@Buddahriffic - eviltoast
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Lol I tried this for two breaths and already got a head rush. I’m not even trying to play an actual flute, just sustain pressure from my mouth while I inhale and then switch back to blowing from my lungs.

    I wonder if master flutists get a kind of natural high any time they play at a high level that uses this technique and that’s why they stuck with the flute long enough to master it.

    Or hell, if dopamine for non-ADHD people gives good feelings from normal stuff, is that why anyone sticks with things long enough to master them? Just flute masters might get that extra head rush on top of it.



  • Oh come on, humans aren’t that unnecessarily cruel! We just cut the feet off several thousand peasants back in the day to determine the average length of human feet and then made a bunch of sticks that length so we don’t have to be so cruel each time we wanted to measure something. We just had to do it that one time.

    “Why cut their feet off instead of just measuring them?”

    It was necessary for scientific rigor, so that others could go back and verify the final result. It’s very important to be accurate using a measurement that is completely relatable to the average human. Funny enough, we later realized that about 300 randomly selected feet would generally get within 5% of the true average, so that makes it even better that we did do that because how else would we have discovered something like that?

    “Wouldn’t that just give an average for peasant feet in that region? For average human foot size, wouldn’t you need to take feet from people who aren’t peasants, like nobles, clergy, and scientists?”

    Well, you see… Hmm. I guess to be completely accurate… That does sound right. Hmm.

    You know, I’ve been hearing great things about the metric system! I mean, who really thinks in terms of how big their feet are anyways?



  • Yeah, this has been my experience. I’ve got ABS on my current car but in winter the main advantage they provide is letting me know when it’s time to pump the brakes if I need to come to a stop. The times I haven’t pumped, let’s just say I was lucky that no one else was going through that intersection at the time.

    I suspect they are tuned to avoid locking up the wheels in conditions other than ice/slick snow and the pulse is too quick for the tires to get traction when it releases.


  • I’m glad I’ve had a few epiphanies over my gaming time that have resulted in no desire to spend any money on P2W or content skipping.

    First one was in the first Turok game on N64. I was playing normally but at some point looked up the cheat codes for things like unlock all weapons, unlimited ammo, and unlocking all levels. There was one weapon that you needed to collect hidden pieces of from each level, and then you only got 3 shots with it that would pretty much AoE clear an area. There was another gun that you’d only find 2 shots of ammo for at a time that was similar. I had fun for a bit running around and shooting those guns at will, but after that it was hard to get motivated to play the game without the cheats because I knew the big weapons were basically just temporary consumables, which meant I’d probably never use them while trying to ration them for moments they’d be most useful. Using those cheat codes ruined the game for me.

    The second epiphany was after raiding for a while in WoW and thinking about the loot motivation. It was a circular motivation: you get better loot so that you can raid more to get even better loot. If the loot was the main motivation, then it was pointless because the loot didn’t serve any purpose outside of the game. So it only made sense to do raiding because I enjoyed the process, not because of the rewards. And this applied to most reward mechanisms in games. Taking that logic just a bit further made me realize that P2W is actually paying money to avoid playing a game and short circuit right to getting the rewards, which was kinda pointless when the rewards were meant to improve the experience of playing the game. Either a) you don’t want to play the game at all, or b) you don’t get as much satisfaction from using the better loot or whatever because you skipped the part where you had to do it without those rewards.

    And then the last one is finding PvP less satisfying when the game mechanics give significant advantages based on either time spent grinding or paying money to avoid grinding. Did I just win because of my skills or because I’ve acquired better gear? Did I just lose because the other player outplayed me or because they got better gear? And I didn’t even want to give any satisfaction to those who just paid money to win and don’t worry about what it does or doesn’t say about their skills. It’s similar to the line of thought when you know cheating is possible… Did I get beat by someone skilled enough to aim better or someone using an aim bot?


  • I think it can be further boiled down to a belief that hierarchies are either necessary or good. All of the evil are cases where those higher up in the hierarchy impose their will on those lower.

    Under those beliefs, the meaning of things like “respect” and “good/bad” are different than when one believes that everyone should be considered equal. The politeness version of respect is for equals, when they aren’t equal, respect only needs to go one way and if it’s sent the other way, it’s more “effective management” and not giving respect “downwards” then boils down to a different management philosophy rather than simply being an asshole. They can even acknowledge that it is an asshole way to treat people, but there’s an underlying belief that it’s ok to be an asshole to lessers.

    It also makes the whole “they believe in things that hurt themselves” make more sense. They just believe that those higher than them in the hierarchy deserve better treatment. Maybe there’s an element of hoping to get there themselves one day, or maybe there’s an element of just feeling like they are inferior to those they agree are their betters.

    This is why they don’t really care if Trump is consistent or if he’ll help them directly. It’s also why his support is wavering, because if he’s not strong enough to win, then he isn’t really their better and is just fooling them, which also helps explain why the ones who have tried to take his life seem to be former followers because they can’t be neutral about him, it’s either gotta be love or hate.

    It makes sense that those who believe in it and those who don’t would be at odds with each other because the two beliefs are very incompatible. I’m not sure there is a resolution. It used to be “just don’t talk about politics, keep it private”, but that wasn’t sustainable as each side of the divide wanted to push for improvements under their belief system.



  • If there’s timed annotations (like say for closed captions or chapters/sections), then there will be some sort of mechanism to line them up with the modified stream. Then compare that with a stream without ads (which might require manually removing all ads or using a premium account where ads aren’t inserted) and you’ll be able to estimate regions of the stream where ads have been inserted. If the timed annotations are dense, you could see where the ad begins and ends just from that.

