated by people who have no idea what they’re talking about. I got told pretty much the same when I was younger - don’t believe it. It may have been true to some degree at some point in the distant past, but it’s outdated advice at best.

Your main general skills when it comes to writing code are the ability to think logically and to think about abstract concepts. Creativity and imagination can definitely help. The ability to keep organized in your thoughts can also go a long way. Just about everything else comes in the form of knowing the language you’re working in, exposure to common coding and software design principles, and knowing your coding environment.

Math can figure into a lot of different types of programming careers… Shit like writing video game engines and other complicated things that model physics and stuff come to mind. But it’s not so much that math is intrinsic to programming, but rather that those types of software just require a lot of advanced math.

For example, I’m an automation engineer. It’s just a sysadmin who writes a decent amount of code. Most of my programming work revolves around sending requests over our company’s local network to servers or internal websites to do shit like remotely power up or shutdown machines or trigger a task or open up work orders. There is very little actual math, if any, in the entirety of my work.

At it’s core, programming is just the storing, moving around, manipulating, and keeping track of bits of information. Especially in a language like Python (which is my primary language).

EDIT: I should probably add my background isn’t STEM either. I’m a two time college dropout who got a break 14 years ago and left the restaurant industry to go into the tech sector instead.

This is a very interesting point and I can see it throughout zoomer culture when it comes to the down and dirty technical stuff, but I think there’s a distinction to be made between being technically apt and being able to grok whatever the hot shit consumer-grade tech paradigm is right now.

In the former context, a lot of zoomers have already “failed” but that context is the territory of people who reach out to learn it - in other words, the nitty gritty tech stuff will always be for the technical types. In the latter context, I imagine millennials will probably mostly be fine and zoomers will, too. I say “mostly” because we’re already seeing millennials start to kind of skip the latest trends (TikTok comes to mind immediately). Zoomers are already coming to grips with not being able to understand Alphas sense of humor via memes. Whatever the next social media platform is, I imagine it’ll be primarily a home for Alphas, leaving zoomers and millennials where they are.

Will there be spillover across the board, with members of different generations populating the other platforms? Sure, there are always exceptions.

As far as physical tech goes, like how millennials got the smartphone and zoomers grew up with it? It’s highly dependent on how ingrained it becomes in society. Hard to exist without a smartphone these days, so everybody has to know how to use one. Boomers have more trouble because they got it later, but there are plenty of them who are just fine with current phone tech precisely because they need to be for professional AND personal use.

Shrek is love, Shrek is life, Shrek is high fashion.

exactly. a little bit of elbow grease and greed is what got us all to the fairly awful future we find ourselves in, who’s to say it can’t get worse? never let the hope die. lol

I think there are a combination of factors intermingling, situations like the API backlash just jostle things a little harder and that’s when you see big spikes. Once a platform like Lemmy begins to see more and more traffic and, in turn, content, it starts to become a viable alternative.

Lemmy existed for at least a couple years before I joined, for instance, and I came with what I would guess was the biggest wave so far (June 2023). Provided the userbase can keep up a respectable momentum generating discussion and content, the next wave could be bigger or it could be more resistant to leaving because there’s enough content here to consume and interact with.

Reddit could take years to lose substantial portions of its userbase or it may shed some and stay solid, but Im not one of these people who obsesses over it’s ruin. If they survive long term, God bless, whatever, who cares. What’s interesting to me is seeing an alternative sprout up and actually generate traffic and start building a community, whether that’s Lemmy or something else built on ActivityPub or something else built on a different federated framework or even something else entirely that’s centralized… I think Lemmy is one permutation of this and it has undoubtedly got some traction.

I sometimes wonder if/when I’ll start getting random Lemmy links from people instead of ones to Reddit.

edit: I should also add that considering reddit is trying hard to get value on paper and probably still hoping to ipo, we probably shouldn’t put it past them be shitty once again at some point in the future.

Yeah, they all definitely seem quite polished. Sometimes I get the itch to play a MUD, find one or return to one I’ve played before, and get hooked for a few months. Other times, I’m done after a few days… they’ll always be an option for me though. IRE games are just fine for my purposes in that regard.

exactly this right here. we saw the same phenomenon with threads and mastodon before it inre twitter annoying its userbase. depending on how engaged each wave of incoming users ends up, i’d guess you could expect it to look something like:

• spike
• drop off
• plateau
• spike
• drop off
• plateau above the last plateau
• etc etc

sometimes the drop off is really bad. sometimes its just people getting bored with the initial hype while others stay. rinse and repeat until the platform succeeds or dies.

Same, back when I played a lot more. There was a period of time where I felt completely unfulfilled and unappreciated at work. I was a Linux admin at the time so I spent 90% of my time in a text environment. One day, I installed TinTin++ which has a non-GUI version and I’d just keep one ssh connection opened to a VPS I pay for and would just MUD throughout the day (mainly just running quests over and over). This was years before “quiet quitting” was cool lol

If you’ve never tried a MUD, there are still a few out there that are alive and kickin’. Funny enough, I’ve been scratching that itch over the last few days and seeing whats out there. They’re something like a pre-cursor to MMOs - online, text-based games. If you get really deep into stuff like PVP, you’ll like wind up writing scripts that trigger actions based on what’s happening since its quicker than typing out commands when things get hot and heavy.

If I had to guess, I’d say Aardwolf is probably the most populated and has the most users online at any given time. I have an old char on there that I occasionally log into and run some quests on:

Aardwolf

I just created a character in Alter Aeon and it’s alright so far, but I haven’t spent more than about an hour logged in:

Alter Aeon

I don’t know how people generally feel about Iron Realms Entertainment. Some or all of their MUDs end up with you kind of having to spend some money if you get super engaged, but I’m pretty sure most of their games are perfectly fine without paying for casual players. They have a handful of MUDs that cover different themes (classic fantasy, vampire stuff, etc). I actually tried out Starmourn recently which is a sci-fi themed one, but I think they’re no longer developing it actively - the servers remain up (for now, at least, I guess). Regardless, all of their games seem pretty polished and thoughtfully made.

Iron Realms Entertainment main site

Starmourn

The cool thing about IRE is that their games are all playable in a browser and the browser-based apps include some QoL UI stuff like maps and stuff. The others generally require a (free) MUD client like Mudlet. Aardwolf has a highly customized version of Mudlet that has frames/windows within the client that show you your characters stats, maps, a chat window, and some other stuff.

Peter Santanello’s videos are usually really enjoyable and pleasant. He has a calm, respectful demeanor and he just goes to random places you usually don’t think about and just kind of shoots the shit with people. He did a couple videos a while back where he went to a couple of native reservations in like one of the Dakotas, I think, and they were an intensely interesting look into that life and culture.

His titles can feel kind of click-baity sometimes and I don’t always agree with his take on things, but I find him a really likeable and honest-seeming guy.

I think i have the 13-year badge. I visit maybe a few times a week when there’s nothing left to doomscroll on Lemmy. I was never really a huge contributor, in posts or comments, but now I’m purely a lurker and I spend maybe 15 or 30 minutes in a single sitting on the site instead of a few hours cumulatively throughout a given day.

With that said, the overall quality of content and discussion had been going downhill for years at this point, I just didn’t have anywhere else to go that provided the same dopamine hit. Lemmy doesn’t do it quite as well, but once the Reddit API controversy kicked up and a ton of people started actually using Lemmy, that helped give me a good reason to spend time with it since there was activity. I’m honestly not sure if Lemmy is the future but I’m willing to stay if it’s a road to the future… and I’m willing to try out new platforms and communities before I find something that I feel fits me as well as Reddit did for so long.

I kind of miss 2010-2013ish era Reddit (minus the bacon/narwahls stuff which kind of felt forced to me), but hoping something like that comes along would probably be along the same lines as wishing I could get the same near magical feel and interaction out of IRC as I did in the mid to late 90s/early 2000s. These are one-and-done things. The next thing that elicits that kind of homey feeling will probably be something entirely new and not a clone of the OG thing.