    Also if the ads themselves include timed annotations, there would be a difference in that meta data that would give it away immediately.

    Or if ads are supposed to be unskippable, the metadata will need to let the client know about that. Though they could also do that on the server side and just refuse to stream anything else while it’s serving an ad.

    Given that, the solution might be to have a seperate program grab the steam and remove the ads for later playback. Or crowdsource that and set up torrents, though that would be exposing it to copyright implications.


  • At least performance mods can improve efficiency, with the focus of getting more power from the motor to the pavement. If they are actual performance mods (as opposed to just making exhaust louder or adding a rear spoiler on a front wheel drive car), with exceptions of ones that do that by increasing fuel use.

    Though even with that one, driving style can matter. Anecdotal, but my car has a sports mode and an eco mode, as well as a fuel use indicator. I found that using sports mode and then having a range of speed I’d drive at (accelerate hard to top speed of the range, then reduce power so that it slows to the low end then accelerating again) was the most efficient way to drive it. If I tried the same in eco mode, the reduced power meant I spent more time doing the acceleration, and either of those was more fuel efficient than just maintaining one speed. Though it was a frustrating way to drive (both for me and I’m sure for anyone who ended up behind me). You couldn’t go on auto pilot doing it that way and had to pay constant attention to your speed.

    It’s kinda like the race to idle strategy for CPU/GPU efficiency. Use lots of power when it’s needed so that it can go back to using much less power.


  • Oh also, this one.

    Responsible part of my brain: Ok, time to get to bed.

    Part of my brain in control at night: Sure thing, I just want to do something quick before that.

    Responsible part: Ok maybe, just what do you want to do?

    Part in control: I don’t know, just something. I’m still trying to figure out that part.

    Responsible part: Maybe just get to bed?

    Part in control: NO, FIRST I FIGURE OUT WHAT TO DO, THEN I DO IT, THEN BED!



  • In my UI (on desktop), tabs take up the title bar and all the other necessary buttons fit in the row with the address field. I’ve also got a bookmarks bar below that but it’s optional. There’s also the optional sidebar that I do use but mostly keep hidden.

    For menus, there’s the tab menu that is a button on the tab row and is mostly filled with open tabs plus 4 other items. Then there’s the main menu with 19 items. Tbf, one is undesired (log in for sync) and at least 7 are redundant (as in if they weren’t there, I’d still have easy access to their functionality), but I find menus are easier to discover features through (and hate how MS wants to get rid of them) and am ok with the redundancy.

    There’s also various context menus, but I’ve never found them to be obtrusive.

    This is the state after some customization, but not a crazy amount. If I install FF on a new system, I can usually get it to a point where I’m happy with it pretty quickly.

    If you mean the mobile version, I can understand that a bit more but personally prefer the screen space to be used up to expose more functionality. On mobile, I’ve felt like FF gives me the most power that feels closest to what I can do on a desktop, though tbf it’s been a while since I used other browsers (excluding electron stuff or apps that integrate Chrome or Google Web view for web browsing rather than letting me use my preferred browser, though I’ve never felt happy with the more minimalist UI instead of the capabilities FF exposes).

    I also haven’t tried librewolf and don’t know if the same UI is possible there.


  • Could you be more specific? I’ve been using ff regularly for a long time now and never feel like the UI is getting in the way, though I do use a tab groups add-on to help manage my mess of open tabs. But I also haven’t used Chrome for even longer than I’ve been using ff, so I’m curious about what specific ways you think the chrome ui is better.


  • I’d just use good old maps. Had a provincial one in my car plus a few city maps. Actually still have them there just in case I need to fall back.

    Hell, I even delivered pizza in a city I lived in for a while but wasn’t very familiar with. Most deliveries involved looking for the street name in the index and getting grid coordinates to find it on the map on the wall of the place I worked, which I then related back to a street I knew how to get to and I memorized the last part to get to the side street I’d never heard of before that.

    Only reason I started using Waze was after getting my last speeding ticket and deciding it was time to get that app I’d read about where police traps were crowd sourced. I like still having that general sense of direction so that following the suggested route is optional for getting to be final destination (though it does also help having a map to be able to check what side streets are connected).



  • Yeah, that was my experience. All those stories made me more curious about drugs than anything else even back in elementary school. Also, having people that used to have addiction problems come in to talk about them showed that you could get through them.

    Also didn’t really help that the one guy’s description of things going wrong for him was basically a bus ride with a hangover where he needed to puke out the window. And that he still did it after that, implying that there was something good about it.

    It wasn’t DARE exactly but some Canadian equivalent. I hadn’t really thought about drugs that much before that and didn’t shy away when I had an opportunity to try weed a few years later (thought it was interesting but not worth the money at the time).

    Also it only took taking psychedelics a few times to figure out the real problem authority has with them: they can help you break down your preconceived notions and see through the leaps of “logic” that the current system depends on.

    Like the first time I did mushrooms, I realized that authority figures (like doctors, police, etc) were just people like you or me and included people having bad days, people not focused on the current task, people who cheated their way through school or got to where they were via corruption, people who think they understand something better than they really do or base their knowledge on outdated information, trolls and bullies, as well as people trying their best in good faith.

    It was so obvious in hindsight, but I realized that up until then I had this implicit trust that even if there were times I didn’t fully agree with them, they were generally “different” in a “better” kind of way instead of a spectrum of the same kind of people you went to high school with, just with a selection process that is supposed to filter some out (with varying degrees of success).